I’ve been trying to clean up the language on my blog to seem a bit more professional. Taking my skills on to consulting for small businesses that want to expand online requires me to seem a little more squeaky clean. However, when I hear about new affiliate marketers that say they’re on a budget and can’t afford to spend money on “expensive” hosting, leaving them with cheap shared hosting for their tracking and landing pages, I just want to rip my hair out.

“IT’S A TRAP!”

No, really – it is. The idea that you think you will save money by using shared hosting is one of the worst traps you can get yourself into.

Let me tell you a little story. Way back when, when I was a little nooblet of an affiliate marketer just getting off the “I’ll make millions of dollars with Amazon and eBay” train and just hopping on to the “Well, everyone is talking about dating affiliate marketing so I’ll try that” train, I was using shared hosting. I didn’t really have any money to my name except the leftovers of a $20,000 student loan for one year of college. I obviously wanted to minimize costs, so shared hosting seemed the way to go. I wish someone could have heard me think that, then punch me in the face and tell me what an idiot I was.

So I started putting up ads, set a low $25 dollar budget and rather watch stuff like a hawk, I went to bed and hoped I didn’t just spend $25 for nothing. The next day I wake up and look at Facebook to see I spent all $25. Probably one of the most stressful mornings I’ve ever dealth with at that point. I saw about 70-80 clicks or so (clicks were cheap way back when). Okay time to check stats, right? WTF? 15 clicks to the offer and 1 conversion. Alright… I was happy about getting 1 conversion, but where the hell did my traffic run off to?

I checked my Prosper202 install and same thing there – 15 clicks.

It was my crap shared hosting. Shared hosting is notorious for being pitifully bad at handling surges of traffic. I wouldn’t doubt that I sent all 80 of those clicks in a half an hour, probably faster. If not for the traffic I was sending, someone else on this server (probably shared between hundreds of shared clients) was making my traffic get throttled of timed-out. People weren’t even able to load my P202 redirects. I’m don’t know the technicalities of hosting (so maybe one of you more savy guys want to help explain), but shared hosting sucks.

If you are serious about becoming an affiliate marketer and using paid traffic, it is time to upgrade your hosting to something better than HostGater or GoDaddy’s $3 a month shared baby plan. A VPS/dedicated server gives you tons more resources to work with and lowers the chance of you getting throttled and losing all that paid supply (traffic) due to congested shared hosting. I guarantee if you are using shared hosting with affiliate marketing and aren’t profiting yet, that hosting solution is 90% of the problem. A VPS/server will save you money, while on the contrary shared will cost you hundreds more!

I’ve recommended these guys again and again, but if you need hosting, go with Wiredtree. Tons of coupons all over the Internet, great deals, excellent support, etc – Wiredtree just can’t be beat in my book.

I was getting the question “I downloaded your landing pages… now what?” a lot, so, I decided to make this video walkthrough to help you guys do it.

Just some prerequisites here, you obviously need your own hosting and domain name before you can upload anything. With that being said, the video is pretty self-explanatory. I used a landing page found in my forums.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the forums or on this blog post!

This is a post based on a comment from the Ask Away! Round 2 post. If you have a question you’d like to ask, leave a comment in the post and I will answer it with a full blog entry!

I recieved this question:

“Im clueless about the whole landing page server/hosting, and simply everything having to do with supporting sending clicks to your page and keeping it from going down.
I read your review about WiredTree and is this something I just need to dive into and learn on the go or what ?”

I was completely clueless about the whole hosting issues you have to deal with, as well. Luckily, the Internet is a wide source of neverending information. Google Search is your friend (or in some cases your enemy).

If you are going to be sending clicks from paid traffic, a small bit of downtime can do a lot of damage to your ROI. We don’t want that! Shared hosting, while cheap and in massive supply, is cheap for a reason. A lot of the hardware used on shared servers are weak, and they do go down a lot more often then you’d like. It generally loads slower, too. What I’m going to tell you is just don’t send paid traffic to a website on shared hosting. The first day I did, I lost half my ad spend on a downed site thanks to the crap hosting plan.

