You’ve found that you’re starting to have a number of great ideas for niche market sites, and wonder what the best, most economical way is to find web hosting for your new niche market empire. There are several ways to go with this, but let’s focus on the two most prevalent practices; first, hosting your new sites on subdomains of a site you already own, and second, utilizing new domains, (usually on the same web host) for a completely separate site. Let’s look at the pros and cons of both.

The Case for Subdomains

The ease with which you can setup a new subdomain on an existing domain is what is usually attractive to most webmasters. They are intimately familiar with the hosting platform, email, and other facets of the web hosting there. You can have the shell of the subdomain set up in a few clicks.

Setting up the site on the subdomain is the same as doing it on any other host; you’ll still be uploading files, configuring your templates or blog, setting up email accounts, databases and more, and generally making everything work well together. This remains the same.

The primary reason it seems people opt for this method is that it is free. There is no charge for what are usually unlimited subdomains, (unless you have a starter account, where you may be limited to a few) and the ease of setup.

They may also feel as though there is some benefit either to or from the main (parent domain) and the subdomain. This is not the case. The search engines treat subdomains as separate entities; their own site as it were, and do not considere them to be related. One glaring exception to that would be if one or more of the sites on the domain was penalized, the penalty would be applied to the IP address, which of course would include them all. Not good.

The Case for a New Domain Name

Using new domains for your niche sites has, in my mind, several advantages over the method previously described. Yes, you are paying $6-10 for a new domain name. Yes, you have to get it hosted. (Though if your web hosting account is robust enough, especially a reseller account or VPS, you have no worries there.) You also have to set them up from the ground floor also.

The main advantages lie in the fact that you can get far more targeted with domain name choices, which are a very integral factor in ranking these days. Another factor lies in the markets you are entering. If you have a dog lovers site, and all of a sudden an auto insurance lead generation site starts showing up on your domain, then at the very least your visitors will be confused. Think of the confused looks at your domain’s URL!

Another major reason to use top level domains for your niche market sites would be that you may want to sell them in the future. Building out sites and then reselling them for large profit has become a business model all on its own, and it would be silly to limit your potential earnings to save a few dollars.

All in all, creating your niche market empire is best done on multiple domains. Happy building!