Most serious affiliates at one point will be faced with the decision of upgrading from their shared hosting. But while there are many good reasons to purchase a VPS don’t believe that you can’t operate your affiliate website(s) from shared hosting account because a lot of affiliates do run successful sites on shared accounts.
For most affiliates shared hosting is the perfect hosting solution because it’s the cheapest reliable hosting and requires the least technical knowledge to manage, but depending on your affiliate strategy all that can change rather quickly. For example over the past few years I had accumulated three websites all on shared hosting; however when I decided to become more aggressive in my affiliate strategy by building out several of my domains shared hosting was no longer a reasonable hosting option as it quickly exceeded $800 per year in hosting fees.
When I began to research other hosting options I looked into VPS and dedicated hosting. I quickly ruled out dedicated hosting as I simply didn’t need it. I don’t own any single website that is so resource demanding that I could justify the extra cost of a dedicated box.
I shopped around for a while until I finally decided to try HostGator’s VPS service. I chose HostGator for the combination of their positive VPS hosting reviews and cost. They aren’t the cheapest but not the most expensive, and all the reviews were positive. I also took into consideration the technical support HostGator seems to pride itself on.
I thought good technical support would be essential to my success with this VPS, and I was right. In the earliest days of my VPS ownership I spent several hours with HostGator dealing with several issues with four different support technicians, all but one experience was positive. The negative experience I think was with a rookie technician. Also there were a few frustrating occurrences that were actually traced back to my domain host GoDaddy. But overall, I can’t say enough about HostGators support and I would recommend HostGators VPS just on their superior technical support alone.
So my recommendation to affiliates is if your shared hosting is serving you well stick with it and enjoy the savings, but if you are running multiple websites going to a VPS may be your most effective method of hosting based on cost and server resources.
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