Can I use more than one host?

heirJordan · #1 11-09-2006, 12:51 PM

OK, this is the best way I can explain my situation.

I'm starting a website, and I only plan on using a simple splash page and forums. However, I have a lot of images to use.

My question is, let's say I own hostgator --- say I host my forums and splash page only on my registrar. But I decide to host all of my images on a sister site to help ensure loading so many queries on each page doesn't lag the server and allows my visitors to have a good, consistent load time.

So can I host the same domain name on two completely different hosts? Or is this just dumb like I have the feeling that it is, and it'd be better off to just get a better plan?

Be easy on me, I'm completely wet behind the ears with all of this stuff. But thanks in advance for any help.

#2 11-09-2006, 01:16 PM

You could certainly create your website on one server and have all of the images and so forth stored on a completely different server, perhaps to save bandwidth or disk space.

Like you might want to display a very large movie file on your website but you don't want to risk blowing your Hostgator bandwidth for the month as 50,000 people come download it. So you create the HTML page on your Hostgator site but you have the movie file uploaded to YouTube. Then you can use standard EMBED tags to embed the YouTube movie on your HostGator webpage.

kmaw · #3 11-09-2006, 07:43 PM

I certainly wouldn't pay for two hosting companies, that would be dumb... and a pain in the ass (for one domain)... upgrade to a better account...

However, the suggestion from above, ie posting a video on youtube is a good idea...

heirJordan · #4 11-09-2006, 07:44 PM

[edit]

That's what I thought. But at the same time, I would assume it'd just be better off getting a dedicated package. I don't have that money though and that's the reason why I figured I could pick up a separate package (like the Baby or Swamp packages) to simply host my images for my site. Such as, the logo's, banners, smilies, etc.
And I'd simply do free host sites like imageshack, but they're hard to track down, not to mention, I favor having my domain and the file name to make finding it easier. But I definately see your point. I'll try seeing how the site go's first before I rush judgement on how much the images will hinder the site.

Thanks to both of you for helping.

Serra · #5 11-10-2006, 07:28 AM

Normally what you do to make this happen is you use the domain on one host and use the IP address or another domain for image links. The advantage of this is if you exceed your bandwith with images, the images top working but your site stays up. Then you can pick up another cheap hosting package and put the images there and redirect the URL to that site and the images are backup up.

This is a more expensive way to share bandwidth, but does have the advantage that there is low overhead and your main site never gets suspended for bandwidth usage. This is a very common way of doing things.

The free image sites is a nice idea too but there are limitations and they do shut down images for bandwidth usage as well.