If you are making a relaxed living from the Internet and the Web or have a plan to achieve that target , its likely that you are running more than ten websites. The websites are your virtual offices. You want to your sites to be up and running 365 days, 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. Managing multiple web sites is a daunting task if running one website is a hobby.


Proposed Hosting Strategy for Managing Multiple Websites

The hosting strategy we propose is to host your multiple major websites with 3-4 different hosting companies, and open a reseller account with another hosting company for 1) small and new web sites , 2) web development and 3) backup. Hosting with too many hosting businesses will significantly increase the instant and the difficulty of managing sites, and using a single hosting business isnt a smart choice either.


Justification of the Hosting Strategy

Cost - Cost of the Web hosting isnt an issue for running a single website whether it costs $5 or $25 a month. The difference is only a few hundred dollars or less a year. Its always nice and smart to get the most out of every single dollar in doing business. At least, a few hundred dollars difference wouldnt make or break a business. If you run 10 or even 50 web sites , the cost of Web hosting alone will define the success or failure of your online adventure. To cut the hosting cost, the option is to use a reseller hosting account to host as many small or new sites as you want for about $15 a month. You host one or 2 major web sites with one hosting company. Shared hosting account costs under $10 a month, and dedicated server will cost $50 or more a month.

Uptime - If your bread-and-butter maker internet page is down for a few hours, youll lose hundreds of dollars and more. Even though most hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, its not common to see a web site down for a few hours. A page could be down for a half day or even more if a hosting company is doing a major update. The hosting business may do the update in a weekend or a major holiday, but thats when many family-oriented and travel sites generate their revenues. If you could afford the loss of revenues, many web sites owners can not bear the psychological loss and pressure. Hosting your sites with a few hosting businesses will reduce the risk of downtime.

Application Development - For simple web application, webmasters will do development on the same production hosting site. If your ecommerce applications are complex, doing development on the production site can bring down the live site especially if youre in the process of changing configuration files or install customized applications. The option is setup a website on your reseller account for development and testing, and move the applications to production account on another server after the completion.

Backup - If youre not happy with a hosting company, a hosting company is out of business, or the servers will be down for a day or two, you can easily temporarily or permanently switch from one hosting business to other since youre familiar with the site managing tools already. If you have a backup or secondary copy running on another server, all you need for the switch is the transfer of the domain, which will take no more than a minute.


Shop Before You Buy

Therere too many hosting plans to choose from a large number of hosting businesses - ASP Web Hosting, Budget Hosting, Dedicated Servers, eCommerce Hosting, FrontPage Web Hosting, Hosting With Templates ( http://www.web-site-hosting-n-tools.com/hosting-with-templates/ ) , Managed Web Hosting, PHP Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting, Shared Hosting, Unix / Linux Hosting, Virtual Private Servers, Windows Hosting or Co-location Hosting. Compare the cost, hosting features, tracking records of hosting businesses before creating your commitment. Good luck with your online adventures.