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!