I agree with Kurt about removing footprints from your site infrastructure via spoof details. There are a lot of reasons to use family, friends and slight variations of registration details.

If all your domains are registered to Small Town, USA 12345 and hosted with the same details you leave a massive footprint for outing and banning of your network sites.

To find cheap hosting, I start by figuring out what I need from php, mysql, cpanel, disk space to bandwidth. Actually new sites don't need much bandwidth and you can always upgrade.

Then I visit forums like the following:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=45
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/viewcategory?categoryid=21
http://hosthideout.com/forumdisplay.php?daysprune=&f=54&s=

Generally I find that for every hosting account that I successfully sign up I have reviewed or tried 10 others. This is the nature of cheap hosting.

They advertise $4.99* hosting but the asterisk might represent $49 setup fee, 3 year plan, first month only, etc. Read the fine print carefully.

Make a general list of the urls that you might want to sign up. It doesn't take long to get 50 to 100 offers bookmarked.

I do two searches for each host that I am considering:

1. Google their name along with "problem OR scam OR canceled" to read some negative reviews. Every cheap host has them. You have to decide if they pertain to your situation. What is a problem for some people might not bother you.

2. The second search is for their name with "coupon OR code" to find out if there are any deals on - there always is for the cheap hosts.

Here are a couple coupon sites to check also:

http://couponsnexus.com/hosting/coupons
http://webhostingdeals.easywebx.com/coupons/

While searching, it is a good time to click on banners and adsense ads for further cheap hosting leads.

A lot of the time you will have to go through pages of registration before you find the hidden catch or drawback.

There are some good deals on hosting. You just have to be careful. This weekend I reviewed almost 100 reseller hosting offers and signed up for about 30 of them. I ended up with 7 working accounts today. Be prepared to spend some time locating cheap hosting that works.

Another problem with cheap paid hosting is that a lot of them are starting to use MaxMind. This is an hosting account signup identity verifier. During a recent batch of reseller hosting account signups, about half of them were nuked by MaxMind when they tried to verify that my browser IP matched my registration location IP and payment IP.

Just keep a list of hosting accounts that use MaxMind that you would like to try. In part 2 I will show you some tested and tried ways to defeat MaxMind.

Top Hat Bob