There is nothing that drives visitors away from your affiliate site than a slow or non-loading website. While shared or 
reseller hosting is great for beginners, any affiliate marketer worth his or her weight in gold that’s banking some money every month should definitely move up to the next best thing – a Virtual Private Server or VPS. Essentially a VPS provides you with a dedicated portion of a fully-fledged server using something called vitalisation. This gives you dedicated RAM, whilst the CPU and hard disk is shared between the other VPS users. While this sounds like a bad thing, most VPS servers are shared amongst a very small number of users, which is limited by the physical memory on the server. This means that VPS’ are infinitely faster than shared or reseller hosting, which may be shared among thousands (yes, thousands!) of other users or websites. Clearly a VPS is a better solution.
VPS’ come in a number of flavours, namely managed or unmanaged. Managed servers generally offer a control panel, with the most popular being cPanel. This means that setting up a Wordpress blog or other piece of software and managing domains is relatively straightforward. The operating system is kept up to date by the hosting providers with no intervention required by you, the user. The other side of the coin is unmanaged, which are usually supplied with no control panel and the updating of the operating system is performed by you, the user. Obviously the managed solution might suit some people, but the big advantage of an unmanaged VPS is the “root” access, which allows you command-line access to your VPS, giving you huge flexibility over your websites. Although the absence of a control panel might be daunting, using virtual hosts to setup your sites is relatively easy. This leads to the two largest advantages to an unmanaged VPS – speed and cost. The addition of a control panel adds additional memory usage to a managed solution, which in turn gives you less memory for your other processes. Thus managed servers require greater amounts of memory, which costs more. A good quality umanaged VPS can be had for around $20 per month (Linode offer a 360mb VPS for $19.95) while an managed VPS of equivalent speed (with around 512mb of RAM) could cost upwards of $40. Whilst there is a far steeper learning curve associated with an unmanaged VPS, the advantages in the longer term great, with the increased flexbility and better responsiveness providing you the edg
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Linode has been in the VPS game for several years and has built up a solid reputation by many users. Linode has phenomenal control panel (see pic). Support is excellent and available via several mechanisms, including the forums, IRC and of course the ticket system.
Setting up a new Linode is exceptionally easy and there are several Linux distributions available. I personally use Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) 8.04 as this is guaranteed to have updates for the next few years (2013 I believe). Once you installed the distribution of your choice, which literally takes one minute, you’ll get root access. I’d suggest you play with the different settings for a month (or more if you’re new to Linux) before “productionising” your server.
Linode also offers a DNS management system, which is excellent and I use their DNS services exclusively. Stability is awesome and queries are answered quickly (I’ve only ever had one and it was related to their DNS services). The community is also excellent and there are several guides available to setup and secure your distribution of choice.
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