SEO Hosting

I'd come across the phrase "SEO Hosting" on a number of occasions, whilst researching hosting. I didn't pay much attention until today, when I thought I'd take a look at what exactly it entailed. I had assumed that this was a niche, value-added service and was surprised to find the space relatively crowded.

The concept essentially involves providing multiple Class C IP addresses. This means that a single customer can get multiple IP addresses from his hosting provider. The customer's primary site can be hosted on one IP address. Other IP addresses can be used to host secondary sites, all of which contain backlinks to the primary site. Search engine bots, being the rule-driven animals they are, interpret these backlinks as coming in from different sites and automatically assign a higher page ranking to the primary site. So, there you have it - mission accomplished and the customer's primary site fares well in natural search results.

The pricing model derives from the technical work-around. The more IP addresses you want, the more you pay. Literally every provider follows this model as depicted here. I am not sure though what the market size for SEO Hosting is; nor am I aware of the margins. Will post an update in case I find out later.

Managed DNS

I'd come across the term 'Managed DNS' on a number of occasions, but gave it a pass. Today, decided to delve a little deeper into the concept. Below is a quick summary of my learnings:

1. Basically, this is a service whereby the provider 'allows' you to use its nameserver(s) for storing your DNS records.

2. There are providers who offer this for free (haven't explored their business model in detail).

3. There are others who offer this for a fee for enterprise customers.

So, what really are the benefits for an enterprise signing up for a provider who offers this for a fee? Essentially, the service provider purports to have a globally distributed, redundant set of nameservers. This provides redundancy, so that requests for the nameserver seldom return error responses. Using technology, they are able to detect the origin of a request and serve DNS data from an appropriately close location. This improves speed.

In summary, this makes business sense only for enterprises. This model would never work for shared hosting and hence many providers provide this for free.