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 edge.

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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1. Hosting your affiliate site
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Hosting options

You’ve found your niche, been accepted into an affiliate program such as EPN and now you’re starting to build your first site. The first thing you’ll need is a domain name, the part of your brand that identifies you. There are hundreds of places where you can register you domain name, I personally use name.com or namecheap.com, depending on who is the cheapest at the time. Both are relatively easy to use and offer similar uptime and options, so the choice really comes down to price.

Hosting is the next hurdle you must cross. There are essentially four options to choose from, each falling into its own price and features bracket. Shared hosting allows you to host multiple sites under a single domain, however as the name suggests you’re sharing the resources of the physical server itself, so this type of hosting can be slow. In addition, managing multiple sites using sub-domins is quite tedious and not recommended. It’s a great start if you are just testing the waters and want to start a single site – you may find yourself upgrading when adding a new site, so depending on your budget you may want to start with reseller hosting.

Reseller hosting is also a shared solution, meaning you share the server resources with other people. However, it offers a big advantage over shared hosting in that each site you create can be managed as if it were a seperate site, unlike shared hosting where you’ll need to use sub-domains. The biggest drawback of reseller hosting to usually the speed as hosting providers need to share the server among many clients in order for it to be cost effective.

Virtual-Private-Servers (VPS), the next step up in hosting offers dedicated RAM and storage for your sites. Generally costing two to three times as much as reseller hosting, with similar features, the greatest advantage of a VPS is the speed – because they offer dedicated resources, your sites will generally be faster than a reseller hosting solution.

The final option is a dedicated server – this option gives you your very own physical server, similar to a VPS. This option would only be used by affiliate marketers with very steep requirements on the hosting front.

Suggestions? Ideas? Feedback? Please leave a comment!

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2. Speed up the Wordpress dashboard with Google Gears
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