Our Most Recommended Private Blog Network Hosts
We've done extensive testing on all of the main PBN Hosting platforms and can highly recommend these two.
LaunchCDN
The best option if you want an extra layer of protection in the form of a Content Delivery Network.
Notable Features
Having a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on top of your hosting will make it much harder to find the server IP. This makes your Private Blog Network websites a lot safer and greatly reduces the chance of footprints.
Unlike most other PBN hosting companies, LaunchCDN allows Gambling, Adult & Pharma content.
The platform includes a quick option to build your PBN sites once deployed, their team will custom build the website to your specifications.
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Bulk Buy Hosting
The best option if you want complete
control using cPanel hosted on popular providers.
Notable Features
With cPanel access you can do anything you need. Using any CMS of your choice, quickly uploading a HTML website and much more.
Your PBN websites are hosted on popular hosting providers including HostGator, NameCheap, A Small Orange and Reseller Club.
The platform includes a quick option to build your PBN sites once deployed, their team will custom build the website to your specifications.
(Click features to expand)
Currently, we only offer hosting services to clients looking to manage 3,000+ websites.
For our clients, we handle everything including domain renewals and hosting.
We have limited spaces in this service, so please apply via the waiting list link below.
About PBN Hosting
As a webmaster, you want your business to be on the first page of Google, but with the constant changes made to Search Engine Optimization with each Google algorithm update, this has become harder to do, as you need to constantly ensure that you’re doing everything by the book. There are lots of case studies coming out about everyone’s unique strategies so people aren’t always sure the best method.
But all these regulations have also enabled us to learn a thing or two about how SEO works, and locate the aspects which have more of an influence than others. PBNs have been a staple in the SEO industry for many years and have been a point of contention among SEOs. Picking a good hosting provider is essential if you want to get to the top, and like most, you’re here because you’ve heard about the amazing power of PBNs (Private Blog Networks) and PBN hosting services, and want to know more.
So get a cup of your favorite beverage and get ready. We’ll explain what PBNs are, how to find good domain names, exactly what you need to look for in a PBN hosting company, and how to get started with your first PBN Site.
What Are PBNs?
What is PBN Hosting?
PBN Hosting refers to Private Blog Network Hosting, it’s a method of hosting a large number of websites using a range of high quality hosting providers. Usually this is all managed from one dashboard to make things easier, with the ability to update all the sites at once and log in to each CMS. This method of hosted websites is often a lot cheaper than regular hosting options which is why it is the go-to choice for many SEOs.
A Private Blog Network, or a PBN, is a term that describes a group of sites that are used to improve the authority of one money site. These sites contain backlinks to your money site – the more backlinks that lead to your site, the higher your SEO rating. PBN domains are often hard to find and over the last few years it’s become very competitive. Many people used expired PBN domains but this isn’t as strong as auction bought PBN domains.
The good thing about PBNs is that you are completely in control. You decide where, how, and when you link, so you are basically in control of how fast your site will progress through the ranks.
It sounds like the perfect method to up your site’s traffic, right? But truth is, it can be risky. Google considers PBNs a gray hat SEO method (unethical, but not illegal), so they’ve developed mechanisms to track down webmasters who use them and de-index all the sites in a given private blog network. But when done correctly you can greatly minimise the possibility of this occurring on your web host.
If you have any doubts as to whether PBNs are effective or not, just take a look at how hard Google is trying to stop them. If they weren’t working, why even bother?
What Is Hosting So Important?
PBN hosting, often confused with SEO Hosting is the process of setting up your Private Blog Network in an environment where your servers won’t leave a footprint for search engines to track, and you get to control all of your sites from one panel. The aim of a PBN is to improve your money site rankings by creating links from the sites you create. In comparison SEO Hosting is low quality hosting that people use to do various black hat methods for their money site. in most cases SEO Hosting & PBN Hosting people use interchangeably, but the bottom line is the difference in quality.
PBN hosting service’s provide you with the tools that can help you avoid detection, and which will lower the chance of your site leaving footprints. Some hosting solutions are so efficient that there is no detectable footprint at all.
Keep in mind that getting a good PBN hosting service is of the utmost importance. One of the main reasons PBNs and PBN structures get de-indexed is because of a bad PBN hosting plan. This is something webmasters don’t spend too much time on – and that costs them dearly. There are different ways to host your PBN and boost your money sites, and which method you pick will depend on your needs and the budget you have.
Private Blog Networks are only as strong as their hosting, if you are using cheap and low quality hosting there is a good chance that all of your effort will be for nothing. It’s important to get your Private Blogs good quality hosting or at least seemingly good quality hosting through search engine eyes. Make sure the customer support team will help you as it’s quite a complex thing to get right.
