AP 0960: What’s the Advantage of a Standalone vs. a Redirect Page?

AskPat 960 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here. Welcome to Episode 960 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. Here's today's question from Chris.

Chris: Hey, Pat. Chris Harris, Safety Dawg. On a recent SPI podcast, you had mentioned that you own several websites. Some of them you host as a website, and some of them you have them redirected back to your SPI page, and the website virtually is a page on your SPI site. My question is, since I too own several websites, why do you do that? What is the advantage to hosting it separately as a standalone websites, and then for a different URL, why do you have it directed back to your SPI website on a specific page? That's my question, Pat. Thanks so much; thanks for everything that you do for us.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Chris. What's up? Thank you so much for the question. There's a couple pieces to this. One, there's the redirect, which you're talking about, which I typically get a domain name on GoDaddy and you type in that domain name in the field there in your browser and then it redirects you to a page on SPI. The reason I do that is because some pages on SPI I really, really want it to be easy for people to get to. If I'm sharing that regular URL on a podcast or on a video, it can be kind of hard to memorize. For instance, if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/ebooks-the-smart-way, or if I have to say “SmartPassiveIncome.com/ebooks-the-smart-way” with dashes in between all of them, it's kind of hard. If I instead say, “Go to EbookstheSmartWay.com,” then that takes you to that URL, but it just is a lot easier. EbookstheSmartWay.com; then it's easy for me to remember, it's easy for other people to remember. It's easy for me to say. It's easy to type in. It looks nice when it's there in an email, it looks nice when it's in there embedded right in the middle of a blog post.

The reason I do it for that, the reason why I pay just a little bit extra to do that is because those are pages on the website that I know are making moves or moving the needle in one way or another. They're helping me grow my email list. Yes, there's lots of pages on the website that do that, but these ones are the top ones that I know I will reference quite a bit, that I know are going to be the most helpful. I also know that they then lead into email sequences that people get and potentially helping people down a road where they're going to get an offer of some kind, for example, for an affiliate product or for a course or something like that. That's why I do that.

The other side to this is the idea that I have many different websites, like twenty, and not all of them are hosted on the same hosting account. Part of that is because some of those are niche sites and they are hosted on sort of beginner level shared hosting services, such as Bluehost, and I still use Bluehost for them, for many of them. Other ones are upgraded to more dedicated servers, such as Smart Passive Income. That has sort of outgrown Bluehost and that's on a separate account. Other ones are separate not just because it's a separate web property that I want to be different and that has taken off versus the other ones that aren't at that level. Other ones are separate simply because we're trying to separate the different businesses out. FoodTruckr.com, that's hosted on its own hosting server because that is a separate business that I partly own with another company. Same with a few other ones. The partnerships and LLCs that I have, they're all on separate accounts because that's how it should be. They should all be separated and should all each have their own unique addresses and unique contact information behind it that represents those companies that represent or that are in charge of that particular website.

When I first started out though, it was just one company that I had and I had multiple websites. Many of them were on a single server, even through a shared hosting. Instead of paying for a new hosting account for each and every different website, you can, through the same hosting account, host several different websites. You only have to pay for one hosting account and the additional payment for the new website is essentially just for that domain name only, which is running through that initial umbrella—if you will—hosting service that you have. If you have too many of that, then you're vulnerable. I experienced this in March of 2013 when I was attacked by a hacker or somebody who is doing what's called a DDOS attack. My site went down; every other site that was on that same server went down too because it was a server-level attack. I had like seven websites that were down, all because this one server was down. I've learned to diversify, and that just helps in terms of keeping things separated just in case events like that happen, but also for business, logistical purposes, and administrative purposes, I have it set that way too.

Chris, hopefully this gives you a little bit of insight on why I have it as such. Hopefully this helps. Thank you so much. I want to send you a AskPat teeshirt 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 as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. Here is a quote to finish off the day by Mickey Rooney, and that is, “You always pass failure on the way to success.” Love that. Alright, guys. Cheers, take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.