If you don’t already know, many hosts offer additional features with their cheap web hosting plans. Of course they cost an extra fee, but in many cases they are very worth it. Even if a host doesn’t publically display add-on features, they probably have the ability to add them, so if you really want something, send your hosts support team an email and ask.
One popular add-on is a dedicated IP. Basically what a dedicated IP does is make it so your hosting account is viewed as a seperate and independant thing by Google and other search engines. While this may not sound significant, it plays a major role in SEO and other things. See when Google evaluates your sites, they look at not only your main site(s), but also at every other site that’s on the same IP. This means that, unless you have a dedicated IP, you are placed in the same category as everyone else on your server, which could be anywhere from 50-200 people, or even more. Now most of those people are probably just hosting clean, normal content sites, so they don’t have any negative effect. However, no matter how good a host is at monitoring their clients, there is almost always someone who is hosting a malicious or otherwise harmful/illegal site on your server. So, when Google sees those bad sites, they assume that you own them, and penalize your other sites in the search engines.
Many hosts also offer some sort of “upgraded” cheap web hosting. Basically, you can get something that’s better than normal shared hosting, but still not as good as a VPS or dedicated server. This is good for people who want more than standard shared hosting, but can’t afford and/or don’t need a huge server.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Oct 31, 2009.
