Choose Your Web Hosting Company WISELY

GOOD web hosting plays a crucial role in the success of your online business. If your site is not hosted properly or if the hosting company on which your website sits upon is experiencing problems, your site will be offline – meaning people can’t access it.

Site down = No visitors = No leads = No customers = No money

That said, you should MUST choose a REPUTABLE hosting company when it comes to hosting your site.

Surely you don’t want your hard work to go down the drain right? You’ve worked so hard and spent so much effort and time making your site rank number 1 in the search engines. You’ve spent ages engaging in forum marketing and social media activities to get your site out there to be seen and heard by others.

Now that your site is about to take off, your hosting company quits the hosting business and they simply say “sorry” and ask you to take your hosting elsewhere.

So you migrate your hosting from this company to another. It could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days before the migration is totally complete. Until then, your site is in offline mode.

During this time you’d no doubt have lost visitors, leads, and customers.

My Web Hosting Experience

I’m pretty lucky not to have experienced these sorts of problems because I chose a VERY REPUTABLE hosting company right from the start of my online business career. The reputable hosting company I’m referring to is Hostgator (aff link), which I’m sure some of you have heard about it before.

Some of you might even already have your sites hosted there already, which is really a good thing because you’re in VERY GOOD hands.

I first signed up for Hostgator in January 2007 and I can count on my fingers how many times they had gone down (meaning my sites went offline). And each time they went offline, it only took a couple of minutes before they were back up online again.

Support is also good and responsive. If you have any problem, contact them and they respond fast.

Shared Hosting

When you’re just getting started, I recommend that you go for Shared Hosting rather than VPS hosting or dedicated hosting because you probably have a limited budget, and shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting available.

If you don’t know what these terms are yet, here are their definitions in layman’s terms:

Shared hosting: many websites (owned by you and other people) reside on ONE shared server. This is the most economical type of hosting as everyone in the server share the cost of server maintenance.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting: This is more powerful and more expensive than shared hosting. You are still sharing the server with others, BUT you have your own dedicated piece of the CPU, RAM, and disk space.

Dedicated hosting: This is the most expensive and most flexible of all since you own the entire server for yourself. You don’t share it with anybody else.

Unlimited Domains

I also recommend that you sign up for a hosting plan that allows for unlimited domains. Unlimited domains simply means that you can put many different domains into the same shared hosting account so that you only have to pay for 1 hosting account.

For example, let’s say you signed up for a shared hosting account that costs $9.95/month. You have 10 different domains. You can put all these 10 domains into the same hosting account instead of having to sign up for 10 separate accounts, which would cost you ten times more money.

This blog is hosted with Hostgator (aff link) with a shared hosting account with my other sites and with other people’s site as well. There will come a time when I need to upgrade it by moving this blog to a VPS or dedicated server, but for now hostgator is still doing a fantastic job. So I have no worries.

I actually have a VPS account in another hosting company which I can move this blog over to, but I’m simply too lazy to do it, at the least for now.

What I Don’t Like About Hostgator

When you go to their website and go to the “Web Hosting” section, it says that the “Baby Plan” is starting at $7.95/month. Well that is true if you’re planning to pay in advance for 3 years of hosting. So you’d have to shell out $286.20 at once.

The true price is $9.95/month if you’re looking to pay on a monthly basis; and I recommend you pay monthly instead of all at once because you could spend the difference of $276.25 elsewhere on your other business expenses.

But if you think about it, Hostgator has every right to set that kind of pricing system since bulk orders should get a discount.

How To Get $0.01 Hosting AND Receive $10 Cash From Me

It’s all explained here (aff link). It has to do with gator hosting coupon.

Lifetime Customer Value

Do you know that I get $50 commission when I successfully refer each person who signs up AND PAYS for a hosting account?

Yes, even though Hostgator only receives $9.95 in revenue, they pay me $50.

How is that possible? They are losing money by having an affiliate program?

The answer lies in Lifetime Customer Value (LCV). LCV is how much each customer is worth (in dollars) to a business OVER TIME. For a more detailed explanation of what LCV is, you can see it here.

Let’s run some numbers to get a better understanding of LCV.

I mentioned that I’ve been a customer of Hostgator since January 2007. At the time of this writing, I’ve been their customer for 39 months.

39 months @ $9.95/month = $388.05

This means that Hostgator is paying the affiliate who referred me to sign up $50, while receiving $388.05 from me.

Of course, this is just one example. There are people who only signed up for a month and then cancel, and there are also people who have signed up for 5 years or more.

The point is that Hostgator (aff link) has already done their homework and determined that paying $50 commission for every new customer acquired is STILL making them money.

Let me repeat this again: Choosing a GOOD web hosting is crucial for the success of your online business. Be sure to choose a REPUTABLE hosting company that has been in the business for some time (at least 5 years).