Five Hosting Tips for Newish Affiliates
Tip 1 – Get Dedicated Servers or a Virtual Private servers. I just spent the last two days migrating and consolidating hosting accounts. Total waste of time, but had to be done. Be smart, not like me.
Tip 2 – Use the Domain Registrar’s DNS service, not your server’s. The main reason is because if you have a dedicated server and all your domains are being served by a single domain name server, which is highly likely, or by different domain name servers that share the same IP addresss, once a competing affiliate develops an interest on one of your campaigns, figuring out the entire portfolio of sites on your server is trivial. If you are using your registrar’ DNS, the same lookup will return thousands of other unrelated sites, essentially cloaking yours even if you have them on the same registrar.
Tip 3 – Don’t skimp on IP addresses – Get one for each domain name. Same reason as for the DNS servers above. You could share some betweena few campaigns… Its not the best of ideas, though.
Tip 4 – Parallel’s Plesk control panel is more user-friendly, but less feature rich. WHM from Cpanel is chock-full of features, but really unfriendly (check out a screenshot of WHM here).
Tip 5 – You NEED a “Managed” server or VPS. Whatever you get make sure it says its “Managed” or get the “Managed” add-on option. This way when it turns out you need a newer version of MySQL to run Prosper, you can just pick up the phone or open a ticket and get it upgraded instead of messing everything up yourself.
Got any other affiliate hosting tips? Share with a comment!
Slave Rat and 
Joseph are discussing. 
Joseph 2:55 am on July 29, 2010 Permalink |
I have a vps where my lps and prosper is setup, do you think i should move over to dedicated or storm on demand?, really appreciate it. I am really worried that the redirects are a bit slow plus lp load times are a bit high
Slave Rat 5:08 pm on July 30, 2010 Permalink |
Joseph, as long as you can control how much CPU you get and how much bandwidth I don’t see a reason to move. I tried DreamHost’s VPS offering and you could not control the CPU (they would only tell you the amount of RAM) and were not terribly helpful when I needed MySQL to support partitioning, so I cancelled that. The amount of CPU is an estimate (1 Gigahertz is just a measure of frequency, not of compute power or I/O power).
I’d stick with brands you’ve seen before. My suggestion of Rackspace is solid, a bit on the expensive side, though. You can also check out vps.net – amazing offering but its not managed from what I remember.
Best suggestion is to test it. Almost all the companies will give you your money back if it doesn’t work out. Another thing you should could into is using Amazon’s CloudFront to store your landing pages, or at least any graphics in them. The graphics on this blog, are all coming from CloudFront. I talked about how I’m using CloudFront on the post titled “How to Accelerate your Site to Warp Factor 9.9 without paying $99 a month” here: http://negbox.com/how-to-accelerate-your-site-to-…
joseph 9:28 pm on August 18, 2010 Permalink |
Thanks man, i currently use a wiredtree vps storing my lp images on amazon s3 . It helps. I tried vps.net, but it isnt managed, and it has a fifficult interface.
Slave Rat 3:20 am on August 19, 2010 Permalink |
Well, hang on to your hat – I’m going to post a little script I had developed to pre-load landing pages from CloudFront while all the redirects happen in the background – The script is already up inside the Affiliate Twins’ Internet University message board. I should have it up today/Friday soon for everyone. It works well.