For Black Hat SEO, you need to choose the right hosting for your needs. There are special functions that need to be accessible on your server in order for your scripts and content generators to work.
Not only that but if you dip your toes into the darker side of things, it’s a good idea to be with a host that has a certain degree of tolerance for your activities. Happily a lot of outfits fit the bill and it’s always easy to find more.
There are 2 main types of hosting to be considered for different usages.
Paid Hosting
Paid hosting is to be used when you need full flexibility of your host. Different options offer different possibilities. If you need to run resource intensive scripts, you might consider getting VPS hosting or a Dedicated server.
Here are the criteria that should be considered “must haves” for black hat needs:
- Wildcard subdomains
- CHMOD 777
- Fantastico
- Cron Jobs
- PHP fopen function
Shared hosting is the least expensive and least flexible option. On the other hand, it has its benefits too because it’s inexpensive and offers you a certain degree of protection against snooping search engine spies.
For example, if you have thousands of sites on a dedicated box and Google is able to identify that they are all auto-generated and all hosted on the same server, you will be looking at a mass ban and that will hurt. You can get away with this for a long time but shared hosting eliminates the problem in large part because your precious little sites are independently hosted.
Another advantage is that you can have more unique IPs. This is very useful when building site networks and or blog farms.
The important thing for now is to know that you can reinforce your site’s power by linking to them from your own sites but the link power will be greatly discounted if the sites are on the same hosting account and IP block. That’s why several smaller accounts can actually give you can advantage since you have variable completely unique link juice to bestow upon your targets.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting refers to Virtual Private Server. In essence, you get a part of a server dedicated to you. That means that whatever server resources you pay for are guaranteed to be available to you when you need them.
Mass pinging, site growing and link distribution can all be resource intensive and VPS hosting becomes a good idea to run your scripts on once you reach a certain level. The two things to watch out for are the higher price tag (generally between 25 and 50 dollars per month) and also the chance of getting a mass ban from the search engines since your sites are the only ones on the server.
Most VPS providers will set you up with at least two unique C block IPs, with the possibility of buying more as you see fit for only a couple of dollars a piece.
Dedicated Hosting
Also known as dedicated server. This type of hosting allows you to rent an entire server for your needs. This provides the most resources and highest flexibility. It also requires some basic knowledge of servers and the costs can be quite prohibitive until you start earning interesting money.
This is ideally what you should aspire to. When you find yourself building 100s or even thousands of sites per day, you’ll find it extremely tiresome to buy and fill shared hosting accounts that will only support 50 domains a piece.
The same holds true for resource intensive scripts that are run from your server. If you are growing 5000 sites, generating content for them, pinging them and generating trackbacks, you need the power of dedicated hosting on your side.
Of course you should start at the level that represents your investment capabilities and the size of your operation.
