by: AskPat 259 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 259 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.
We have another great question today from Joshua, but before we get to that, I do want thank today's sponsor, a company that I've been using for years now, called AWeber.com. AWeber is an email service provider that helps you collect email addresses from people who stumble upon your website, or other mode of transportation, if you will. I don't know why I said that, but you get what I mean. And then, you can send emails out, either broadcast, which gets sent to everybody who's on your list, or you can sent out autoresponder emails, which are my favorite, because those get sent out over time, based on when people subscribe. So you set those up beforehand; you can write them up all beforehand, and then you can have them set up to go out every week after people subscribe, or every two weeks. You can do it however you want. I personally have about 40 emails that go out every week, so I'm able to keep in contact with my audience for that long, without me putting any work into it. ‘Cause I did it all upfront. Smart Passive Income, that's what's it's all about. And smart, passive communication is what AWeber can help you do. So if you'd like to give AWeber a shot, you can try it out for 30 days for $1 by going to AWeber.com/askpat. Again, that's AWeber.com/askpat. Go ahead and check it out.
Awesome. Now, today's question comes from Joshua. Here it is.
Joshua: Hi, Pat. My name's Joshua, and I'm from Vancouver in 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 needing 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 I only figured it out today that all I needed was one domain name with a main hosting plan, and then park my others domain names into that hosting plan. I understand structurally or directory-wise, it's going to be a sub folder of the main domain. I was wondering what your thoughts are of this. How it's affected SEO-wise, or what you would do; if this is even advisable. And more power, thank you very much for everything that you do.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Joshua. Thank you so much for the question, and I appreciate the kind words. It's really funny, because I was just like you. I thought every … and this question's going help a lot of people, actually. I think it's going to help a lot of people save a lot of money too. I remember when I first started to get the idea of building websites beyond that first one I had. I figured, that in order to do that, you had to get a new hosting account; one hosting account for each domain name. And that … that kinda makes sense, right? Because, you have one host for one domain, but, you can actually buy domains, and have them hosted on the same host that you have for that very first website that you have. And, it's interesting, you can actually run that complete website off of the same host, and it can look and act and feel just like a separate hosting account. But it's just running off of that same server.
So, yes, it will be in the same server. It will actually be a different folder within that server, but what's interesting … You can it set up however you want. You can set up the folder structure however you want. It's just a matter of that domain, where it points to, and that's how the internet knows what to read. It's a little bit technical, but the idea being that you can purchase domain names, either through your host—I know, Bluehost for example, you can purchase domain names for $10 a year, or you can purchase them for cheaper at other places like GoDaddy, and just have them hosted on Bluehost, and having those two things speak to each other, and that's done technically. I can't go over that here on the podcast; you'd have to watch a video on YouTube, which would be really easy or go through customer support to connect domain you buy on GoDaddy for typically, what is it, $4.95 or $9.99. I don't know; the prices change. You might be able to find a coupon on it as well, which I recommend so you can get the domain for cheap. And then you connect it to your existing hosting account, if you wanted to.
Is it always recommended? Not really, but, if you're just starting out and you're building multiple websites, I would recommend it. You're going to save a lot of money instead of paying, $6.95 a month, three times over, for three different websites; you can pay $6.95 a month, plus $10.00 a year for each additional domain, or however many dollars a year you're paying for those additional domains. I would do it when just starting out, and if your website isn't necessarily huge yet. I think, if you're just starting out, and you're experimenting, and you're trying these new ideas, I think it's okay to do that. One hosting account for multiple domains and websites, that's okay. I had that with Smart Passive Income when I first started. I think I had five or six different domains under the same hosting account, and then eventually Smart Passive Income grew so big, and it started to eat up all the traffic and take all the bandwidth from all those other sites, and plus it was on shared hosting as well, so other sites were taking away from what Smart Passive Income could have had in terms of bandwidth and capability. That's when I switched to a virtual private server. I took Smart Passive Income off of that server, kept those ones on there. Many of them are still on there as well, in Bluehost. And then Smart Passive Income went to a virtual private server, which is sort of the next level up. And then the next level up beyond that is a dedicated server, which SmartPassiveIncome.com is on now. So I'm paying a few hundred dollars a month, for Smart Passive Income, to be the only website on a particular set of servers so it has maximum speed; nothing else is taking anything away from it. And a dedicated service for that particular website as well. Currently I'm using Linode.com: L-I-N-O-D-E.com. And I have a technical guy helping me with all that, 'cause it is a little bit technical once you get to that level, making sure things are working correctly and sped up and optimized. I don't believe Linode has what's called a cPanel, a controlled panel that makes it super easy to go through, so I have a back-end developer do all that for me.
