How long have you been with your current host?

2 years and still goin' strong.

When did you turn 15, Thomas. /random

Well, happy (late) birthday!

It will be two whole years in about two week's time actually!

Bubble.nu is about four years old now! As free hosts go, it's quite an established one although it does have paid packages now.

Apparently I made my account with Zymic on March 8th, 2008, so nearly four whole years...

Thomas - OMGOMGOMG! happy belated birthday

I think I've been with this host for about a year... Gotta say that I'm pretty happy with them :)

Bluehost, 3 years I think.

Switching to Rackspace or Hostgator most likely soon. Basically I need a dedicated IP (Google hates it when you have too many sites on the same IP, and shared hosts stuff hundreds if not thousands)

You should consider getting it with me/EMNHosting.. We're actually set up with a friend who owns his own server - there aren't a lot of sites on the server, so I doubt the Google/IP issue will be a problem

I've actually heard a lot about that too...

http://webhostinggeeks.com/user-reviews/bluehost/

Actually, I think the person who posted on Icecaves (unless I'm going crazy) posted about how they had to remove files, as they had reached the limit number of files - 50,000 or something like that

My site has only been down once in 3 years with Bluehost (Bluehost, Hostmonster, Hostgator and Godaddy were all partly down due to a power failure in California)

It was me who posted about that. My cousin (who designed JCpenny's and helped with Apple's website, among other big corporate websites) was building a website for a tile company, which needed about 650,000 files. Bluehost only allows you to store 500,000 files, so he had to switch to some other host.

Also, if I switch, I won't be using shared hosting. I'll at least need a VPS to run some SEO tools (high bandwidth, the fact that I can connect to the server with remote desktop, etc). If not a dedicated server. Ideally, I'll have a dedicated IP for each website but you aren't suppose to have multiple sites linking to each other on the same IP, and you aren't suppose to have sites in the same niches on the same IP (ideally).

Edit: Host Monster and Bluehost are the same company. None of those reviews are slightly correct.. load times are amazing with Bluehost from my tests.

That's interesting (about the IP SEO stuff)... I wanna learn more about that soon :)

And review sites.. You can't really trust people on them - they could be the people who own the site, or people who just outright hate the site.. Idk.

I'm happy with the host I have now, and don't think i'll need to change at any point :)

Aside from the 500,000 files thing, did your cousin have any problems with bluehost? if not, then I think you should be ok

That was my cousin's only problem.

Thomas, it's been proven and they have talked about it at google conferences. The problem is people make 1000-2000 of the same site but 'spun' so they can sell products faster and easier, but they usually do it on the same server, so Google discredits them.

That's blackhat SEO, and it's basically the only way to rank in competitive keywords nowadays. Theres programs that will post your site to 5 million sites at once, but theres safer techniques. I'm writing an article about it for Arid Seas, probably next week.

Edit:
Most people use the site duplication technique for advertising affiliate links, it's different from 'spamming' the search engines since that generally refers to blackhat SEO.

major companies, such as BMW and Gucci have apparently been caught using blackhat SEO techniques.. and penalized. You have to be pretty stupid to be fully deranked using blackhat tools.

I was just about to say - Ian, why don't you write an article about this? Lol

I want to learn more about SEO techniques, so that I can try to improve enchantmenot's SEO ratings, as well as some other sites too I guess..

What Google proved makes sense, and is a smart thing to do.. but that's if there are 1000-2000 sites with the same IP.. I'm sure if you only have a few, you should be ok

Lots of 'dedicated' servers don't even have their own IPs, since it costs a bit of extra change and it's easier just to set each server up with a different port.

I also need a VPS or a dedicated server for:
>Shoutcast Servers
>WHM
>Scrapebox
>Ventrilo
>Testing Stuff

so meh, really next time I change hosts for Arid Seas (not saying I wont use shared hosting on other projects) it will be dedicated or VPS.

I can use them pretty easily, lol. Probably would get 2, actually. One for website stuff, one for applications.