Jan 13 2009
Who Do the Super Affiliates Host With?
Almost anyone involved in online marketing has a hosting horror story – reliable hosting is hard to find. We were curious about who experienced super affiliates host with, so we conducted a round-table interview of sorts, and received insightful responses along with great advice. Our featured super affiliate interviewees are Al Carlton of SelfMadeMinds.com , Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and Scott Jangro of Jango.com
Question #1 – Who Do You Host With?
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“For my US targeted sites like Coolest Gadgets I host with ASmallOrange, PowerVPS, BlueHost and a few other resellers. For my UK sites I use Clook.” |
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“RackSpace. I’ve had dedicated servers with many different hosts, and RackSpace is the best. They’re more expensive than some other companies, but they live up to their claim of “fanatical support.” Their staff is incredibly fast, responsive and helpful.” |
 Scott |
“We host at a number of places, tests that have accumulated over the years, but the one that we do the most with is LiquidWeb. We have several dedicated servers there running on a private network with load balancing.
I’ve also been experimenting with several of the VPS/Cloud providers out there, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, and Linode. I think we’re settling on Linode for fast deployment of servers. Hopefully this solution will help us scale better than we have been able to in the past.” |
Question #2 – What are the most important features in choosing a web host for you as an affiliate marketer?
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"Uptime and speed of response of support, ideally being able to contact them 24/7 via IM or phone." |
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"Reputation of the host, uptime, customer service and technical support." |
Scott |
"For us, the single most important feature is the ability to customize the server. We do a lot with custom code and need to be able to install apache modules, compile PHP, add in libraries and compile third party code. This is another reason we’re shifting away from Cpanel servers as we find we’re working around Cpanel more and more with the stuff we do." |
Question #3 – You’ve probably had your share of bad and good hosting experiences. Do you have any tips for new affiliates looking for a hosting company?
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“Don’t rely on just your host for backups, do your own as well. If a host accidentally deletes all your data; get them to restore from a backup and move to another host BEFORE telling them exactly what you think of their crappy service” |
 Shawn |
"Ask around on affiliate forums on which companies others are using. And don’t bargain hunt – I did that in the past and wound up with a company that only kept a one-day backup of my files. The long and short is that I was operating a forum and it was hacked (I didn’t keep an archive of the files locally), and the host didn’t respond to me within 24 hours of the hacking. They simply wouldn’t answer my calls or emails for an entire business day. During that time, their system overwrote my backup with the hacked version and I lost two years of content."
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Scott |
“You can save a lot of money by buying a year or two of hosting instead of monthly. Read the small print, but typically you’ll get refunded for what you don’t use, even if you buy in advance.” |
A big thank you to Shawn, Al & Scott for contributing. This guest post is by Toni Allen from Who Is Hosting This, who have just added hosting reviews and hosting coupons to the popular webmaster tool.
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Jan 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm | #
Thanks! Really helpful for me as a blogger. I Wouldn’t want to wake up one morning and see an empty blog. Uptime is especially important for me as an affiliate because if the server crashes while a product launches I won’t make any money.
Really helpful tips, Thanks!
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