One of the very important aspects of PBN is hosting. In this post, I will discuss a few options and reveal what new approaches to PBN hosting I am using.
CHOOSING PBN HOSTING
Ideally, a private blog network hosting solution should have the following characteristics:
- each blog in a PBN (that feeds one money website) must have a unique IP address; if not, this is a footprint easily discovered by Google;
- it should have good “neighbors” to avoid Google penalty; it can happen because your blogs belong to a spammy IP address cluster – more on it later;
- the hosting should be low cost; otherwise, it does not make any financial sense to have a PBN;
- the hosting should be easy to manage to reduce the amount of time invested into it; you can hire a VA but in the end, this again goes down to the amount of money you want to spend on your PBN.
All these conditions can be distilled down to two important things: a PBN hosting should make a financial sense (to be not too expensive) and should not cause de-indexing.
PBN HOSTING SOLUTIONS
So, what to choose for hosting? Let’s look at available solutions.
Multiple Class C IP Hosting
Also known as SEO hosting.
I learned that I better stay away from multiple class C IP hosting.
If you do not know what it is or why it is bad, you can read a great post by WebHostingBuzz.
I mention it here only because I did consider to go with it in the first few days after I started researching hosting options. Apparently, I read too many old posts! After reading a bit more, I learned that this is an outdated approach that very quickly leads to de-indexing.
Speaking of old posts. The world of SEO changes so quickly that it usually makes a little sense to read posts older than 1-2 years.
When I search for such info, I got a habit of limiting the search to 1-year-old results.
One-Dollar Hosting
One of the most popular solutions is to use so-called one-dollar hosting. They got their name thanks to the price they charge: It’s only a few dollars ($1-$3) a month per website.
This solution has some attractive advantages:
- the price of $1-$3 dollars a month is very cheap;
- if you get a coupon for a new account (easy to find on the internet), it will be even cheaper;
- you get (or at least, should get) a new IP if you simply pick a different company for each PBN.
But it also has some significant disadvantages:
- the cheap price comes with its own price: usually, these hosting companies have issues with uptime and poor customer service;
- hard to manage due to the sheer amount of the accounts (one per a PBN blog);
- Google has a way to mass crack PBNs hosted on cheap hosting.
I have a few accounts with $1 hosting companies.
The ones I am with seem to be doing surprisingly well in terms of the customer service. They responded to my requests and even did what I asked 
The ones I am not with have silly troubles that only show how little they care about acquiring customers (I am not even talking about customer support here!):
- one hosting company rejected my order because I mistyped my phone number. I went back to correct it… only to find out that the field was read-only, and I would have to open a ticket to fix it. I decided not to bother and move on;
- another company shut down my account (put into a manual review) because they did not like my email; however, my email was totally legitimate and worked without problems;
- some other hosting did not allow me to pass the account security (it is called MaxFlint or something like that)…. despite the fact I was using my real contact info. Over-protection?
Apart from poor customer support, cheap hosting is full of bad neighbors – and this is what truly matters.
Who usually buys hosting there? Right, blackhat marketers who are building PBNs. These websites use shared hosting and thus share the same IP address with yours. Once one of them gets flagged as a PBN, it is super easy for Google to find the other ones by using a reverse IP lookup. After the blogs are found, they are put for a manual review. The manual review usually ends with de-indexing.
“Normal” Hosting
When I say “normal” hosting, I mean the hosting that you would usually get for your blog or a money website.
It’s such reputable companies as BlueHost, Hostgator, GoDaddy, etc. I am talking about shared hosting they offer.
The advantages of normal hosting:
- good legitimate neighbors that will probably never get de-indexed;
- good customer service and relatively low downtime.
And of course it has disadvantages:
- still, one IP address per blog so you need to have one hosting account per blog;
- since such hosting is not cheap, a PBN built on it will be expensive; the price is somewhere between $6 and $10 per blog per month.
So if you have a PBN with 5 blogs with BlueHost, you will be paying $8 x 5 = $40 a month.
Now compare it to a one-dollar hosting: $2 x 5 = $10 (I took an average price, which is in between min and max)
Is it worth it? It depends on your revenue from a money website but usually, it is too expensive.
Easy Blog Networks
This is a new thing on the market: A dedicated hosting that is created specifically for PBNs.
The provider kept in mind all possible issues and difficulties PBN webmasters experience including a protection against a possible Google de-indexing.
Easy Blog Networks resells third-party hosting services, to which they add a new intermediate layer containing PBN managing tools.