Choosing Hosting for Multiple WordPress Sites

Creating a network of blogs or sites is one good strategy to earn dependable online income. However, managing multiple sites naturally demand far greater resources than when running just one site or blog. It’s also not as simple as launching several simple HTML info/hobby sites back then in the earlier days of the Internet.
You’d also meet plenty of competition from established, well-funded blog networks (such as online spin-offs of print newspapers). As a matter of fact, you’ll be competing with all the millions of sites out there (a total of 234 million sites by December 2009 compared to 162 million sites in 2008, Pingdom reports).
If you’re a website owner, or just planning to become one, you’d want to have the edge, or at the very least, ensure that your well-designed sites are running optimally (or running at all!).
The good news is that there are plenty of easy-to-use sophisticated content management solutions (CMS) that will allow you to create and manage a lot of sites from one powerful administrator dashboard.

Use WordPress

Worth trying if you haven’t yet is WordPress 3.0 (multisite), which absorbed the abilities of the old WordPress MU (multiuser). It lets you install and manage many sites once from one location instead of you separately installing each site on your server.
WordPress has matured from a blogging platform into a very powerful yet easy to use publishing platform, which is why it is highly recommended for running a network of sites or blogs. WordPress is a very robust system that runs on PHP and MySQL, two most popular web programming and database systems today.
You can’t go wrong with WordPress. Since it is an Open Source project, hundreds of programming experts around the globe continually improve its code, helping ensure that even a novice user can learn to use it in just a matter of few minutes. You don’t even have to learn how to install WordPress because your web host will be more than happy to get it up and running for you immediately.

Recommended Hosts

Some companies that offer reliable WordPress hosting are the following:
1. Dreamhost is one of the very best web hosting companies that offer compatible WordPress hosting. Its popular features include: unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email, and unlimited domain hosting. Dreamhost offers tremendous value for a low monthly price. It is a perfect solution for many small businesses that are just beginning or updating their existing content management system solution.
2. Myhosting is an affordable WordPress hosting solution for multiple domains. They are one of the few hosts that proudly offer a 100% up-time guarantee to their customers. Myhosting is an easy to use solution and includes tools to successfully self-install content management systems without error. The inclusion of unlimited email, free domain name, unlimited storage space, and unlimited bandwidth make handling the most demanding WordPress multisite management easier.
3. Justhost is a fantastic provider of hosting for multiple sites. A standard package includes a free domain for life and instant setup. Unlimited SQL databases are a good option for WordPress hosting decisions. The reliability and simplicity of Justhost allow easy transitions when creating new websites. A free site builder can help you create your new website fast and easy. Additional features includes add on scripts and shopping cart solutions.
4. HostGator is one of the most popular web hosts available. The easy and affordable packages make hosting a website seem effortless. In addition to many unlimited features, they are one of the few hosts to also provide reseller hosting, VPN hosting, and dedicated hosting. The reseller hosting is perfect for website designers who offer hosting to their clients. HostGator makes it easy for WordPress hosting, business class hosting, or simple website creation.

Two Things to Consider

When shopping for the best deals, aside from looking at the cost, consider the storage and bandwidth requirements of your site network with an eye on the long term benefits:

1) Storage

A fully functional website is composed of many files that work together, and the bigger the site, the larger the storage space requirement. Multiply this by the number of sites you have, and you’ve got several hundreds of megabytes of web pages, images, video and audio, scripts, and executable files all taking up space in your web server.
It would be wise to figure out early in your planning how much storage space you’d need, and allow for any future expansion. It would be less expensive, for instance, to select one that grows with your needs rather than mass-migrate a hundred sites to a more powerful server once your sites outgrow their old servers.

2) Bandwidth

When a user visits a website, information is retrieved from the web server and sent to the user’s computer. The space occupied by the data transfer is known as bandwidth (to understand this concept better, it may help to imagine cars on a busy interstate highway).
If you have or expect a lot of visitors who use applications, stream videos, or interact with other visitors, then it is wise to purchase greater bandwidth to avoid costly server errors and missed business opportunities. If your current shared hosting plan can’t keep up with your sites, then it may be time to switch to cheap dedicated hosting that can support multiple sites very well.
Creating and running your own network of sites is not easy, but not impossible, thanks to numerous options available. Make the right long-term decisions at the very beginning to help make your dream of a solid revenue-generating content network become a reality. Choosing the right web host at the start will also save you a lot of hassle down the path.