The 6 Best Web Hosting Providers for Affiliate Marketers (2024)

There is no such thing as the best web hosting for affiliate marketing. Whatever is best for your affiliate site really depends on how big your site is and how hands-off you want your hosting experience to be.

The internet is filled with hosting recommendations. Most are horrible. And not only because they recommend bottom-of-the-barrel providers like Bluehost. It’s also because they waste your time highlighting stuff like getting free SSL-certificates while 99% of hosting providers have been offering that for at least the past half decade.

With this overview I’m taking a different approach:

  • I’m only recommending hosting providers I’d use myself.
  • I’ll be highlighting the REAL pros and cons of each provider.
  • I’ve split this article in different use cases: beginners with small sites, experienced affiliate marketers looking for a fully managed solution, and experienced affiliate marketers who are more DIY.  

After having tested and researched 30+ hosting providers, I can confidently say that the ones below are best suited for affiliate marketers.

Best for beginners and/or smaller affiliate sites

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and building websites, it is important to pick a hosting provider which is easy to use, reliable and affordable. Support must be top notch and should ideally be available around the clock with minimal waiting times. These are my top picks.

SiteGround

SiteGround homepage

SiteGround was the darling of the hosting world for many years. But after a couple of price hikes, them ditching cPanel for their bespoke Site Tools, and allegedly slower loading times, they’ve fallen from grace a bit.

But despite their squeaky clean rep taking a hit, I’ve used them for years with barely any problems. And so I wouldn’t hesitate recommending them if you’re brand-new to affiliate marketing – granted you have the budget for it.  

The good

  • Extremely beginner friendly. SiteGround’s hosting dashboard is pure bliss. Unlike many off-the-shelf dashboards which seem to have been cobbled together by engineers (and not UX experts), SiteGround’s own Site Tools is hyper intuitive – even if you’re completely new to hosting.   
  • They’re fast. Sure, as a Google Cloud reseller they’re not hooked up with Google’s latest server tech (unlike premium hosts like Kinsta and WPEngine). But with SiteGround I always had TTFB scores which were consistently below 100ms (anything below 200ms is great) and passed Core Web Vitals with ease year-over-year.
  • They’re reliable. 0 downtime in 3 years in my experience.
  • Great 24/7 support. Some people say SiteGround’s support has been sliding off in recent years but I disagree. What happened is that they hid away they customer support more and more away in their dashboard. But once you find it, it’s still the same ol’ “talk to a customer service rep in 2 minutes, have your problem solved in 5 minutes” kind of deal.
  • Super solid WordPress features and extras. Such as their SG Optimizer plugin (not as advanced as competing products, but it’s free and much easier to use) and 1-click staging (where you can test a new version of your website).

The bad

  • It’s pricey. All this convenience comes at a cost. SiteGround is on the pricy side and their renewal rates are, frankly, overwhelming.
  • Limited resources. Their inodes (files you can put on your hosting plan) and disk space are a bit limited in comparison to the competition. Granted, in 3 years with SiteGround I never ran into any issues, but if your plan is to launch and manage a great amount of affiliate sites, this can become a problem.

When you should pick SiteGround

Go with SiteGround if you’re all about a great and frictionless user experience. While their hardware is not best-in-class, it’s super reliable and more than fast enough for most affiliate sites (they run on Google’s servers after all). Be prepared though to pay a premium.   

NameHero

NameHero homepage

While you probably have heard of SiteGround before, odds are that NameHero doesn’t ring a bell. Here’s what they’re all about: they have super-fast LiteSpeed hosting at low prices.

Though they offer all kinds of hosting (shared, VPS and enterprise), as affiliate marketer you only want to consider their shared hosting (which on their site they call Web Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting and WordPress hosting – all of these are exactly the same though).

