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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