Web Hosting Reviews for Affiliates

Having a solid web host is an extremely important part of Affiliate Marketing, however there’s so much choice out there most of us don’t know where to start. The main problem with most web hosting review websites is that they’ll generally push the hosts that make them the most commissions, unfortunately this isn’t the ideal situation for someone who is looking for the best host to use.

You’ll be glad to know that at Earners Blog we’re not endorsing any web hosts, we simply review them on their own merits instead of how much they’re willing to pay us for a customer.

How do you know what type of Server you'll need?

1 - 20 Small Websites

A shared hosting service should suffice for a number of small non resource intensive websites. I tend to start all of my new sites on a shared hosting service then once it needs to scale I’ll move it to a VPS Server. Shared hosting is also good for hosting landing pages & other small one page sites. However, one thing to bear in mind here is that if the host has a poor uptime record your landing could be offline whilst you’re still paying to send traffic to it.

1 - 10 Medium Websites or 1 Large Site

You’ll get to a point where you will want more control & responsiveness with your web hosting. This could be due to the number of sites you’re hosting or perhaps 1 site in particular has taken off. At this point you’ll want to upgrade to a VPS, I personally have about 4 different VPS Hosting servers all hosting various sites. I find that with more servers I can spread any risk (i.e. if the network goes down all my sites aren’t down).

You can get a fairly beefy VPS for around $50/month, it’s imperative that you don’t skimp on this sort of stuff. If you have 5 sites making you 3k a month & you’re relying on $10/month shared hosting then your income stream is at risk.

Multiple High Volume Sites or Forums

When you’re in the realm of dedicated servers then you’ll probably have a serious project on your hands. Dedicated servers are a whole different ball game from Shared Hosting, you’ll be able to throw tens of thousands of unique visitors per day at them (highly dependant on how dynamic the site is & the load each process puts on the server).

Even the best hosting can crumble sometimes

Who do you host with?

I personally host with 5 different companies:

Dreamhost: I’ve been with Dreamhost for years, whilst they’re not the fastest host out there I always start new project on their servers until they’re at the point where I can justify a new VPS. I’ve got unlimited bandwidth & disk space for $5.99 a month, I also usually register all my domains through Dreamhost since the whois protection is free.

SL Host: SL Host was the second company I got a VPS from, they used to absolutely rock with 2min response times on tickets & ultra fast servers. Over the past few months the company was sold off & the servers were moved to a new colocation facility. Things unfortunately went downhill from here, high loads, slow support response times. I had considered leaving, but things have picked up again recently & I’m pretty happy again.

Knownhost: Knownhost remind me of what SL Host used to be like. Kick ass servers, fast response times & top notch support. I’ve got nothing but good things to say about these guys & have no complaints. The VPS Servers are a little more expensive but worth it.

Wired Tree: I picked up a Wired Tree VPS a few months ago & these guys rock. I don’t think I can fault their hosting service at all, I get answers to support tickets in 3 minutes, the servers are lightning fast. The only gripe I have with Wired Tree is the lack of Burst RAM on the servers which can cause MYSQL to get killed off if you haven’t set up my.cnf to work within the limits of the VPS. Although this is not necessarily a bad thing, no burst ram increases the stability of the node as no-one can overload the services but eating into the total Burst RAM.

Geek Storage: I’ve only just signed up for a VPS recently with Geek Storage so I don’t have much to report yet but I’ll update this in a month or so.