Types Of Private Blog Network Hosting
There are a range of hosting solutions that PBN hosts will use to host your sites. Often they try to get a mix of hosting companies to make it look as normal as possible with unique IP’s. However, PBN hosts can often have large footprints in heir network that they aren’t even aware of. When building a Private Blog Network one of the hardest things to get right is making sure each website has a unique IP. When assessing hosts, it’s important to review their hosting plan and see exactly what it is they offer as you can grow your money site much faster knowing what you are dealing with. The quickest way to do this is get on their chat support and ask them some hard questions about how they host their websites. We’ve put a summary of the different types of hosting solutions they could use below.
SEO Hosting
Once the gold standard for PBN hosting, nowadays, SEO hosting companies cannot be relied upon to deliver results for Private Blog Networks. SEO hosts are fairly simple to use, gives you access to all of your sites and is inexpensive, but it will leave footprints which will make it easier for search engines to realize what you’re doing and potentially de-index your pages. They will often try and get you on board by providing free SEO services, but this is very risky.
To put it plain and simple: having access to your Private Blog Network through one IP address is a big no-no. Also, having different IP addresses that lead all to you as the sole owner will raise red flags with the search engine. With SEO Hosting you will almost certainly land your sites in a bad IP neighborhood.
Simply said, using SEO hosting for your PBNs is like putting a giant target on your back and is likely to get your money site penalised.
Reseller Hosting
An affordable option, but also quite inefficient in covering up tracks, usually known for good customer service. Reseller hosting is a type of hosting which is based on the purchase of a regular hosting account and then asking for additional unique IP addresses for each site that is part of the PBN, so that it’s harder for search engines to track you through them. You will get unique PBN domains, a lot of bandwidth and speed, and you’ll be able to manage all sites from one account.
So what’s bad about reseller hosting? The name servers… They are all the same, and you might get burned if Google notices the pattern. While cheap and practical, it’s only a bit better than SEO hosting. Don’t do it. Cheap hosting rarely means safe hosting and reseller hosting certainly isn’t the best option.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a concept that people turn to when other hosting has let them down. They offer different name servers and let you pack all of your content on one IP address, but with different domains. So basically you would be hiding in plain sight, and all other users hosting their money site will provide you with cover. They are very cheap, with some offering hosting plans that cost as much as a few dollars a month.
Shared hosting is difficult to set up, and can lead to all of your PBNs ending up in a bad neighborhood. Also, a shared hosting plan is notorious for lack of customer support and the frequent downtimes of servers. For this to work you would need multiple shared hosting accounts for each website which gets very costly.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
This type of hosting is a popular hosting solution, but it’s also one of the more expensive ones.
VPS hosting involves buying a VPS (well, duh), and then hosting all of your PBNs on it. It’s easy to get extra IP addresses, you manage it (this can also be a downside for inexperienced users), and you control all domains from one control panel.
Perfect, right? Not really…
It can get somewhat expensive if you want to work with a bigger network as that would mean enlisting the services of a CDN service provider (although content delivery networks can be done for free). Also, you would need to set up all the IP addresses yourself, and it’s risky to work with a bigger network, as they will all have the name of the VPS company slapped on them, which can lead search engines to see a pattern and dig deeper. Customer service teams can help you get this set up properly but it’s much easier going with a web host that can do it all for you.
Another thing is that the unique IP addresses are mostly B class IP, which is not bad, but not good either. A good option if you have some extra money, but also a lot of time and energy to set it up correctly.
Dedicated Hosting
A 100% safe method for hosting a PBN which involves having a dedicated server for each domain – meaning they all come with their own dedicated IP address, it also offers the most disk space. While leaving no way for search engines to catch you, this is by far the most expensive hosting solution and is not feasible for PBNs with more than 10 sites.
Premium (Popular) Hosting
Premium or popular hosting is now the go-to in the world of PBN hosting. It leaves no footprints, but just like dedicated IP hosting, it’s pricey. You enlist the services of a popular hosting plan that provide excellent bandwidth and storage, and you don’t have to worry about your sites ending up in bad neighborhoods as your pages will be in the same group with other legitimate businesses.
The downside? As we already mentioned, it’s pricey, but that’s not all. These can be really complicated to set up, not to mention maintain. You would need to pay for each site separately, and managing them doesn’t need a webmaster – it needs a spreadsheet wizard. No, really, a wizard…
CDN (Content Delivery Network) Hosting
CDNs are becoming increasingly popular for PBN hosting as a protection layer. They are great for covering up IP addresses making them look like unique IP’s and providing high-speed performance and relatively low prices.
But it’s difficult to find good CDN hosts, as some of them are known for bad neighborhoods and you’d also need to pay extra attention to your SOA email set-up, which can start putting up red flags for Google. It’s safer than most options, and by a large margin, but it does require a lot of time and effort to get it all right. Overall, Content Delivery Networks offer good protection for a good price.
