Subfolder vs Dedicated Hosting Account

[chrison600]

My host offers "unlimited domains" as a part of their hosting packages. Come to find out it is possible to add domains, but they are configured in subfolders below the primary hosted domain, then aliased in the DNS setup. I am concerned about the SEO ramifications of this.

Another option would be for me to buy individual hosting accounts for each domain I want to host.

The additional domain that I want to add at this point is related to our core business, but is intended to be a non-commercial, topical community with a forum.

What are the pros and cons of having that site hosted in a subfolder vs its own hosting account?

Thanks,

Chris

[tomcatuk]

Hi Chris, I'm trying this out myself with my Taekwondo site. Rather than set it up with it's own domain, I've got it on a sub and apart from downright tightfistedness I'm doing it to see how well a sub domain can perform. One of the things that prompted me to give it a go was the apparent success of quite a few "free" web services like Tripod & Freewebs - every site on them is a sub, and there seemed to be a few that perform quite well in search engine placement.

The Taekwondo site's been up for a solid year now, and it's getting number one placements in Google for queries that return 1/2 a million results. The ONLY taekwondo related keyphrase that's really worth gunning for is Taekwondo itself. I'm at 35 or so on Google and don't really expect to see much traffic till I make page one, but the indications are there that I'm going in the right direction. On a side note, up until the last TBPR update (yes, I know no-one takes TBPR seriously) my www was a 3, whereas the tkd subdomain was at 4 implying (and the stats confirm this) that the subdomain was far more popular.

I'm building a small dinosaur site with my son as a way to gauge whether or not I can get away with two subs on completely different topics, I'm pretty sure it won't be tricky.

Now, Taekwondo isn't a competitive topic in terms of search (at least I don't think it is - yet!) so that could be why I seem to be doing OK. If you're in a competitive market like mortgages or SEO, you'll probably find it a lot tougher.

One definate drawback is backlinks from directories - a lot of them won't accept submissions for sub domains.

[chrison600]

Thanks for the response! I think I need to clarify something:

I'm not running a subdomain. My question is about subfolders vs independent hosting accounts for unique primary domains. As in:

Is it 'better' for me to run "domain1.com" in the root folder of my hosting account and "domain2.com" in a subfolder on that account?

or

Is it 'better' for me to run "domain1.com" in the root folder of hosting account 1 and "domain2.com" in the root folder of hosting account 2?

Subject matter is very similar, except domain1 is a commercial site dedicated to promotion of a product and domain2 is a non-commercial site dedicated to creating a contextual community, where the context is what the product in domain1 addresses.

Clear as mud?

Chris

[incrediblehelp]

Shared hosting on one IP is very common. If SE's were to ban these types of websites the WWW would be a much, much smaller place.