But, shared hosting? Perfectly fine when you're just starting out, and again I recommend Bluehost for that: AskPat.com/bluehost. But when do you not want to use it? Well, like I said, when you grow, or traditionally, and I wouldn't recommend you doing this anymore, but this is the mind of a lot of people. Two years ago, 2012, no, 2013. ‘Cause it's 2015 now. So, a couple of years ago, when people started building private linking networks. These are people who purchased different websites, many of them that existed, or maybe the owner dropped the website and they picked it back up and they created it. And they would have them all kinda linked to each other in a certain way that would gain Google for a little bit to try and rank their website. And, what people would do, was they would put those on different servers, because Google could figure out that you could create this essentially on your own, a private link network: a network of websites that you would use to help boost the ranking of another website. Again, which I don't recommend you do right now, it's just Google's catching on to those things. I know a lot of people who would argue against that, but we're not going to get into that debate right now. But, if you were going to do that, the idea back then would be that you didn't want the websites to be on the same server, because then Google would know and derank or devalue the sites that they were all pointing to, knowing that this sort of gamification, of gaming the system was going on. So, that's when you wouldn't want to do it back then. You wouldn't want to do it right now if you have a main site that you know is going to be the site that you're going to be working on. You want it sort of being on its own thing, right? And not have anything else, take away from it.
I think, ideally, what you can have is something like what I have. I have a main dedicated server for SmartPassiveIncome.com, and then I have a number of shared hosting accounts, a couple of other shared hosting accounts, each with multiple domains on there, and as they start to grow and branch out, maybe I'll pull those out and pull them into a virtual private server, a VPS server. And then maybe beyond that, if they continue to grow, a dedicated server.
So, I'd love to know what all of you do out there. I know buying domains is a thing to do, and some people buy them for building multiple websites; a lot of people buy them just to sit on domains for a possibility of building a website in the future; some people buy domains like myself to forward to other domains, to make the links easier—for example, if I were to say, EbookstheSmartWay.com, that redirects to SmartPassiveIncome.com/ebooks-the-smart-way. Again, it just makes it really easy, and that's another strategy as well. And I have a number of those; I actually probably have more of those than I do have websites that I actually have sites up on the internet, but, we can talk about this for days.
But I hope that helps you out, and again, kudos to you for figuring that out now, and you're going to save a lot of money. And I wish you the best of luck, Joshua. And for those of you listening, if you have something to add to this conversation about domains and buying and subfolders and all that stuff, you can use the hashtag #AskPat259 for episode 259, on Twitter. And I'd love to know what you think, and I'm sure Josh would too. We could all use more help in this realm, 'cause things are always changing, and maybe some of you out there know something that we don't. So thank you for your help; thank you for the communication.
Joshua, thank you for the question. An AskPat t-shirt will be heading your way for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question, you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is go to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.
I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is AWeber.com. A lot of cool little features you can do with that. They make it super easy to put up web forms on your websites and they connect to all the major services out there like Leadpages, and if you use something like Optinskin or Optinmonster or SumoMe. All those little apps, they all connect to AWeber, because AWeber is one of the most popular email service providers out there. So, if you'd like to give AWeber a shot, check it out: go to AWeber.com. that's A-W-e-b-e-r.com/askpat. It'll take you to a page, you'll see a little video testimonial from me there as well, and you can try it out for 30 days for $1 only.
Thanks so much. Appreciate you listening to the show, and as always, I'd like to end with a quote. And today's quote comes from Mohammad Ali. He says, “Don't count the days. Make the days count.” I hope you make today count, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Peace.