Few important hosting questions....

I just have a few questions which need answers hope you guys can help

1) Is http://www.dreamhost.com a good web host

2) What is shared hosting? Am I sharing anything with anyone, if so can they harm my sites in anyway?

3) It says 1 unique ip address, does that mean if Google penalises 1 of my sites, all my sites are penalised?

4) Just say I have www.dogs.com and www.cats.com hosted under the 1 account, how will my page urls look? Will they look normal in all hosted sites, or will there be something like www.dogs.com/cats.com/catfood.htm

 

2- shared hosting mean you share the same box as others. Box mean the same Server. So basically, your site will have the same IP as other sites.
4- you will just have dogs.com and cats.com separately.

 

If you don't want to go for shared hosting, hosting companies also provide dedicated hosting. That is when a single unique ip is allocated to your website.

In the case of dedicated ip, you can access your site like www.dogs.com and also as http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where this is your unique IP. Usually established sites go for a dedicated IP.

Here's a live example for you for the site www. visitdublin.com

if you do a ping to visitdublin.com (using command prompt) you will get a message 'Pinging visitdublin.com [206.196.31.118] .....

now if you try to access this URL using your browser, http://206.196.31.118/ you will see the viist dublin website.

Same is the case for Google and other big sites.