How many sites on one hosting account?

[leafndrop]

How many sites is safe to house on one hosting provider? I use BlueHost and they advertise unlimited domains, but I'm not sure what the negative side effects might be from hosting too many on one hosting service. If it matter at all, I'm using WordPress to build my sites.

Pros and Cons?

[William.Lau]

Majority of the time, or heck...ALL THE TIME, these hosting solutions that state unlimited everything is not true. The resources are for start up sites because they have hundreds of sites on one server.

Now the question is how much traffic is going to those sites? If you expect a decent amount of traffic, I suggest you get a VPS, which is more flexible in bandwidth use.

None the less, the most important thing is how much traffic you are getting currently. If all your sites generate a lot of traffic the site will get "suspended" and they will either ask you to upgrade or just completely kick you off.

BlueHost, I believe only has shared hosting and don't have dedicated or VPS solutions(last time I checked). I would go with maybe HostGator(a little pricey for shared and other solutions but speed is good). Best chances are going to a host that offers Shared, VPS, Dedicated Servers, so you can grow easily and move around easier.

Usually the hosts will be glad to upgrade you and even help you transition and transfer the files to the new VPS/Dedicated server.

[BenRWoodard]

I was on a different hosting service and my sites slowed to a crawl when I began to grow my company. I moved to a hostgator reseller and have had great success but have heard of the situations where even they will kill your sites if they get too much traffic. Either way you go, always have a backup and a plan B. From my experience a really good hosting service runs anywhere from $20/month and up. A great Wordpress hosting service is WPEngine, but only if you have the budget and traffic to constitute the price. I love them, great group of people there.

[deltasystems]

Pros

Shared hosting is cheap. Really cheap.

Shared hosting is manged - you don't need to be a trained systems admin.

Cons

You don't have much control over the server environment. Some applications won't run, others might not run to their best ability. Did you hear about how cool node.js is? Too bad, you probably can't sandbox it.

You have no control over fixing downtime. You put in a ticket and hope someone takes care of it soon.

The server will be slow when anyone on the server hits a peak in traffic.

Support is generally subpar for shared hosting providers.

If the host hasn't secured the server, there could be security issues where others on the server could get access to your root directory or database.

Scaling? Ha, more like, when you grow you have to find a new server to migrate to and hope the process is fast and smooth. (It probably won't be)

Inevitably, many cost effective hosts will not be in your time zone. Or those near yours.

Suggestion

Shared hosting at the major hosts isn't too bad. If you can't afford the money (remember, this is tax writeoff material) then stick with them.

If you actually need the performance and such, find a way to pay for the upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated. A good dedicated server will be $100/m. You'll need to know basic sys admin stuff, but just knowing Linux in general and being familiar with the services you run (apache, mysql, postfix, php) and how they are configured is suitable.

Also if you are using a panel like cPanel.. your goal should one day to admin your own server without it. You'll be intimidated at first, but quickly find that you are more quickly able to do anything you need over command line.

[EGOL]

I moved to a hostgator reseller and have had great success but have heard of the situations where even they will kill your sites if they get too much traffic.

Not saying any names but just about any host that offers you Unlimited Bandwidth is going to have some type of tripwire that throttles your traffic.  If I moved a site there that burns terrabytes per day I can guarantee that a lot of these host would either kick you off or you will leave because you lost a ton of money the first day.

Sites that claim to offer unlimited resources.... your success is not in their best interest.  They are not going to give you $700 worth of bandwidth for $4.99/month.

So, if you have a site that is starting to be successful, move it to a host who will charge you for all that you use.  That host wants you to succeed because when you succeed they make more money... and when you call them for help they will do it gladly because they are helping you make more money.

[kbloemendaal]

I have about 25 sites on an unlimited HostGator account right now ($8 per month I think), most of them get minimal traffic (few thousand visitors per month), but a couple of them are pushing 30k-50k per month and I will most likely have to move them.

Using it as a starting point is fine for new sites until they begin to gain traffic, then move them to better hosting.

That's my humble opinion anyway