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.
Hey Amit,
I know you’re a very successful marketer and all, but I think you’re inflating numbers here. I have a very hard time believing you have one affiliate site pulling in over $9,000,000 in revenues.
Please prove me wrong. I’d love to see the evidence.
Hi Jason,
I’m not inflating anything, and don’t feel the need to share anymore information about my affiliate revenues then I’ve already mentioned in the above post, since this post was about web hosting & NOT about my companies affiliate revenues.
Hi Amit,
I agree with your post except I do not think that this is required until the income you make is substantial to warrent it.
Once you business reaches a certain financial goal then it makes sense to protect your invest and income.
Thanks
Greg
http://www.marketingsoftwaretools.com
Hi Greg,
I agree, it’s not worth paying $400 a month for web hosting unless you have substantial revenues to protect.
Wowser! 20-30K a day? And that’s just one of your sites?
Awesome!
Hi Linda,
Yes, the revenue is from one of my affiliate sites. There’s a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing
Hi Amit, I am just starting out in Affiliate Marketing to help support my family. i’m an at home dad with some apartment rentals. We need another income stream and i’m hoping this will do it.
Do you have any examples of your system for making so much money? Perhaps sharing a landing page or your philosophy/methods of operation?
I am reading all your blog posts to pick up some advice.
Thanks in advance and congrats on your success.
I found my way to RackSpace the hard way, too. I was using a bare bones host and got hacked.
The long and short is that the host not only took a long time to respond to my ticket, but they were maintaining a backup of my forum and other sites for only 24 hours.
Yes, I should have been backing up locally, but I figured (regrettably didn’t investigate before it happened) the back-up would go back for days and I’d just lose a day or two.
I lost years of content.
And the downtime I’ve experienced at other hosts – a nightmare.
Yes, RackSpace is expensive. But how much is your time and content worth?
I’m not in Amit’s league by any stretch, but still find RackSpace to be worth it for the reliability and service.
Hi Shawn,
My story is very similar, someone hacked into my webhosting and deleted ALL my affiliate sites last years! I was freaking out.
That’s when I switched to rackspace. It’s piece of mind more than anything else.
I don’t understand what Rackspace did that was so above and beyond in this situation. Why would you have to submit a ticket to have your DNS stuff changed? I can do all of that instantly through my hosting company’s web interface. This is really basic stuff.