I have very limited experience actually building sites or the technical end. I want to have 50 to 100 affiliate sites , what are my options for hosting , do i need a server , can i put several domains on one hosting account , what are the limitations of a shared account also for seo what is best? No cart or SSL needed and just one email per site.What is best and what is cheapest? thank you in advance
Depending how resource consuming your sites are, if you're only displaying ads on them then they don't consume much of anything. You'd need a host that allows you to have high number or unlimited number of addon domains or parked domains, same with mail addresses. With such a host you can just host all your domains in one place. Can you share a link of one of your sites? so I can take a look what kind of sites you're talking about.
Go for any Shared Hosting which allows Unlimited or atleast 100 add-on domains ( if you want to make 100 different sites). You'll easily find one. There are no limitations on shared hosts for these kind of sites. You might want to try JustHost, I don't really know much about them, but they've pretty good ratings.
As for SEO, it doesn't really matter if you put all your sites in one hosting account, just don't cross-link your sites heavily trying to pass around PR and you'll be fine
Thank you for the good as gold info Shagoon I do not have any sites up yet but I am going for this sequinbags.com what am I looking at for cost for this hosting I need?
When it comes to cost it depends on each host and what they offer to you in that price... depends on your monthly budget and what you can find within that range of $
Well you could try hostgator for starters. Who also have great start off plans, but their is many host's around Digital point, spend some time do some research your bound to find a decent host who is their for the customers not the Money.
Shared hosting will do. If you have 10 site,do buy a hosting that allow 10 addons domain so that you can host 10 site within 1 shared account. For SEO,you need dedicated IP which cost around $3/month.
In my opinion for 50 to 100 sites you need at least a VPS(a dedicated server will be best). No Shared host will sustain such high memory consumption and they will suspend your account.