Be sure to specify the UK in the targeted country in Google’s Webmaster Tools…
..and you could set the site up so that different ads show up for different countries, or redirect to different pages for other countries using this geotargeting tool ( shameless plug for my geo plugin/script ) :)

Being based in the UK, would my Rankings benefit by using hosts whose servers are located in the UK? (I should mention that my site sell’s a service only relevant to one city and really needs to be optimized for local searching.) Would I therefore be penalized in any way for hosting – say in the U.S?

So, there is an argument for having multiple hosting packages with multiple hosting companies in order to have different IP addresses and therefore rank more highly in the search engines if linking between the sites?

However, just like ever other web sites on the same box ( it’s shared hosting after all ) they will all have the same IP Address.. so interlinking your own web sites won’t have as much as effect as if they were on their own server.

I think what’s going on with the whole “hosting multiple sites with one account” is that the main domain attached to the account gets a new “sub-domain” for each of the add-on domains…. but that’s irrelevant for the most part.. each domain stands on it’s own.. but again, with the same IP as the rest and sharing the same resources.

Hope that helps…

I was wondering however how hosting multiple sites/blogs on one hosting package impacts the ranking of each domain. Will search engines like Google treat each domain as a separate entity and therefore rank each domain independently ignoring the fact that they are all hosted on the same package.

The reason I ask is that I currently host one of my sites with 1and1 hosting which claims to allow webmasters to host multiple sites under 1 package. I have discovered however that this is misleading as they achieve this through a redirect from one primary domain (attached to the host package) to a subfolder/minisite using a redirect script in the root. From my understanding however, this has implications on the ranking of each site as all ranking is collected by the primary domain and not filtered through to the sub-domains?

Thanks very much.

Simultaneous connections seem to be limited to 2 at a time.

Let’s say you have five client sites where three of those want FTP access to update their individual sites. If you give them the site level FTP username and password, they would be able to jump up a level from their site folder to the _sites folder where they could view the contents of all the other site folders.

Then account for some of those clients not being very observant of the folder they are in, such that they upload their site files to whatever folder they are in, then you got a mess.

Probably the virtual dedicated server option would be the better solution, under this scenario.

Yep that’s right…

..and yeah I hear ya, it can be a bit scary.. but what I would do to simplify things is buy the package… put up some test scripts to learn the paths, then move one site over at a time at whatever speed I was comfortable with..

.. and.. you could get a refund if you find it isn’t for you.. but you should probably determine that before moving any sites over :) I don’t suspect you will have an issue with bandwidth/transfer if you are used to hosting in a shared environment anyways… it’s just that it may not be as user friendly as you have been accustomed to.. GoDaddy does have a proprietary control panel.. but I actually prefer it now.. things are laid out very simply IMO