I recently had the opportunity to talk with Michael Jenson from Solo SEO. Solo SEO is one of the leading do-it-yourself SEO services online. Michaels product is very user friendly and I had a chance to test it out and I was impressed. I also love the missing mybloglog tools he has implemented into his site.

Michael and I talked about hosting accounts and what his feelings are on certain hosting options.

Joe: When you first started doing SEO do you remember what type of hosting account you started with and what type of hosting account would you recommend to new SEO/SEM’s and Internet Marketers?

Michael: I remember my first website, 13 years ago, was hosted on my ISP because that’s all I knew about. It had a tilde (~) with my username after it. Nowadays you have more options than you can imagine for web hosting. We run our own servers, and for us personally it has been more of an issue of what facility to put our boxes in. For that I have a few recommendations for co-location facilities:

1) Up-time. They can say 99.9%, but is it actually that. They should have various systems in place to notify you when the network is down, and even more important, be notified themselves when its down.

2) Access. You should have a contact at the facility that you can say, “Hey, can you go listen to the fan on this box and tell me if it sounds normal?”

3) Fast. Make sure your pipe is fast, real fast. If you don’t have your own server, there are many options for a web host. You can do shared or dedicated hosting depending on your budget and needs.

Joe: What do you look for in a hosting account/ web host?

Michael: Your own IP. Not required, but a nice benefit. If you share an IP with others and a site on your IP decides to do bad things, your IP can end up on blacklists or other lists that would affect your site and business.

Service. Your requests from point 3 should be quickly attended to. If you like the phone, make sure you can call and not just submit an online service request through their website. Many of the web hosts will let you try it out for 30 days or so, and make sure you try it out to the max and make sure it fits your needs.

Joe: Do you prefer Windows or Linux hosting and why?

Michael: Unix server. Not only do I not like Windows, but my experience with Windows servers has been awful. You can do a ton of things out-of-the-box with a Unix machine.

Michael was very busy and only able to talk for a moment but I thought it was more then worth posting. Thanks michael!