The good

  • Generous specifications. Unlimited NVMe storage, more CPU cores/RAM than many competing hosting providers.
  • Support that has got you covered in every way. I’m talking phone, tickets and live chat here with waiting times which don’t take longer than a minute.
  • They use cPanel. Granted, it doesn’t look as sleek or feel as intuitive as SiteGround’s Site Tools. But it lets you tinker with your hosting settings in many more ways than SiteGround does.
  • Free object caching through Redis. Redis is basically a faster version of Memcached. Object-based caching refers to the storage of database results, so that the system doesn’t have to process the same queries repeatedly. This is great for WordPress which is database-heavy.

The bad

  • Limited server locations. They only got servers in the US and Europe and only their US servers have the fast NVMe kind of storage. This makes them only a good hosting candidate if you’re US-based.
  • Optimizing LiteSpeed hosting is more cumbersome. As someone who runs all his on sites on LiteSpeed hosting, I can tell you it’s not as straightforward as some of the alternatives. Some of the recommended speed settings can break parts of your site (in my case my mobile menu). And when you’re using their CDN (QUIC.cloud), you better be prepared for a day of tinkering to get things fast and stable.  

When you should pick NameHero

Pick NameHero when you’re feeling a bit adventurous and are willing to tinker around a bit to get your site as fast as possible. LiteSpeed is great but it’s also a bit rougher around the edges than NGINX (which is what SiteGround uses). Personally, I think it’s worth the extra effort, but don’t go for it if you’re looking for something which is as simple as possible. Another NameHero benefit is that it’s much cheaper than competing hosting and has better specs.   

Best for experienced affiliate marketers (Fully managed)

For experienced affiliate marketers, the costs of a hosting plan often become less of a consideration. What might matter more is having a hosting provider which is effortlessly fast (around the world), 100% reliable, can scale with as you grow and causes zero problems. You’ll want to house your site at a provider which got you covered for years to come.

The key for you is likely to think as little as possible about your hosting and only focus on growing your website(s).

If this is the case, then a fully managed WordPress provider is the way to go.

The most well-known names when it comes to this kind of hosting are WPEngine and Kinsta. While both are decent choices, they offer too little for too much money.

For instance, Kinsta cheapest plan (at $30 per month) only has 2 PHP workers which means you can’t even run a WooCommerce shop on it. That’s outrageous.

Luckily, in 2020 an innovative, new managed WordPress host saw the light of day. This is the only fully managed WordPress hosting provider I wholeheartedly recommend.

Rocket.net

Rocket.net homepage

Rocket.net has only been around since 2020. It soon got hyped up by some well-known bloggers. This was the case too with WPX though, which turned out to be totally overrated. Having tested Rocket.net however, I came out thoroughly impressed. The hype is real.

The good

  • Insanely fast hosting with 0 effort. Do you despise migrating to a new host and having to spend a solid day (or more) on optimizing your site(s)? Then the thought of hauling over the goods to Rocket.net and instantly getting a worldwide TTFB of <100 should excite you. Rocket.net comes with Cloudflare Enterprise pre-installed and pre-configured. The impact on the speed of your site is shocking.  
  • More freedom than Kinsta. Unlike Kinsta, which blocks a good number of caching and other optimization plugins, you’re not getting limited by Rocket.net. Feel free to use a plugin like WPRocket or FlyingPress to get your website even faster.
  • Crazy specs. Though Cloudflare Enterprise will end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for your site, it’s good to know that all Rocket.net plans have 2 CPU cores/128GB RAM, NVMe SSDs, MariaDB, LiteSpeed’s PHP, Redis (Redis Object Cache Pro on higher plans), 1GB memory limit and no PHP worker limits.
  • Ben Gabler is behind Rocket.net. Ben is a big name in the industry. Previously he was COO at HostGator (when it was still good), CPO at StackPath and Senior Product Manager at GoDaddy. This man lives and breathes web hosting.

