The Advantages and Disadvantages of Unlimited Domains Hosting

Nic    Web Hosting     unlimited domains hosting

It’s certainly good times on the Internet right now. We keep getting more for less. As the competition in industries like web hosting become more and more fierce, increasingly better deals are available, including hosting unlimited domains with a single account.

It’s easy to see why unlimited domains hosting is so appealing. Pay one fee, get all your hosting done in one account. Convenient, easy to manage. Makes perfect sense. The end to all your hosting problems. Or is it?

As with most things in life, unlimited domains hosting has its advantages and disadvantages, and the disadvantages are well worth taking note of.

Disadvantages of unlimited domains hosting

First, you are hosting multiple domains on a single hosting account. Fine. Multiple domains mean multiple websites however, each putting their own demands on your hosting. All the resources used by all your domains and websites is counted against just one hosting account. If you run popular sites, you can run out of bandwidth. If you run sites that run demanding scripts, your host can start blocking some of your sites from actually running their scripts.

And trust me, these limitations are in place. You may not be told about them on the order page, but they’re there.

So, having said that, I guess you can argue that unlimited domains hosting is a somewhat misleading phrase. Whether you’ll be able to host unlimited domains will depend heavily on what you want to use your sites for, how much traffic your sites generate, how much bandwidth you need, how many demanding scripts you run, and so on.

It is, in fact, entirely possible for a power user to max out the server side limitations of such an account with just a few, or even just one domain.

However, for the average user just getting started in Internet business, the advantages usually outweigh the disadvantages.

Advantages of unlimited domains hosting

You certainly save money, for starters. It’s convenient to be able to manage all your hosting accounts in one place. Adding a new domain is quick and easy, no need to sign up for new hosting all over again.

Just be aware that, if you are going to achieve any level of success in marketing your websites, one unlimited domains hosting account definitely won’t last you until kingdom come. Nor should you put all your eggs into one basket, so to speak. It’s always good to have backup hosting, and it’s good to spread your domains over various accounts to more easily accommodate any sudden growth in your business.

With that said, our recommended source of unlimited domains hosting is Hostgator. We’ve been hosting with them for close on 5 years now and have been extremely happy in all respects, from uptime to pricing to support. Hostgator’s unlimited domain plans start from as little as $7.95 per month if paid anually in advance, which you can do with confidence with this trusted and well established company.

3 Sources of free website hosting, no ads

Nic    Web Hosting     free website hosting, free website hosting no ads

While we cannot recommend free web hosting as a good idea to run a serious business from, some people will use it anyway, so we might as well tell you where to go to get it. If you do go for free web hosting, at least try to find some that offers the hosting service with no banners.

In other words, your web space is your own, it is not hijacked by the hosting provider showing ads that you have no control over. There really is no other circumstances under which using free hosting makes sense.

Having no control over what is displayed on your page at any given time is just bad for business, not to mention that it is a distraction for visitors and may see them leaving the page via the banner ads of the hosting company without any advantage to you whatsoever. This is going to hurt you a lot more in the long run than the small hosting fee you’d pay somewhere like HostGator.com.

But if you have to go free…

…here are three sources for free web hosting, no ads.

We Recommend:

Doteasy

Doteasy offers banner-free, cost-free hosting. They’ve been around for a long time. The free hosting package comes with 100MB disk space, which isn’t a lot but if you don’t want to pay you should take what you get. A fairly generous 1GB monthly transfer is included. If you need more than that, you should be making enough money to afford decent paid hosting.

As far as free hosts go, Doteasy is about as reliable as you’ll get.

Other Options:

Mister.net

While Mister.net offers free hosting, they do require that you register a domain at $35 to qualify for the free hosting. Hmmm. Given that you can register domains for less than $10 at places like Namecheap, Mister.net’s hosting suddenly seems to cost about $25 per year.

Still cheap, but in the greater scheme of things, maybe not quite free. On the upside, no banners.

Affordable Multimedia (afmu.com)

Perhaps not as well known and trusted as Doteasy, Affordable Multimedia offers a free hosting account with 5GB monthly data transfer and a healthy 500MB in disc storage. Again, we can’t vouch for the reliability of this service in the same way that we can for that of Doteasy, but it’s an option worth considering if you need a little more space or data.

So, if you really insist on using free web hosting with no banner, the above services are decent options. We can only hope that you need to escalate to paid hosting soon. That means your business is growing!