You have a website–you place it with a website hoster, and you know that better hosting can improve your SEO performance. Whether you have one website or multiple, you have to host them somewhere. Placing all your websites on one host might seem like a cost-effective idea, but it could spell disaster.
How Does This Work?
Let’s assume you have three different domains. If you want to add multiple domains—such as site.com, site.org, and site.net—to the same hosting network, you need to own each separately. Owning multiple domains isn’t cheap, which may be part of the reason why hosting multiple accounts on a single Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting platform may seem like a good idea for your budget. Still, there are effects of VPS hosting on SEO that you should consider, as well.
After first signing up with a host, you will receive a single, all-encompassing directory known as the root folder. You must make a subfolder for every domain you intend to place on this host. For example, if you want to use three distinct domains with your hosting account, you must make three different subfolders. But why is doing this a bad idea?
Lack of Isolation
When you host all your sites in the same setting, and they aren’t separated in any way, any operational failure on one site will also affect all of the others. If you accidentally put a bug into an operation that causes it to slow down, or if one of your sites is the subject of a distributed-denial-of-service assault, all your other sites will go down, too.
In addition to blunders and assaults, you’ll need to be extra vigilant about your resource usage. The hosting service will put a limit on consumption–your sites will suffer if one of them is resource hungry because the others won’t have the resources they need to remain online. Additionally, your hosting provider may decide that your high-resource consumption levels are undesirable and slash the amount of resources available to your websites.
One for All
Most web hosts don’t offer multiple languages or frameworks across your sites because all your websites share the same hardware and software materials associated with your account. But here’s the problem–suppose Website 1 requires applications A and B, while Website 2 requires applications C and D. Both sites 1 and 2 will need to have A, B, C, and D installed.
Having all of the applications installed and accessible to your websites is usually not an issue, bug as your sites grow, this can become a reason for their performance to suffer. The best solution is to install only the applications you need.
Lastly, when you’re restricted to just one account, you’re limited to only one stack. For instance, you can’t use two separate versions of Python on different sites, or you might wish to use a separate cache and logging configuration for each website. These all call for website isolation, which is impossible if you use the same host for everything (without exceptions for Class C hosting).
All Your Sites Can Go Down at Once
You can call hosting all your sites on the same host the digital equivalent of putting all your eggs in the same basket—and it’s a bad idea. If your account somehow gets hacked and someone gets access to your password and username, they’ll be able to access all your sites on the one hosting server. They can change your content, show something you want to hide, or phish your users on spam sites, or they can simply take all your websites down in one swoop. You can avoid this by simply using different hosts for your sites.
Final Thoughts
Hosting all your sites on a single hosting account might seem like a good idea to cut costs, but you’ll soon realize the risks are way more than what money you’ll be saving. The bottom line is that it is better–and safer–to avoid hosting all your sites on the same host.