The bad

  • Limited bandwidth on cheapest plan. Their cheapest plan only comes with 50GB monthly bandwidth. It’s nice and all that they say that plan supports up to 250.000 monthly visitors, but with this little bandwidth you’re probably going to be unable to hit that.
  • Sub-domains count as an extra website install. To me personally this is extremely frustrating. I was actually looking to transfer Affiliate24.org to Rocket.net. But given this site has like 10 subdomains, that turned out to unfeasible.  
  • If you run many smaller sites things get very expensive very fast. Let’s say you run more than 10 smaller affiliate sites. With Rocket.net that will set you back at least $200 per month.

When you should pick Rocket.net

Go with Rocket.net if you have one or a few mission critical websites which you want to be as fast as possible (worldwide) while spending the least possible time. Rocket.net can save you hours of optimization work, offers 24/7 VIP supports by the best in the industry and specializes in removing friction on each step of the way. So why nickel and dime and settle for less?

Check out Rocket.net now or read my Rocket.net review for more info.

Best for experienced affiliate marketers (more DIY)

If you’re an experienced affiliate marketer looking for the most possible bang for your buck when it comes to web hosting, pick one of the providers below. They’re great for scaling and suit websites which are drawing in 100s of thousands of visitors.  

Mind you, I haven’t tested these themselves. I’m purely going here from the experience of friends in affiliate marketing who use them, feedback on Facebook groups and bloggers I respect. So I’ll keep my descriptions a bit short.

Cloudways

Cloudways is a cloud hosting provider that offers easy deployment and management of web applications on platforms like DigitalOcean, AWS, and Google Cloud. You’ll get an intuitive dashboard, one-click installations, and performance optimization without needing deep technical knowledge. However, their support tends to be overly technical.

A big advantage is that that they let you host an unlimited number of websites.

One thing to keep in mind: they were bought by Digital Ocean which has some hosting a aficionado’s wondering about their long-term viability as a quality host.

WPJohnny

WPJohnny is a “boutique” VPS hosting provider aimed at mission critical websites. It’s managed VPS hosting we’re talking about here, so it doesn’t get overly technical. But WPJohnny’s support is allegedly Spartan. This is by design: according to the owner his hosting is for people who are not in need of any hand holding.

They have servers in the USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Bonus: great option for Europeans

If you’re based in Europe I recommend Cloud86 for smaller to mid-sized websites (they offer some great VPS hosting, but this is more geared towards heavy web shops, not affiliate sites). They’re a Dutch hosting provider which only recently started targeting an international audience.

I host all my websites with them (on their meaty Webhosting Unlimited plan, which only costs 12 euros a month) and am enjoying GTMetrix scores such as these:

GTMetrix test showing perfect numbers for Affiliate24

That’s correct: TTFB clocks in at an insane 31ms and fully loaded page time is less than a second (and that’s on a site which has WooCommerce installed).

I’m in close contact with their team so I know they really know their stuff and care a lot about offering the best performance possible.

Their major downside is that their customer support is not 24/7 but instead follows Dutch working hours. Also, they’ve only got servers in the Netherlands. For many Europeans this shouldn’t pose too much of a problem, but if you’re in America or Asia, this disqualifies them.

Read more about them in my Cloud86 review.  

Final thoughts on hosting for affiliate marketing

To sum it all up, here are my top hosting providers for affiliate marketers:

  • SiteGround. Great for beginners who want a plug-and-play experience
  • NameHero. Ideal for beginners who are willing to put in a bit more effort
  • Rocket.net. Best for experienced affiliate markets who want the best performance with the least possible time spent
  • Cloudways. Good for experienced affiliate marketers who run many small sites
  • WPJohnny. Managed VPS hosting at great rates, but lacks support
  • Cloud86. Great for Europeans with small to mid-sized websites

Got any questions? Then leave a comment below.

2 Comments

  1. There is no such thing as the best web hosting for affiliate marketing. Whatever is best for your affiliate site really depends on where in the lifecycle your affiliate site is. If you are just starting out, you will want to look for a web hosting provider that offers affordable hosting plans and easy-to-use tools. If you are more established, you will want to look for a web hosting provider that offers more robust features and services.

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