Reverse Proxy Hosting
This is a relatively new method which is slowly getting more and more popular. It works similar to a CDN, masking both your IP and name servers. And you use CDN-style DNS protection for free. You can host multiple websites on one IP and Google will still consider it a diverse network. There’s no need to do additional work after you set it up, but you would still need to create new accounts for each domain, making it hard to keep track of. While they generally leave no footprint with your IP addresses, using them excessively can lead to the creation of some traces, as patterns that can be recognized by Google.
Cloud Hosting
A lot of people say that cloud hosting is no different than SEO hosting when it comes to PBNs, but that simply isn’t true. With this method of hosting, each PBN site will be assigned a unique IP address that can in no way be connected to the others. This is what most of the main popular providers are using at the moment and for good reason. Cloud hosting is trusted by the SEO community, however it can lead to potential issues if not implemented correctly. There’s no doubt that when done effectively it can be an excellent solution.
How To Avoid Footprints?
When assessing each PBN Hosting plan there are a lot of aspects that you need to take into consideration in order to remove (which is really hard) or reduce the amount and size of footprints your PBN will leave. Ultimately you want to reduce the potential risk to your money sites. Here is a list of some of the things to look out for:
- Diverse Domain Registration: Adding all of your domain names into one registrar will lead Google on your trail right away. Add two on one registrar at most.
- Don’t Use Privacy On All Domains: A quarter of all of your domains (at most) should be private, any more and Google will get suspicious. Just use fake names and addresses.
- Diversify Whois E-mails: Using popular email providers like Gmail and Yahoo is OK, but branded emails are better, web hosts leave footprints for this.
- Domain Timestamps: Deciding to register or renew your domains at the same time is a mistake as this leaves money and date trails. Make sure there is a day or two between the expiration date between each domain name.
- Use Different TLDs: Having all of your sites having the same TLD is suspicious. Register some of them as .com, others as .net, .info, and so on.
- Use Different IPs: We already mentioned it, but we can’t stress enough how important this is. Invest in different servers and IPs including c class IPs.
- Avoid Cheap Hosting: As tempting as they are, they only bring trouble. You will either get bad IPs which will get you in bad neighborhoods, or get long downtime and abysmal loading times.
- Change Your DNS Info Right Away: By changing your DNS info, you can ensure that your SOA records won’t show multiple sites containing the same info. It can be a big red flag.
- Avoid Cloudflare For IP Masking: Cloudflare was good for it in the past, but not anymore. Using LaunchCDN's Cloudflare implementation is good but we've not found another hosting plan that offers it properly.
- Lower The Number of 404 Redirects: This was a good method to preserve link juice, but nowadays it’s more of a big footprint. Use it only on your best content.
- Add Different Plugins: Having 20 or 30 sites with the same plugins is more than suspicious. Of course, adding the most popular 3-4 plugins on all sites is okay and that isn’t a footprint on its own, but make certain the rest are diverse and in different numbers.
- Don’t Use The Same Theme: Theme diversity is something Google actually pay attention to. There are a number of popular ones out there and this shouldn’t be hard to do, but most webmasters tend to use very similar ones or one that is altered in different ways. Don’t be like most webmasters.
- Make Sure You Have Contact Info And Legal Forms On The Page: This sets apart the good sites from the bad. It’s not hard to do, but somehow many website owners skip or forget it. Do it, it will add to the legitimacy of your sites.
- All Round Good Design: A website that is nicely designed looks more authentic. I mean, why would anyone try to make a fake page look good? A good looking site looks more credible not only to manual reviewers but to common users, too.
- Maintain Content Flow: Having too little or too old content doesn’t scream ‘attractive’ or ‘exciting’, does it? Maintain text/post flow and update existing content.
- Posts With Too-General-Sounding Topics: Try to be more authentic and tackle some more specific topics. No one wants to go through the basics over and over again. Specific content makes you more relevant in your niche. Mix it up.
- Create Social Media Profiles: Every legitimate business has a social media profile or page nowadays. Not having one is… weird. Create a few pages, post content and links, interact with visitors. If you want to go the extra mile, invest in some ads.
- Use Real Authors: I mean, having all your content “unsigned” will make anyone suspicious. An art piece needs an artist and a blog post needs a writer, so make sure to get some proper names, pictures, and profiles for your writers.
- Avoid Adding Bad Content: Cheap hosting is bad, but bad content is your nemesis. Quality and authentic content is not that hard to come by nowadays. Invest in good writers.
- Diversify Links: Your PBN sites should contain links to other authority websites, not just your money site. Also, don’t clog your site with links from sources like Wikipedia. There are other sources as well. Use them.
- Create A Web Of Links In One PBN Site: Interlinking is an important tool. It helps keep visitors on the page and Google off your back. Oh, and don’t link to other sites in your PBN that contain a post relevant to the topic. Just don’t. That brings a lot of trouble.