When you first start out with affiliate marketing and paying for traffic, you probably aren’t dealing with a whole lot of clicks. Your best bet is to get a reliable and lower end VPS. I always recommend WiredTree for their VPS services. Not only are they great servers at a great price, but the service can’t be beat. Even if you are a total technical retard, they can help set up everything from working with databases, helping set up scripts, FTP issues, upgrading, and any other problem you could come up with. They really can’t be beat!

Once you get the hang of things, start rocking some nice profits; you can move up to a dedicated server. There are too many options to consider here, but what you’ll want is speed (especially if you plan on getting in to PPV). Solid state disc drives, 100 MB connections, big processors and lots of RAM will help you out greatly. Of course, its all useless if its not configured properly, so make sure the techs know what they are doing, and ask if they can optimize settings for you. Once again, I gotta give it to WiredTree for being there for me.

There are countless tools you can use to check downtime on your servers. A lot of people recommend HostTracker, which has a free and paid version. The paid version allows you to get SMS updates, which kicks ass, as it lets you know how your sites are doing in case you aren’t in front of a PC. There isn’t much you can do to predict if a site will go down, or a piece of hardware will fail on your server, but talking with your hosts technicians and having an up-time service to back you up should help you find a solution faster in case it does happen.

And if you happen to need any landing pages to host on your server, be sure to check out my affiliate store. It’s got a selection of landing pages and creatives you can start using now, starting at only $5!

Back when I was a noob, I thought of buying the stupidest thing – Shared Hosting. I signed up for this nearly unlimited space and bandwidth hosting plan for about 60 bucks with DreamHost. Little did I know they would become NightmareHost.

Dreamhost support is lackluster and slow. I never got a very good answer when I had a problem. My sites were always going down. This was when I was trying to build out websites based on SEO and haulking shit off of Amazon’s affiliate program. I think to date I’ve made about $13.48 with that. Then I tried sending PPC traffic to a landing page I had put on Dreamhost. 20 minutes later my website was down. I lost over $100 dollars. To date, the only real sites I keep on Dreamhost is this blog (I keep it here because I don’t want you guys scanning my IPs and hacking my tracking on my server) and a few other for fun blogs I run.

I knew if I wanted to get serious, I would have to look around for something better. I read up about Virtual Private Servers (VPS). I decided that was what I needed. I wasn’t pushing even 1000 clicks a day yet, so I didn’t really need anything fancy. A friend told me about Linode. If you know how to setup a VPS on your own, they are great. I had no clue what I was doing and dropped it after a few days. I needed something that was managed for me.

I read some reviews, and not once did I hear one bad thing about Wiredtree. Everybody loved them! I looked them up, saw their prices were decent, and ordered a VPS512 package. It only cost about $50 a month, which at the time was far less than I was making just direct linking with affiliate links. I wasn’t even using tracking at the time, and that is what I really needed this VPS for.

I got set-up in about a day, and was online. I was already pretty stupefied by what I would have to do to set up a new domain on the VPS, but Wiredtree’s support fixed that. On top of sending me PDFs that do step-by-step on how to configure new IPs and domain names, they have a back-end ticket system that lets you ask their support team 24/7 how to fix your site. I must have sent them about 100 tickets by now and each one has been answered in under 10 minutes… no lie! They’ve walked me through so many things, retrieved my password at least 20 times, and unblocked my IP from my own server more times that. And you don’t get a monkey bullshit answer from their team. They send you the right answer in a courteous way, even if you are asking the stupidest, most annoying questions. (Which I tend to do 3 times or so a week).

Eventually, they decided to send me this in the email a couple weeks ago:

Hi Justin,

Congratulations, your VPS host.—.com has been leveled up!

