I have a friend who’s a huge super affiliate, makes 100k+/month in profit, a CJ Top Performer. He has dozens of sites, and put all of his sites on shared servers. He proud to say that he only spends $20 a month (or something like that) a month on web hosting.
We’ll I use Rackspace and pay $400-$500/month for each dedicated server I had setup (I have multiple servers) . I also have 24/7 phone support, a dedicated account manager, the works. Rackspace also has build in redundancy, so you’re guaranteed 100% uptime.
Now my CJ super affiliate friend thinks I’m crazy for spending this much for web hosting. And for a while I thought I was going a little overboard. That was until today.
You see, I recently signed up for a cutting edge tracking/split testing service that actually split tests the response rate and conversion of your site without changing the site at all. I spend $2000 to sign up for this wiz bang space age split test service.
We had to ask rackspace to change the DNS, the CNAME, and A RECORD so that everything went through the split test provider’s server for the program to work. Well to make a long story short, when we switched everything over, over the course of a day we noticed that our site conversions had gone for 3% to less than 1%. It turns out the split test provider’s server was stalling and failing intermittently, we lost an estimated $10,000 in profits.
When we finally realized what had happened we immediately called rackspace to switch the DNS setting back to the original settings, they responded immediately. With any other cheap web hosting company it would have taken 24 or more before we got a response to a ticket.
Thanks to rackspace we were about to get back on track quickly and minimized the damage, another 24 hours would have cost us another $10k in profit.
Do you think it’s worth paying $400-$500/month to save $10k?? Not to mention all the additional sales we get since we have ZERO down time-which easily cover the hosting costs-since this one site that was effected generates $20k-$30k in revenues a DAY.
Hi Amit,
I fully agree with you here about investing rather more money into hosting than less. I’m hosting my sites at one of the premium hosting companys in Germany and they provide me with perfect support. Hardware failures are being replaced 24/7 within 30 minutes usually, very fast DNS Service (I got an interface for that, too) and perfect flexibility. I can add new servers, new networks, etc. in minutes!
Just one question.. do you actually host a couple of sites on the same dedicated server by sharing the same ip or do you have the ability to add more ips?
Cheers,
Andreas