Great site..I just recently started researching the “dark” side of SEO, and enjoy your commentary, articles, and suggested software tools..

Since you use dedicated servers for your blackhat activities, and shared hosting for some of your whitehat sites, I was wondering what you would suggest for people who would like to get into “black hat” on a budget.

If you are on a budget you should be looking what’s the cheapest multiple domain hosting. Reseller hosting from ResellerZoom.com costs you $5 a month and can host around 30 sites (they put a limit recently). You will find plenty of reseller accounts in the range of $5-$20/month.

Now if you want to spend a bit more you can get a VPS (powervps.com for example) for $40-$80 a month. This will allow you to host more domains and totally automate site creation.

If you can’t afford the 99.00 a month for dedicated servers, would you suggest going with a shared host? If so, would it be Dreamhost?

Shared hosts generally aren’t as good as reseller hosting. If you aren’t a dedicated button pusher, you can create each site manually (gathering keywords, generating pages, setting up a blog etc). Dreamhost would be fine for that because you get a lot of space and unlimited domains.

I guess a more important question would be is what happens, if say, you have ten Black hat sites on a shared host and about half bet banned?

If half get banned, they will still be getting traffic from another engine. Well if they get banned they get banned. You just create more.

Does the host complain to you about developing such sites, and will you get the “boot” from their service if they suspect you of search engine spamming?

Unless you do email spam, referrer spam, ping spam or using up a lot of resources, they won’t be giving you any shit. I suspect that some hosts will be more aggresive and get angry at scrapers, cloaking etc, but you just stay away from those. I haven’t heard any stories about something like that yet. The true horror stories are hosts disappearing or being down for long periods.

Sounds like the answer is obvious, but I just wonder what gets the attention of hosting services? Has Google, or any other search engine complained that there are too many BH sites coming from a certain address, and they (the hosting service) ban you from developing any more sites with them?

I haven’t heard any hosting company banning anyone unless it’s email/referrer spam. There are bad neighbourhoods of sites though, which Google may deindex, penalize etc.

Has this happened even with a company that rents out a dedicated server for your BH sites?

If it’s your server then it has nothing to do with anyone else. You can do whatever you want on your server (except email/referrer spam of course).

These maybe some basic and obvious questions, but I have read some posts on affiliate forums, where a few of the members mention that they have been “burned” through a number of hosting services developing affiliate websites.

I just wonder about the ramifications (if there are any) from hosting services if they get complaints about your site? Can you be personally affected by such complaints, making it hard for you to use other host services?

If you are just doing generated sites, then there’s no problem. I don’t think it will ever be difficult to get hosting though.

In other words, can your good name get passed around to other hosting services as being–what they would consider to be a search engine spammer? Let me apologize in advance is this comment may sound somewhat nieve, and you may delete at will. However, it is a concern.

Nope.

Also, as I roam through the rest of your site, I will have other “stupid newbie” questions. So, if I don’t see any responses, or if my post no longer exists, I will get the message, and just recoil to “lurker” status.

Robert..

Thanks for the comment Robert.