Black Hat Hosting Accounts and Dedicated Servers

If I gave the URL of particular hosting companies and said “these hosting companies are good for search engine Spamming” the influx of new spammers to that company’s servers might make them bad for Black Hat SEO projects. It’s a catch-22.

We Black Hatters tend to eat up bandwidth and server time while giving bad reputations to given IP addresses. The last thing I want is to be on the same IP and Server as all my fellow search engine spammers. So this post takes a more high level approach concerning hosting partners and dedicated server issues.

I’ve never tried free hosting accounts. They are supposedly good for doorway pages but we’ve never bothered trying them for anything. If anyone has had real success with Black Hat SEO on free hosting accounts, please share (I’m not talking about Blogger, Yahoo360, Myspace or the like – that is a seperate issue we’ll tackle later). The way I look at it, hosting is cheap. Most Black Hat projects can operate fine with a $3-$10 per month hosting package.

You do not want Frontpage extensions. While I’m surprised MSN doesn’t give more weight to sites created with Frontpage (It sounds like a very MS thing to do), Apache severs with mySQL and PHP support is still the way to go.

CPanel comes in handy so often that it’s frustrating not to have it on certain accounts. If you are going to spend an extra 3 hours trying to figure out how to use another interfaces, doesn’t it make sense to just pay the extra $1-5 per month? As with everything, make sure you are putting proper value on your time.

How many hosting accounts do you need? Think of it this way, how much does a ban on the cluster of projects under a given account hurt? You want to make sure that even if an entire hosting account or IP range gets deleted or banned, it does not destroy your business.

Keep your white hat and black hat projects on seperate hosting accounts. If your projects are some shade of gray, use your discretion. (duh?)

Unzip and upload large sites at off-peak times. If you have (a) dedicated server(s), lower the priority of the upload process (Linux or Windows) so it doesn’t eat up processing power and create site / server lag.

A Hosting company that is openly Black Hat Friendly raises a red flag to me. Two issues:
1.Do you want to be on the same server as other Search Engine Spammers? and
2.Do you want to be spied on by a hosting company that understands Black Hat and is looking to steal all your best techniques and server side scripts?

I prefer to go with companies that don’t really understand Black Hat SEO; ones that don’t have specific TOS about cloaking, redirects or other black hat tactics.

If you are hosting your own sites, using different broadband ISPs providers will make it extremely difficult to figure out that your projects are all from the same publisher.

For very large scale and corporate projects, co-lo in carrier hotel or near an Internet exchange (like 1 Wilshire in LA or 60 Hudson in NY). Cross connects to ISPs in meet-me rooms cost much less than paying for access or transport costs. Server space and ISP charges in these facilities are often 80%-90% less than in commercial data centers.

I will discuss Intelligent allocation of IP addresses and sub domains in a future post.

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