Hosting for Website Flippers

Posted on April 8, 2011 by David Gass No Comments

If you’re getting into the business of flipping websites, you need to make sure that you have adequate server space to accommodate all of your acquisitions. Most often, this will mean purchasing a dedicated server, which is pretty complicated to run and which requires a bit of programming skill to understand. You may be able to get by with a virtual server but, as you acquire more and more websites, you may find yourself running out of space and bandwidth. There are some ways to accommodate a lot of different websites without having to purchase the most expensive products available from web hosts.

Different Hosts

One of the biggest complications when you acquire a website is transferring ownership of the domain. If you need to transfer the domain between two different web hosts, you may find that there is a delay of up to as long as 60 days before the transaction can be completed. Obviously, if you’re planning for a speedy launch, this may be unacceptable. You can avoid this by purchasing smaller accounts at several different web hosts. This allows the almost instantaneous transfer of ownership of the domain. If you plan on redeveloping the site for a while before you actually relaunch it, you can simply develop the site on a test domain and transfer it to the proper domain when the transfer is completed.

Bandwidth

Some people who flip websites make a series of purchases, redevelop a number of sites and then launch them all at once or put them all up for sale at once. If this is what you have in mind, you want to make sure that you have adequate bandwidth allocation on your server to accommodate all of these different sites. When you go over on bandwidth, you will either find a notice in place of your website that lets people know that your account has ran over its bandwidth allocation or you will be charged overage fees.

If you’re planning on doing this for a business, it’s worth it to find a web host who offers unlimited bandwidth among the various packages. This affords you the same level of comfort that an unlimited minutes plan would afford you on a cellular phone. If you have such a package, you never have to worry about running out of bandwidth and you don’t have to worry about including bandwidth-heavy content, such as multimedia content, on any of your pages.

CMS Systems

Good web hosts usually have content management systems built into their servers. You can activate them by simply choosing an option from the user interface panel. This vastly simplifies the process of porting a site over to a content management system. You may have to install and configure this manually on a dedicated server. If you don’t know how to do it, this is one of the tasks that’s worth having a professional programmer handle. The costs of hiring such a professional will quickly be justified by the amount of time you’ll save versus trying to do it yourself.