UK Minisite Hosting

[sc2009]

Hi All,

Looking for some hosting to meet the following requirements to run mini sites:

- UK (Located)
- Unique IP address for each site
- PHP
- Unlimited MYSQL (potentially not definitely required)

Any advice would be really appreciated, main thing is the unqiue IP for each site as I have had trouble finding a company who willingly offer this!

Cheers,

Ben.

 

[monaghan]

You'll find it hard trying to get someone who can do lots of unique IP's as these have to be justified and unique IP for SEO is generally not accepted. Co-Lo / rented servers are often only supplied with a few IP's these days and additional ones have to be asked for with correct justification. The only real option is to use SSL on each site, then your IP requests should be accepted.

Some of our servers have IP's in different subnets for customers with SEO requirements, but even this was hard to achieve as most providers like to issue IP's in blocks.

The other option is a network of small reseller accounts and split the sites into categories and keep good records of your cross links so you don't hit any cross linking penalties

 

[sc2009]

Thanks for the reply did some digging and asked a fellow AD member and ended up going for HostGator who can easily provided additional IP's.

 

[monaghan]

Aren't Hostgator based in the US and your request was asking for UK based?

 

[sc2009]

Yes, sorry after some decent advise I was persuaded that it didn't matter. I was under the impression that UK hosting was better for SEO of .co.uk domains.

 

[monaghan]

Ah, that old one, you get a different answer from each SEO

In my personal experience moving one of my sites from a USA server to a UK server caused it to jump into the 1st page, I also saw a similar jump in Google ratings for a uk targeted .org

There are a lot of elements to ranking and from memory you can also now indicate target country via Google's webmaster tool interface, so perhaps hosting location is not as important as it was for ranking, however, if the target is UK and your site is in one of the major UK DC's then it will most likely be faster if served in the UK than USA. Ping time from my here to my old USA DC is nearly 6 times longer than to my UK DC, even longer still to hostgator. (I know ping time is not the best timing method, but it is good enough for a rough comparison!)

So many factors to consider