- Your Blog Posts Shouldn’t Contain The Same Amount Of Words: Anywhere from 250 to 2000 is good. Different lengths = credibility. Some topics are longer, others are shorter and that’s okay.
- Don’t Publish/Post Content At The Same Time: It’s an immediate red flag if 5 or 10 of your sites publish articles on the same topic at the same time. One or two articles now, then wait a day or two, then two more, then wait for another two days and so on. You can use backdating in WordPress to achieve this easily.
- Review Older Content: Check for broken links and other potential malformations in your older posts.
- Watch Out For Downtime Length & Timing: If your site is down for too long or if multiple sites from your PBN go down at the same time, that leaves a big footprint. If your hosting plan has terrible downtime you'll need to contact them as soon as possible.
- HTTPS/HTTP Having an SSL certificate is a good signal for your PBNs but you should have a combination of both HTTP and HTTPS websites.
- Varying Domains It's important to have a wide variety of PBN domains and make sure they aren't all very similar. Usually a website would have a range of domains linking to it, which is what you want to aim for with your PBN Domains as well.
- Data Centers It goes without saying that you should be sure your websites are hosted on a range of servers so your hosting profile looks natural.
What To Look For In A Hosting Service?
Now, we mentioned all the stuff that you need to be on the lookout for in order not to leave a footprint, but the truth is, a web hosting company cannot help with everything and you need to assess each hosting plan. Service providers offer a range of services, here are the things you should look for when searching for a hosting solution.
Safety, Safety, Safety
PBNs are a gray hat SEO tactic. Not illegal, but if you get discovered, there is still a chance your sites will get de-indexed and removed from search results, especially with big footprints like having the sites on one IP address. Not only that, but your main money site could be negatively affected. This is why security is the first thing you should look for. Yes, PBNs are dubious in nature, but also a very popular method, and are used by many companies and other independent webmasters.
The Least Footprint Possible
No footprint services are ideal, but they’re also expensive. For all of you who’re on a budget, go for hosting services that include CDN services. Not only do they provide protection and make your PBN less obvious, as we explained above, they also provide speed and quality.
A Different IP For Every Domain
The most important thing is to ensure your sites are in a good IP neighborhood. This is very important characteristic that is not offered by many providers, but one which can do wonders in reducing the potential of leaving a footprint. You need to get unique IP’s for your hosting otherwise it can signify a big footprint for Google. Using the same IP address to access your sites will increase the chance of your PBN getting discovered tenfold. Double check the info regarding the IP addresses you will receive, as you might end up in a bad neighborhood, or simply have blacklisted IPs.
High Performance for All Sites
Low downtime percentage, high speed, quality content, and user experience all depend on the hosting solutions to a certain extent. And all these factors need to score high for you to have a good SEO rating.
Using a SOA Record
An SOA record stands for Start of Authority and simply a record that contains details about the zone it’s hosted on. You can use the default SOA record from DNS providers to host email addresses and keep your network undetected. Some providers offer this but most don’t, Daryl Rosser from LionZeal explains how important it is to keep your domain names safe.
Unique Name Servers For Your Sites
Your provider should also provide you with name servers which are key if you want to be noticed on the internet. Every PBN hosting company should provide you with two name servers. Check if they are unique. If they are, it means you will also get good IPs. Many webmasters disregard these, but they can enhance the reputation of your PBN by quite a lot.
Simplicity
Most webmasters think that the harder something to manage is, the better/safer/more powerful it is. This isn’t true. Some of the best hosting services offer a simple one-panel/dashboard in which you can control your whole PBN.
Traditional Web Hosting
If you choose to go with regular web hosting services (this could end up being more expensive but potentially more effective). You need to take a look at their web hosting packages and decide whether it will suit your needs, service providers are very different with what they offer. Some quick questions to ask are:
- Do they give you an email address? This is a good EAT sign for your PBN to have on the site.
- Do they have chat support for any issues?
- Do they have a quick setup process for additional domains?
- Do they have any of the obvious hosting footprints we’ve mentioned here?
Once you ask these questions you can compare web hosting offerings across different web hosting services.
Final Word
PBN hosting is no joke and it requires careful planning, patience, and a lot of learning. Of course, at first this might seem like a daunting task, but don’t fret about it. Just start bit by bit, and soon enough you will get the feel of what’s right and what’s not. Making a good start with PBNs requires you to have aspects such as hosting as airtight and footprint-less as possible if you are to survive in the ever changing world of SEO. Make sure when choosing a hosting plan that you consider their customer support as it’s incredibly important to get a team that can help you along the way.
At the end of the day, be aware of what you want to achieve and how much money you are willing to spend, and this way you can determine the service provider that is best for you. Get it right the first time, and you’ll be in the game for a long time and your money sites will be up there on page #1 in no time.
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