by: AskPat 728 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 728 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
Alright, now here's today's question from Joshua.
Joshua: Hi, Pat. My name is Joshua, I'm from Vancouver, Canada. My website's InformationTechnologyTraining.biz. I actually came across your podcast way back in 2009 and I've been a fan ever since. My question is this. Recently, I've been meaning to get a few domain names. I've always thought that I needed to get a separate hosting plan for each domain name that I got, but evidently, I figured that out today that all I needed was one domain name with the main hosting plan and then park my other domain names into that hosting plan. My understand structurally or directly-wise . . . It's going to be a sub-folder of the main domain. I was wondering what your thoughts are in this. How it gets affected SEO-wise or what you would do if this is even advisable. Yeah, more power. Thank you very much for everything that you do.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Joshua. Thank you so much the question. It's really funny that you mentioned this because when I first started out, I thought the exact same thing. I thought every single new domain name that I wanted . . . I wanted different domain names because I wanted to try different businesses and I wanted to do different main sites or have all those kinds of things. I thought everyone had to be a completely brand new hosting package. That's totally untrue. You can have different domains served on one hosting plan. You can have it done that way and it would be advisable when you first starting out to, perhaps, start out that way, so that you don't have to spend a lot of money on different hosting plans just for each and every separate domain name that you have to offer. You're right! It would the the sub-folders from the main domain but the online world SEO, that's actually, in my own eyes and from my experiences, that doesn't matter. It's treated it as if it was owned . . . A completely different website. You just want to make sure that the domain name is just stand-alone. It just happens to be hosted in the same server.
Now, that being said, as much as you could save money doing that, there are some cons against doing that. There are some reasons for not doing that. For one, if you have all these different businesses on the same hosting account, they're all tied together. If they have different entities involved, then that's going to be a mix up, you might lose some of these structural, legal aspects of having these kinds of depth for different businesses and entities if they're on the same host. You want to, at least, for every different entity that you have, business structure . . . business that you have . . . have all those hosted on different hosting accounts, so that they're each paid by the different companies. They build those different companies separately. You want to separate all your different businesses, basically. But obviously, I would just . . . For those starting out, I would just start with one business. You wouldn't probably have to be worried about that.
The other thing to worry about, however, if you don't want to do . . . Going back to the question earlier . . . You know, for me when I first started out, I had different business ideas, but they're all under the same serial entity, which is Flynndustries. Some of them have branched out and we had to have a new hosting account for those because they . . . I have partners come in on board and we started in partnership and those broke away from Flynn, Flynndustries.
This is like FoodTruckr.com but anyway, the other part about this is, if one of those site get hacked or that server gets hacked, all those sites go down at the same time. That's not good and that has happened to me in the past. In March of 2013, SmartPassiveIncome.com was being hosted on a VPS server. This was after I moved away from Bluehost. I started on Bluehost with Smart Passive Income and several other domains. I still have many domains on Smart Passive Income. Excuse me on Bluehost, but I moved SmartPassiveIncome.com out of Bluehost because I just kind of outgrew it. It was growing so fast. I needed something that was just much faster that can hold all that traffic. Then I went to what was the in between a shared hosting solution, which is what Bluehost's offered and dedicated servers. I had the VPS server.
Well, I started to host a number of my different websites on there because it was lot faster. Some of my main sites were on there, like GreenExamAcademy.com and SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com, which a lot of you know, and SmartPassiveIncome.com, of course. Then, I had gotten attacked. I was DDOS attacked and it was quite bad, to point where that server went down for over a week. It was about a week and a half. To make it even worse, I was actually not even at home. I was on travel, so I had to deal with it while I was in San Francisco filming for my book, Let Go.
Man, it was just such a nightmare and all of those sites that I had just mentioned were down. Those are my top earning websites and I had lost about a week and a half an estimated earnings of over $15,000, in potential earning that I had lost. I actually recouped some of it through the insurance that I had because I was attacked and the insurance did covered that, but it was still just a hassle. I went off the server that was scrivnt.net. S-C-R-V-I-N-T.net. I know now that they put in certain things into place because of that particular attack to make sure that doesn't happen again. I'm glad other people aren't gonna be affected in the same way I was because of what happened to me, but it was too little too late for me on that . . . on them. Currently, I'm on Linode, which is L-I-N-O-D-E.com, which is more advanced server that my . . . I hired a guy to do all this for me and keep the websites secured and all that stuff. Anyway, that's where Smart Passive Income lives now.
Yeah, when you're just starting out, you want to have a few domains. You can just go to that same hosting account that you have. I think for your own Bluehost for example, just 10 extra dollars to include a new domain name on that particular hosting server that you have. You can just hold them there for a while. You're able to move them around later if you'd like, but it's little bit more complicated. But your server and host should help you do that once you want to start moving things around if you wanted to. You can build different websites. They can all live in the same server and they will all look like completely different websites. As far as from an SEO perspective, they will be just treated as different websites, too, in my experience.
Hopefully, that answers your question. Joshua, best of luck to you. Thank you and I'm glad you're learning this lesson now instead of hundreds of domains down the road. Take care and I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like, potentially, featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Thanks so much. I appreciate you.
Here is a quote. That is one that I could not find whoever said it. It is from anonymous or unknown, but that is, “Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.”
I love that. Thanks so much. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye