What Makes A Good Web Host?

When shopping for a new web host, what do you look for?

The best price?

The best reviews?

The most features?

Back in 2011, I operated an affiliate marketing blog called SuperAffiliateTwins.

At that time, my identical twin brother and I were working with another twin running high-volume media buys together as affiliates.

We grew a pretty large audience of experienced and beginner affiliate marketers. One day, I decided to conduct a survey to see what they looked for in a web host.

Back then, the industry was primarily dominated by HostGator, prior to the EIG takeover.

Here’s what we concluded:

1. What is the main ‘selling point’ to choosing a web host?

Price 11.1%
Reputation 13.3%
Reliability 60.0%
Customer Service 15.6%
Unlimited Features 0.0%
Control Panel 0.0%

2. Which option would you rather have?

More Bandwidth 60%
More Disk Space 4.4%
More Sub Domains 0.0%
More Add-on Domains 4.4%
Easy Control Panel 31.1%

3. Are you likely to purchase a domain name with your web hosting company?

Yes 24.4%11
No 75.6%34

4. Which control panel do you prefer?

cPanel 95.6%
Plesk 4.4%

5. Which is more important to you?

Best Price 29.5%
Best Quality 70.5%

6. Given your business as an affiliate couldn’t run without web hosting, what are the main things you’re looking for? Any additional comments you’d like your web host to know?

Speed of the web host is very important to me. It affects pop-up traffic, redirects, etc. Fast performance is a must!
up time server does not crash good support reliability quality fair price As the saying goes an unhappy customer will say plenty and if your lucky a good customer will recommend you.
I just did some shopping around for a web host 2 weeks ago, looking to upgrade my shared hosting to a vps. There were so many choices as far as hosting companies i had to be pretty rash and look for any reason to cut the list down. I had a few things in mind such as price (my range was $0 – $50) and I wanted to use cpanel because that’s what i was used to on the shared server. Once i had my list narrowed down I searched google for user reviews on the companies, and then looked at the server specs to ultimately make my decision. I ended up going with knownhost. they had glowing reviews, and offered a lot for the money in my opinion.
I’m using Storm on Demand and I think that is a good business model for Affiliate to start using. (VPS, scalable bandwidth depending on needs and unlimited sub account for all your domains)…you can even use this or dedicated servers to offer your own brandable hosting service…Humm =) ..Good Blog guys!
Managed hosting is a life saver
good price, adequate memory, great support.
speed
Ive had the ‘cheap’ dedicated hosts before and had significant downtime and issues. I now use ‘Single Hop’ and although they aren’t the cheapest they had a pretty good reputation and had an awesome upsell “lifetime free wildcard SSL”.
Free multiple domain hosting and to not get shut down for any reason such as space used, billing issues or any technical what so ever.
ease of use for newbies or non-technical people.
i prefer a site like dreamhost over hostgator
memory – can I run many memory-intensive applications, like even a few wordpress blogs w/o the server crapping out. Also, support is a close 2nd in terms of priority. If things go south, it’s costing me big money so look for fast response and good access to solve problems quickly.
100% uptime. If there is a downtime, which happened recently with Site5, credit people with a few month’s of their hosting fee. Site5 credited me with 5 months of my hosting. Now, I love them for it.
24 hours customer service.
Free addon domains, good customer service, high reliability, unlimited bandwidth. I have always found hostgator to be excellent.
combination of price, quality and reliability
Scalability, scalability, scalability. I want to know that when something explodes in terms of traffic, I will be able to dial up the server resources as high as I need them to manage the traffic – Without having to pay an arm and a leg to have a massive server just sitting there when nothing is happening.
Ability to handle lots of traffic. Stress testing feature would be nice.
Easy DNS administration, unlimited domains/subdomains, full control of the server. I don’t use a control panel — I administer my own VPN servers. I haven’t used Plesk, but I chose it because I’ve used cPanel.
Server monitor included. cPanel templates and server settings tweeks done for me at setup. Easy to use CDN and DNS management system included.
Price don’t matter, if the service is good its worth paying for, People who shop for pricing are the ones who will get screwed. Managed services are also awesome even if you can manage your own server, why do that when you can have someone else do it for you?
I would love to have a host running on a cloud. Normal webhosting accounts, just ran on a cloud, to ensure uptime and performance…

Affiliates Choose Reliability Over Price

As you can see from the above survey, the affiliate marketers we asked want performance and reliability over everything else. If I was to include their annual income on the survey, I would say the median would be somewhere around $100,000 a year (and this was 6 years ago).

I think anyone who has ever dealt with a “bad” web host would agree, they’d rather pay a bit more and have things run smoothly than have a website plagued with downtime and slow page load time.

Affiliate marketing can be somewhat hard to shop for web hosting because a campaign can literately blow up over night and require many more resources. That’s why I like the cloud! Resources can scale on demand.

Web Hosting On A Budget

I think one of the biggest challenges for affiliates or Entrepreneurs just getting started is their budget is limited. I’ve ran many startups; I understand!

At NameHero we’ve tried to leverage our Reseller Hosting packages for those that aren’t quite ready for the expense of a VPS.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to be releasing a product called “Affiliate Web Hosting” that is a cross between our Reseller and VPS plans.

This will provide those that are just getting started a high-performance solution without all of the cost without sacrificing reliability.

When you’re looking for a web host, what is most important to you?

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.