Guaranteed Uptimes
You can’t sell or promote if your affiliate marketing site is down. Beyond that, people rarely return to a site they find down when looking to make a sale or read your reviews or grab your coupons. This seriously impacts your brand, so you need to look for a hosting company with a solid reputation for having quality uptime. It does not matter if the company offers a free month or reimbursed monthly payment, down is down.
As far as the numbers go you should be looking at a minimum of 99.99% uptime. The table below shows how much time your site could potentially down with the various percentage offers made.
Performance Numbers
Page load speed is another critical element in selecting a host for your affiliate marketing business. Most website visitors will click away – especially if they come through a search result – if your website takes more than a couple of seconds to load.
While it is hard to find detailed stats for shared hosting options, you should be looking at things like solid-state hard drives for storage and a decent amount of RAM for quicker page request processing.
You can also check for hosting that offers content delivery networks (CDN) and caching tools. These features can help speed delivery.
Backup and Recovery
Hacking and malware are two major issues for any affiliate website owner. Good hosts will provide backups and security to fight DDoS, viruses and malware attacks.
You should make backing up your website a very regular practice. Good hosting will have backup and recovery built in where you can set how often you get your website copied.
Support Quality
Unless you have your own in-house webmaster or tech department, the hosting you buy should include a solid support team. Managed hosting is one way of including that, but even self-serve shared hosting can be used if the company has a quality support system.
You may be able to use an email and ticketing system with a good FAQ and Resource platform. But chat and phone support are always worth looking for.