For side by side comparison with other web hosts go here:The SEO Web Hosting List

Hostnine.com

Hostnine website

Hostnine does not bill itself as a seo webhosting company. They just sell reseller plans that have most of the components of one. A typical reseller plan with Hostnine allows you to choose where you would like each domain hosted. You can choose from 7 different cities in the US plus the UK and Singapore. They have 75 different nodes and although they do not automatically guarantee different class c IP addresses, it isn’t hard to figure out how to set it up that way. Most of the different cities are also different class B and some different class A IPs.

All of the IPs are shared, however, Hostnine also sells fixed IPs for $1/mo. with justification. Justification usually means that you need a security certificate for that domain. The biggest possible negative is that they do not have seperate nameservers, although they do support private nameservers.

An entry level reseller plan includes 25G storage 250G of bandwidth and allows you to host unlimited domains for as low as $19.95/mo. Their plans also come with WHM, cpanel and fantastico.

I purchased my first domain from network solutions about 13 years ago. I never really had any complaints with them or their service, but finally left because their pricing was much higher than a lot of the newer companies. Their prices are still pretty high and have gone higher, but at least they are a solid company that is not going anywhere.  Not like my next domain registrar.

While still at Netsol,  I had the misfortune to purchase a domain at registerfly.  I got fed up with them and they wouldn’t let me leave.  They managed to hijack one of my domains, refusing to let me move to another  registrar and even charging my credit card for a renewal two months after I requested a transfer. I had to file a complaint with ICANN that took months to resolve before they finally let me transfer my domain.  At least I wasn’t still there a couple years later when they went belly up leaving a lot of people stranded.

I finally ended up consolidating my domains at Godaddy. Mostly because of the low price I guess.  I have been with them a few years and have a few domains with them now.  Nevertheless, I have had a couple of minor gripes with them for sometime now.

The first gripe is that they are always trying to sell you something.  You go there and buy yourself  a domain and you do a search or two and settle on a name that you want.  Now you want to check out and pay for your purchase.  Before you get to the point where you enter in your information, you will have to go thru at least three screens where they try to sell you more domain names, more domain extensions (info, biz, net, etc), email, hosting, whatever… everything but a bass-a-matic.  Then you finally get to the real checkout screen and the price is more that you thought. After a few seconds  you see that you are entered for 2 years and not the one year you wanted and maybe privacy as well.  So you have to uncheck  that stuff and recalculate before finalizing your order.

The next annoying thing is the interface.  Talk about confusing, the interface has at least three different set of navigation links.  One on the top, one on the left and one on the bottom.  All of these differ at least a little bit from the others.  Sometimes, you find yourself going back and forth from screen to screen trying to find the screen you were just at a minute ago.  Plus, they don’t have a single screen it seems that will load in under 5 seconds, many take more than 10 seconds.  That is positively glacial by today’s standards.  Some days their website just locks up and refuses to load any screen.  What makes it worse, is when you hit the back button for a screen you were just at and it still takes 10 seconds to load.  I recently migrated about a dozen domains to a new server and I had to do it over two days because it was literally taking me 5 minutes for every click to change the nameservers.

The final straw,  A couple of months ago I was trying to decide whether to drop a domain that I had bought and never used.  The next thing I know,  I get an email,  it had renewed automatically a month before it was set to expire.  I never had signed up for automatic renewal, but every domain you buy is initially set up for that way.   Last week,  I was billed for auctions membership, something I had forgotten I was even subscribed to.  It took me several minutes even to find it in their navigation. There were two more related items that were set to renew pretty soon as well.  I spent several minutes going from screen to screen trying to figure out how to remove the automatic renewal feature.  Finally, I opened a support ticket and 24 hours later they explained the procedure and reversed the renewal that I didn’t want.

Two days ago,  I decided to start a new website and needed a domain name.  I have been hearing a lot about namecheap.  Nothing spectacular really just that they were cheap.  I decided to check it out. Their interface is comparably faster and their site is definitely less pushy.  I bought the domain, we’ll see how it goes.

For side by side comparison with other web hosts go here:The SEO Web Hosting List

Biggest-Hosting.com

Biggest-Hosting.com website

They earned our Best Deal gold star by offering the most bang for the buck. Plans come with whm and cpanel and private nameservers for each of your domains, php 4 &5, fantastico, unlimited addon/parked domains. Plans offer up to 130 different c class addresses. Prices range from $6 -to $4.10 per c class.

