One popular web host offers relatively cheap hosting at $3.99 per month, for one domain. Sounds like a good deal? Maybe not.

Another popular host charges $9.95 per month. Leave aside that the second offers vastly more storage and bandwidth - far more than all but extreme power users could require - and think about the key feature the second offers: unlimited domain and subdomain hosting. Once you host over 3 domains the economics begin to strongly favor the more expensive web host. At 3 domains the hosting cost per domain is only $3.32 per month. If you have 10 domains, the cost is under $1 per month per domain name.

If you want to host an extra couple of domains you would be better off choosing the host charging more per month, because it offers so much more capacity for you to grow your internet business.

If you run a business on the internet you almost certainly will want to host more than one domain name. Some of the reasons include:

* You could choose to register a domain with a similar spelling to your main domain name, and redirect its traffic to your main site. This not only gets more traffic but stops a competitor from taking some of your business.

* You could optimize one site for the search engines and another as a landing page for your Adwords pay per click advertising campaign.

* Search engines will assign a better search ranking to web sites that concentrate on specific subjects, more than they give to general sites. You may get better results with several sites covering with your market niche.

* If you run an internet business you may want sites covering several market niches.

* Web domain names have become an important investment in their own right, and many people now buy up and trade in domain names. It can add value to a domain name if you have it hosted and build up its traffic and page rank before you sell it.

You may be better off using Squidoo or Google Pages ...

Or if you just want a blog, how about Google's Blogger or the free www.wordpress.org blog option?

But if you seriously want to build a business on the internet, you really should consider unlimited domains hosting options.

Dreamhost is kind of funky and fun as a business. The newsletters are, shall we say, "different". There are real people at Dreamhost, just like the rest of us, and they do admit to making little errors from time to time. But behind that sense of humor there is a lot of web hosting professionalism.

Like the newsletters, some aspects of the hosting are a little quirky.

First, Dreamhost does not use cPanel as the user interface. They have their own interface. That puts some people off right away. That, in my view, is a mistaken viewpoint.

My websites are hosted in several places, including some using cPanel. They all work fine. It took me an hour or two to get used to the Dreamhost panel, but now going back to it from a cPanel host is a little like coming home - it just feels more comfortable, especially in the way it copes with multiple domain hosting. In my view, cPanel was not designed with multiple domain hosting in mind - it works, but is not as elegant a solution as the custom panel at Dreamhost.

Secondly, if your applications use fopen functions in php you will need to modify your code to use cURL to draw down external data instead. Dreamhost disables fopen for security reasons. I believe that is a good risk management thing to do on shared hosting, but for some older applications this can be a hassle if you are not a programmer able to do the modifications. Most recent php applications appear to have cURL built in to work fine on Dreamhost.

Thirdly, Dreamhost occasionally has had outages. In my experience over a couple of years they have been rare, but Dreamhost has a lot of users and a high profile, so the topic gets some air time. The thing is, each of my other hosts has had a similar level of downtime. In my view, if you need 100% uninterrupted uptime you must be on a dedicated server with backups. You should not be using shared server hosting. Sure, that solution is costly. It comes down to economics and the nature of your website. In my experience, Dreamhost is no better or worse than other shared server hosts for downtime, and it is a relatively rare issue in practice that hardly warrants much debate.

Each web host has unique issues. Taken overall, Dreamhost stacks up as very good value for money.

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