You may have read in your email that WiredTree is “leveling up” all current VPS clients free of charge either in the email we sent you or in your Grove account. If you have not, please have a read through of the complete announcement in Grove. To summarize quickly though, we are “leveling up” each VPS plan by one tier, free of charge!

This is the personalized email we said we would send when your server has been upgraded.

host.—.com has been upgraded from a Virtual Private Server 512 to a Virtual Private Server 768 !
Your guaranteed memory has been increased from 512MB to 768MB!
Your bandwidth allocation has been increased from 800GB to 1000GB!
Even though the new plan you are on costs $69, we have not raised your monthly rate up since you are currently paying less! It looks like you used a coupon which gave you a discount on your current plan rate, and we are passing this onto your new plan for you!

Thank You for being a WiredTree client!

If you have any questions about this, please contact us at contact@wiredtree.com !

Best Regards,
WiredTree Team!

Oh… so now you mean your kick ass support isn’t enough to win me over? Now you have to give all your clients a free upgrade? Uhm… Awesome and thank you Wiredtree!

I was plenty satisfied with all this, but I wanted more power! I wanted something to call my own. I decided to get a giant dedicated managed Wiredtree server for no other reason than having a ridiculously large server that I could send thousands, maybe even millions of clicks to a day! I went ahead with my order, set up my new tracking on there, and let me tell you I have never seen anything fly faster. Here are the specs I’m running:

1 ? X7DCL-i
1 ? IPMI Card – Supermicro
4 ? 4GB PC2-5300 ECC REGISTERED
1 ? X25-M 80GB SSD
1 ? Hard Disk – 250 GB SATAII 7200RPM 16MB Cache RE
2 ? Intel Xeon E5420

It’s big and its fast. I’m honestly not even sure what it can do because I know I’m no where close to pushing half the resources on this puppy. Originally, something like this would cost I think around $700 – $800 a month, but I used a coupon to get it down to somewhere in the $500s a month. I couldn’t find a competitor that could give me the same specs at a lower price, or a price anything near what Wiredtree was able to give me.

And speaking of which, here is a list of coupons you can use to save money on your VPS, dedicated or hybrid server from Wiredtree:

Wiredtree Coupons:

Copy the coupon you like and use it on the customization page for your server while ordering.

10PERCENTOFF
Get 10% off the total monthly cost of a managed VPS for the lifetime of its use. Use the coupon 10PERCENTOFF here.

10OFFDEDICATED
Get 10% off the total monthly cost of a managed dedicated server fora limited time. Use the coupon 10OFFDEDICATED here.

50PERCENTMORE
Get 50% more RAM for free on VPS384 and VPS512 managed VPS plans. Use the coupon 50PERCENTMORE here.

HYBRID512RAM
Get 512MB of RAM free on any managed Hybrid server at Wiredtree. Use the coupon HYBRID512RAM here.

XEON10PERCENT+DOUBLETHERAM (This is the coupon I used to save about $300 on my monthly order)
Get 10% off the total monthly cost of a managed dedicated dual quad-core Xeon server + double the RAM ordered for free for the lifetime of its use. Use the coupon XEON10PERCENT+DOUBLETHERAM here.

QUAD10PERCENT+DOUBLETHERAM (Similar to the above coupon, but only 1 quad0core versus 2. That is still a lot of power!)
Get 10% off the total monthly cost of a managed dedicated quad-core server + double the RAM ordered for free for the lifetime of its use. Use the coupon XEON10PERCENT+DOUBLETHERAM here.

COREI7SSD
Special Offer: Core i7 920, 12GB RAM, 80GB Intel SSD + 4000GB Transfer – Save over $100/month. Use the coupon COREI7SSD here.

HALFOFF1 (Good for those not sure if they want to make the switch)
Get 50% off the 1st months cost of a managed VPS. Use the coupon HALFOFF1 here.

If you are waiting for a special coupon to pop up, I will list the latest ones on another blog I am building dedicated to Wiredtree called Wiredtree Reviews. You can see all the coupons I’ve listed here.