Base Plan at SEO Hosting

5 C-Classes
22GB of diskspace
220GB Bandwidth
whm and cpanel
private nameservers
fantastico
unlimited domains

$30 month

One great way to increase traffic to your blog is to submit your rss feeds to as many services as possible. Listing your sites in rss directories will help you to generate backlinks and more importantly, traffic. Just search on rss directories and you will find dozens of places to list your rss feeds.

To list your site in these directories, you might spend several hours submitting your site and generating profiles. Another option is to hire a service to do the work for you. For anywhere from $20-100 you can hire someone to submit your site to all the important rss directories.

The third option is to use RSS Submission software to submit your sites. If you search on rss submission you will find several titles that will do the work for you. Most have a price tag ranging from $30-100. There is one freeware title called Allscoop RSS Submit Pro .

To use RSS Submit Pro, you simply fill out a form with details on your rss feed. With a couple of clicks, RSS Submit Pro validates your rss feed and automatically submits it to most of the major RSS feed directories on the Internet. A huge time saver.

Considerable thought went into the decision to call this site gray hat in my tagline. I would never do anything illegal or that I thought was unethical. I will however, ignore Googles guidelines if I feel that doing so will help my site and I feel that I can do it undetected by Google. There is the risk of course that I will get slapped for my efforts.

There are SEO professionals and others out there that regard that attitude as wrong because ‘Google said so’. Black Hat SEO, along with blue hat and gray hat are put into the same category as hacking, spamming, phishing and a myriad of other web ills. They have allowed Google and the other Search Engines to define their sense of morality and self worth.

Recent events have brought to light the surprising information that Google has trouble following its own guidlines. If you somehow missed it, Google has admitted to using paid links to promote its sites. To gray hats like myself this is of course hilarious. Google found itself in the position where some of its pages that it wanted to promote were not visible enough. ‘What shall we do’ they said ‘How about some search engine marketing’ but nobody answered with ‘won’t that be against our own guidelines?’.

The next time you decide to envision what color hat you wear, ask yourself the following question: Am I drinking the GoogleAid?

GoogleAid

Introducing our first of its kind SEO Web Hosting List.

All the companies on the list have created a special hosting account with multiple class c ip addresses. The list breaks down into two categories. Plans with shared IPs and those with dedicated IPs, some of the companies offer both. Data is also presented on plan cost and three other important factors to consider in a SEO Web Hosting plan. The number of class c IPs, the number of domains allowed and if seperate class c nameservers are provided for each different class c IP.

Of course there are always many other factors to consider when purchasing a web hosting plan. You will have to look at storage and bandwidth and several other factors before you make a decision. Hopefully this list will help you by eliminating some of the legwork needed to find the perfect account.

All of these vendors offer several steps up, some offering over 100 class c IP addresses with high end plans costing hundreds a month. Most of the lower cost plans are for shared hosting. A couple vendors also offer VPS and dedicated services one even has a reseller plan. There are a couple of companies we have left out because they don’t advertise their rates and sell their services through personalized quotes.

SEO Web Hosting means different things to some companies. There are several companies that package traditional SEO services with web hosting and refer to the their product as SEO Web Hosting. These companies do not meet our prerequisite of offering multiple class c IP addresses and are not included.

If you run across any companies not on our list, let us know.

Just about anybody who owns more than one website has at least considered linking them together. Why not? It seems only logical. If you owned two gas stations or motels you would certainly refer customers from one to the other wouldn’t you? What if you owned 10 motels? Of course you would refer customers between your locations. Certainly nothing wrong with that.

On the web, we live by search engine rules. It is kind of funny that web marketers have to be sneaky to do the same things that they would do openly in the real world. You might get away with linking one or two websites together, but try and do it for a bunch and you are sure to get yourself blacklisted by the search engines. Web marketers quickly learned to use one way links and the search engines responded by discounting links on the same or similar IP addresses.

The next step for web marketers was to create ‘feeder’ sites at different web hosts all linking back to a central ‘money’ site. This worked because the ip addresses were widely dispersed making it difficult to detect a relationship between sites. But setting up a network of sites like this could be expensive and time consuming keeping track of what sites are where and how they are paid , etc. Thus the need for SEO web hosting was born.

Companies that specialize in SEO Web Hosting have created a special type of account that allows the web marketer to host several sites in one account while maintaining the appearance to the search engines of web sites that are geographically dispersed.

How is this accomplished?

