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Host Gator Tackles SEO Hosting TechBy Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
April 2, 2007 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Search engine optimization continues to play an integral role in hosting with more Web hosts launching their own search optimization services to help their business customers increase traffic to their.
Brent Oxley, president and founder of Web hosting provider Host Gator (hostgator.com), says providing SEO services can require a host to walk a thin line between using inventive techniques to attract search engines, and activities that those search engines might consider exploitative.
Google (google.com) may use the various classes within a site's IP address to discover relationships between Web sites in an effort to spot spammers, and interlinked Web sites hosted on the same IP range may be inadvertently giving search engines the impression that they're spamming.
IP addresses that fall within the same class C range are likely to be close, and sometimes on the same server. According to Oxley, many SEO experts believe that Google or other search engine algorithms may use this info to penalize sites with the same C class for linking to each other. For Web hosts and their customers, this can be an understandably frustrating issue, since certain sites have similar themed content and may wish to host their Web sites in one location.
This was one of the considerations in Host Gator's recent launch of hosting services enhanced for search engine optimization under the brand, SEO Hosting. The service includes all the expected SEO capabilities, but more importantly, customers can use it to optimize their Web sites for search engines by enabling them to host on multiple C classes.
By offering multiple C Class capabilities, customers no longer have to host their Web sites with multiple Web hosts, and instead, can consolidate all their sites with Host Gator.
"Technology changes, our customers' needs change, and we need to move quickly to give our customers what they want," says Oxley. "From our initial research, we also found that SEO hosting was an area that was underserved in the hosting industry, allowing us to stake a claim early."
Host Gator is offering the SEO Hosting service from $5 per month per C class. Customers can also choose to add or remove C classes at any point, while customers with more than 50 sites will be assigned a dedicated account representative. Oxley says that the new service should enable customers to save both time and money.
And while the common cynic would be quick to conclude that such a service caters to spammers, making their job easier by hosting with one vendor, Oxley has a different customer profile in mind.
"The primary users of our SEO hosting service will be Web masters with more than one Web property who are looking at multiple C classes," says Oxley.
The SEO Hosting brand is well timed, as demand for hosting on varied C classes continues to grow. To date, only a few Web hosting providers offer similar multiple C class hosting services, such as GotWebHost (gotwebhost.com) and SEO Web Hosting (seowebhosting.net).
"We do not know of anyone currently offering this type of service, which should give us a great jump on the competition," says Oxley. "Since no one else has been meeting this demand up until now, the response we've gotten from those looking for this type of hosting has been extremely encouraging."
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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Comment by Anonymous on Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Interesting article, although it appears Host Gator is a couple years late in catching up.
The first question that comes to my mind is will Host Gator be giving their customers dedicated IP's like Got Web Host, or shared IP's like SEO Web Host?
Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, May 27, 2007
Hostgator is a day late and a dollar short. We've been providing multi-server, multiple dedicated class C IP hosting for over two-years. We can't keep up with the demand. http://datawebpro-seo-hosting.com
Comment by Anonymous on Monday, November 12, 2007
This article stats as fact "Google penalizes sites with the same C class for linking to each other." Where as Google itself says that is not true at all. I think I will believe Google.
Comment by Anonymous on Sunday, December 13, 2009
I've tried most of the seo hosting sites and seowebhosting.net offers exclusive ips to each client at a better price than Host Gator. Plus, seowebhosting.net has been doing this exclusively since 2006 so my accounts now site with them.