5 Things to Consider When Choosing a Web Host Provider for Your Affiliate Site

Choosing the right web host for your affiliate website is a big decision as it can determine the success or failure of your affiliate marketing business. The right web host can improve your website performance and include features that drive traffic to your site and increases its conversion rate for visitors.

Remember, your success is wholly dependent on the number of visitors to your site in affiliate marketing.

Make the wrong choice, and you’ll end up with unnecessary expenses and a failed venture. Here are five crucial factors you must consider when deciding the right hosting for you, asides from price.

Server Reliability/Uptime

You can’t promote or sell anything if your website is down. Plus, visitors rarely return to a site if they get a server error code the first time they visit. It can also damage your brand reputation if people are headed to your site to redeem a coupon or read a review. To prevent this, you should be looking for Linux or Windows hosted servers with a minimum of 99.99% uptime.

You can use a server monitoring tool to check a website host’s uptime scores. However, most report their uptime scores, and that should suffice to tell whether your potential web host provider is stable or not. Avoid anything below 99%.

Security

Security is another critical factor when choosing a web host provider.

While your website development process plays a significant role in the security of your website, secure web hosting can go a long way in protecting your affiliate site from cyber attacks. A great web host should have effective firewall rules and network monitoring workflows that prevent harmful traffic from making its way to your servers.

Also, ensure the vendor regularly updates their machine with the latest security patches. Plus, there should be a periodical anti-malware and antivirus scanning.

Finally, your web hosting service should also come with an access control panel that enables you to control who has access to the administrative features of your affiliate marketing business.

Speed

Next, you need a provider with an above-average page load speed. Your website visitors want to click through your web pages with ease, without having to wait before the page loads. It’s even worse if they come from a Google search results page; they often expect your site to load at the same speed as Google’s pages.

Most providers don’t share detailed statistics on their page speed, but you can look out for the following:

• Do they use solid-state hard drives for storage?
• Do they provide you with a reasonable amount of RAM?
• Do they offer content delivery networks?
• Do they offer caching tools?

These features all help boost your page processing speed.

Backup and Recovery

Sometimes, despite all the security measures, your website might still get hacked. In such situations, you want to be using a host that provides recovery and backup services for malware, virus, and DDoS attacks.

A great hosting provider should have the backup and recovery service baked into your hosting package. That way, you can easily do it anytime.

On a final note, make sure to back up your affiliate marketing website regularly.

Customer Service

The quality of a web host’s customer support is essential. Ideally, you want to sign up with a web host provider with excellent customer support via email, chat, or telephone. That way, you have multiple channels to reach them if you have any issues and get them resolved speedily.

Spend some time reading reviews about the hosting provider’s customer service on online forums and social media platforms such as Reddit before you commit to a contract.