5 Best Hosting Solutions for Affiliate Marketers

HostGator

HostGator has over 400,000 customers and hosts more than 8 million domains. These statistics are nothing short of an indicator of how good HostGator is with their customers and the quality of their services. There may not be many high profile sites that are resource intensive that use HostGator but for smaller websites HostGator is a perfect solution for their hosting needs. HostGator is one of the most famous well-known hosting companies and you have probably already heard of it. It is a home for many affiliate marketers who have relied on the service for years to keep their websites up and running so they could sell products.

Additionally, HostGator has a referral system that helps website owners and bloggers make extra money. You can easily earn money by referring your readers to HostGator to sign up for a hosting plan. The commission you earn depends on the amount of people you refer. For referring 1 – 5 people per month you can earn $50 for each signup, refer 6 – 20 people and you can earn anywhere from $75 per signup to $100 and if you refer more than 21 people every month then you will earn $125 per signup.

Bluehost

Bluehost is always mentioned alongside the top hosting companies. Bluehost offers tons of storage space, unlimited bandwidth, and infinite subdomains and as many email accounts as you will ever need. Although these features are not new Bluehost does have a reputation of providing good reliability and a fixed pricing plan that allows you to plan out your hosting needs compared to hosting companies with monthly payments that could change for the better or worse. Stability and excellent customer support is the reason Bluehost was able to climb the ranks as one of the best hosting companies. They have an in-depth knowledge base, step by step guides for common tasks for new customers, and more than 60 video tutorials.

It has a great referral system that allows publishers to make money through affiliate advertising. Bluehost pays out $65 for each referral, so if someone signs up for one of their hosting plans through your affiliate link then you will receive a $65 commission. Although the base referral pricing is higher than HostGator’s they are different in the way that Bluehost doesn’t provide an incentive such as more money per referral depending on how many people sign up through your affiliate link. So ultimately Bluehost pays less per referral but if you’re not confident that you’re going to be hitting a high amount of referrals per month you may want to try out Bluehost’s affiliate program.

A Small Orange

A Small Orange is a hosting service that has been up and running since 2003. It offers a variety of hosting plans from Tiny, Small and Medium to Large and Super. This hosting service delivers consistent uptime and guarantees an uptime of 99.95% for all sites in addition to giving you the tools necessary to track those statistics. Their Linux servers run Apache, PHP and MySQL and the site itself features an active community forum, a wiki community and live chat support. They also give you 2 months of free service with the purchase of any one of their 12 month hosting plans. A Small Orange provides unlimited email accounts and MySQL databases, great customer service, very reliable server uptime and unlimited domains with tons of bandwidth and disk space.

Their affiliate system works similar to Bluehost, as in they have a fixed payment amount per referral at $50 each once a visitor from your affiliate link purchases a hosting account. You can choose to get paid via PayPal or by Check and you must meet their minimum earnings requirement of at least $300 before your affiliate commissions are paid out. However, this can be changed in the profile settings and if you desire you can lower it down to $100 which is the absolute bare minimum. Although payments are paid once a month, it’s important to note that there is a 90 day delay on each commission before they are approved and paid out so you could be waiting a while before your first payment.

DreamHost

This hosting company markets itself primarily as a hosting solution for developers and entrepreneurs. DreamHost offers VPS, shared and dedicated hosting and more recently it announced a new service called DreamPress which was designed specifically for WordPress. Its plans range from as little as $8.95 per month for shared hosting with unlimited disk storage, bandwidth, domains and email accounts to VPS plans that cost as much as $200 per month that come with 4gb of ram, unlimited TB of space with 50GB backups of disk storage. DreamHost features one-click installation for popular software such as Joomla and WordPress.

DreamHost may have the best affiliate referral program. They offer $97 for every direct referral but unlike the other affiliate programs you can also earn commission from sub-referrals. This means that if you refer users who in turn refer additional users you will earn $5 for each person they refer.

iPage

This hosting service offers a variety of different suites in addition to their hosting including malware and spam scans, $100 Google Adwords credit, $50 Yahoo and Bing credit, $50 Facebook credit, an online store, template based web builder and much more. iPage even offers free domain registration and a free security suite. Also if you care about the environment and like to support green companies then you should know that iPage vouches that their servers are powered by 100% wind energy.

iPage has the highest base pay of the aforementioned, paying out $105 for each referral when a customer signs up for their hosting service. If they sign up for WordPress essential hosting then you can earn $120 but if they sign up for a dedicated hosting package then you’re looking at $150 per referral. iPage provides you with a comparison spreadsheet to compare its services to other hosting companies so you can better promote their products and help your readers make more informed decisions.