If you have an online presence (either a business website, or a number of sites) you will have some sort of hosting plan. Whether you are paying for this or not, you will be hosting your websites with one or more companies. For most people that have one or two sites chances are that you will have one hosting account with just one company.
But is hosting your websites with just one company smart?
This is a question that I was faced with this week. You see, I have a number of my sites spread out over a variety of servers, but that is most because of the SEO benefits that I obtain multiple webhosts. But, the bulk of my sites have been hosted on two VPS (virtual private servers) machines and account for about 90% of my online income.
The reason that I went with VPS hosting was that some of the sites (for example my proxy servers) require more power than a typical hosting plan. But with the extra power, comes extra space as well (that proxy websites don’t need), so I figured that I could use the extra space for my other money sites.
This week though, both of my VPS machines went down and I proceeded to contact my hosting company, only to get no answer from their support department. It meant that this site was down as well as 800 or so of my other web properties and I was losing money by the minute. At this point, there was only one question on my mind:
Is hosting with one hosting company smart?
Well, in this case it sure wasn’t. To go from making money to making next to nothing at all isn’t a good business position to be in. Sure, they were able to get my hosting back up nearly 24 hours later, but frankly that isn’t acceptable at all.
So, I have had to reevaluate my thoughts on hosting everything with one company. After this weeks experience, I have decided to spread out my website network so that if one host has problem, I still make money for the day. This might mean a bit of an inconvenience, but in the end I believe that it will solve more problems than it will cause.
What do you think about hosting with just one hosting company? Share your thoughts below.
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