Their Hardware Replacement SLA is pretty tight. Basically, if they can’t repair or replace a part on your server that goes sour, they’ll reimburse you for the downtime. But for them to replace something, something needs to go wrong. I have yet to see anything happen with my servers. I’ve had 100% up-time and no problems other than my technical stupidity.

They’re backend is all built into “Grove”. Here you can monitor your servers data, add new domains, submit tickets, upgrade your server, and more. It all works very well with Wiredtree’s design, which also suggests it is a kick ass host.

All in all, Wiredtree is very solid. So solid that they’re ranked upon the top in several hosting magazines, blogs, and rankings websites. If you don’t know how to run a server or a VPS, I highly suggest using the managed ones available at Wiredtree. Plans start cheap (around 50 bucks) and should be able to be enough to help you get your affiliate commissions rolling in. For those that need something more advanced that what is provided, try contacting them before hand. They are very willing to work with you on different server packages and giving you more than what is listed.

Check out Wiredtree today and see if they are the right host for you, like they are for me, here.

(In this post, I was whoring affiliate links left and right. Not just because if you sign up, I get a little referral bonus, but because I honestly believe Wiredtree is the most amazing web host provider any affiliate marketer could imagine being with, especially one with none to little background knowledge in hosting and your options. I have already sent Wiredtree a few clients through personal chatting before they even had an affiliate program, so if I can make a little money getting you guys to sign up with them, why not? I truly do believe they are the best and so do many others in the industry. If you don’t feel like giving me a referral bonus, just copy the following URL to your navigation bar: http://wiredtree.com. If you do want to help support my hosting bills with Wiredtree, go ahead and use this link here.)

This blog is hosted on my first webhost I ever purchased. I was frail, unknowing and ignorant when it came to hosting options, and at the time (around December) I was running on just a few dollars a month. I saw the space Dreamhost offered, and the growing amount of space they give every month. Oooo Shiny, right?

Wrong. At first I had no problems with them. I hosted my first few blogs there, had a few SEO’d sites that got awesome traffic on long tail keywords and direct product matches after just a couple weeks of work, and I registered all my domains with Dreamhost. Hell, this blog is hosted there even now.

Things stayed smoother for a couple months. Then, they were like “FUCK YOU to anyone that signed up with us on a debit card.” They ended charging my debit card with no money on it for 2 years of service. No problem though, as they immediately charged back the money. However, where were my overdraft fees they should have paid for, too? They did nothing and responded to no emails I sent them.

After that, things just sucked. My loading times on trying to get onto the backend of WP are miserable. Sometimes, it even times out. Then there are the times that the server status just cuts out for minutes, even hours and days at a time.

This was especially great when I went to cloak an ad using a redirect for Facebook. As soon as the ad got up and running, and I got to changing the redirection to what I really wanted, the hosting just died. I lost about 50 dollars in clicks until I noticed it. Maybe I’m just on a crap server, and should ask to be moved, but something just says don’t even bother with it.

I’ve read the reviews now, and everyone says Dreamhost is great if you need a shit load of cheap space and don’t actually use it for anything serious. I’d say its great for backing up files, and the hosting space and bandwidth keeps growing on a weekly basis. I’ll still keep my account for those reasons, and those reasons only, but never again will I host on it. It just isn’t reliable.

So, wanting to move away from shared hosting, I bought myself an unmanaged VPS server at Linode. I knew nothing about VPS, seting them up, or Linux, but hydrophonic from the Nicky Cakes Chat hooked me up with everything I needed. The new site I’ll be running some massive PPC campaigns on will be up soon, and I’ll hopefully be doubling my revenue by next month with this thing.

These guys have excellent reviews, and everyone I’ve talked to said they’ve had nearly 100% uptime and most dowtime is actually caused by user mistakes, not the actual servers. I’ll give a better review once I test it out, but I’m hoping it isn’t comparable to Dreamhost as it should be well better.