If you have multiple websites on one account they are probably all on the same IP address. It’s pretty easy for the search engines to detect that. Even if you were to get dedicated IP addressed they are all probably closely related. The IPs might look something like this xxx.xxx.xxx.xx1 , xxx.xxx.xxx.xx2, xxx.xxx.xxx.xx3. Again pretty easy for the search engines to detect a relationship.

SEO Web Hosting companies have gathered together multiple c block IP addresses and created a special account that will allow your sites to appear with IPs that look more like this: xxx.xxx.AAA.xxx , xxx.xxx.BBB.xxx, xxx xxx.CCC.xxx. This type of dispersed address is much harder for the search engines to detect provided that your hosting company is also using different nameservers for each different c block.

These type of accounts aren’t easy to put together and they don’t come cheap. Be prepared to premium price for a SEO Web Hosting account.

For more information, take a look at our Seo Web Hosting List.

Bookmarking Demon website

If you have done much SEO you know that their are two main components to gaining organic traffic from search engines.  Those components are Content and backlinks.  If you have good content, you will eventually get plenty of backlinks, but even the best content will generate backlinks at a snails pace.  Listing your website on Social bookmarking sites will greatly speed up this process. But, Submitting your website to social bookmarking sites is a very time-consuming and tedious process. This is where Bookmarking Demon comes in.

One of the most unique features of Bookmarking Demon is randomization.  Most similar software adds the exact same bookmarks with the same comments and tags to every site.  BMD allows you to randomize every component of your submissions to help disguise your promotion efforts and make them look much more organic.

The install for Bookmarking Demon is simple enough as long as you are comfortable with files and directories.  BMD consists of just a single EXE and a couple of config files.  All you need to do is unzip it to its own directory and create a shortcut. You’re done!

The first step in the bookmarking process is to create accounts on all 104 built-in bookmarking sites.  In the beginners mode you fill out a form with your desired name, user name, password, and email address.  Then push a button and Bookmarking Demon will attempt to create an account on all of the sites.  While it is doing this, you will have to decypher captcha forms for most of the accounts.  When it is done, you will also have to reply to confirmation emails.  In the advanced mode, you can create several accounts of each of the sites in one session.  Be carefull though, adding five accounts to each bookmarking site all at once, could easliy take an entire afternoon and perhaps even get you banned from a couple.

To reduce the chance of looking spammy I decided to add five accounts to each bookmarking site over a span of three days.  Of the 104 built in sites,  BMD sucessfully created accounts on only 70.  By manually  checking the failed accounts I found 6 that BMD had created an account but BMD failed to realize it.  I manage to manually create another 8 accounts and add the details into BMD.  But still 20 of the 104 sites were down, broken and in a couple of cases, long gone. (The next update from the designer managed to weed out many of the unresponsive sites.)

The next step is to add the website info of the sites you want bookmark.  Add one or more website urls and Bookmarking Demon will pull up the title, keywords and description from your meta tags.  You can adjust these and use {} and | to randomize components of each to help your submissions look organic.  The documentation on this is a bit vague and may require some trial and error for you to get it just right.

Bookmarking Demon also allows you to insert urls from youtube or other popular sites. The purpose for this is to add random bookmarks to help disguise your promotion efforts.

We are finally ready to begin bookmarking! Bookmarking Demon allows you to set various randomization settings before you begin.  I set it to submit to all of the sites randomly choosing one of the five accounts I set up for each, then submit 3 of the 5 bookmarks on average with 1 post from an rss feed as camouflage.  When the program was ready it told me it was going to submit 288 bookmarks to 84 accounts.  I pushed the button to start and BMD spent the next hour submitting to up to 5 accounts at a time at a measured pace (to keep from looking like spam) until it was done.

  On the first try, Bookmarking Demon managed to sucessfully submit 159 bookmarks to 51 of my accounts.  As my prowess with the software increased, so did the success rate. One gripe though, the initial process took me several hours over three days instead of the minutes promised on the website. Now that all the setup is done, however, I just click a couple of settings and let it run in the background while I am doing other tasks.

Another unique feature of bookmarking demon is that it allows you to add both scuttle and pligg sites. I managed to get the total number of sites I am submitting to up to over 200 by searching for additional sites on google. You can find them fairly simply by searching on their trademark catch phrases. ‘Powered by pligg’ for pligg sites and ‘Store, share and tag your favourite links’ for scuttle sites.

Despite its minor flaws,  Bookmarking Demon  is a valuable tool that compares quite favorably on price with its competitors, while boasting an as yet unmatched set of features.  Ideal for anyone needing to do social bookmarking for multiple websites. 

Bookmarking Demon website