The 3 Best Web Hosting Providers for Affiliate Marketers

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 website is and how hands-off you want your hosting experience to be.

The internet is filled with hosting recommendations. Most of these recommendations seem to gravitate towards a provider like Bluehost. This however, might have something to do with the spectacular affiliate commissions these guys pay out.

I’ll be not covering providers like these here. In this article I’ll be only recommending providers I’d use myself. I either use them myself or have experience with them through client work and collaborations. On top of that, these are the hosting providers that are the most well-regarded in the affiliate marketing community.

So without further ado, let’s get started.  

3 best WordPress hosting services for affiliate marketers

• SiteGround – Great for beginners
• Cloudways – Great for experienced affiliate marketers
• Kinsta – Fully managed WordPress hosting for fast-growing websites

SiteGround – Great for beginners

Though SiteGround has lost some of its shine over the last couple of years (especially their price hike was ill-received), it’s still a super solid hosting option for many affiliate websites.

In fact, every new website I launch (affiliate or otherwise) I throw on their GoGeek shared hosting plan. You can put as many websites as you like on this plan, and it supports up to 100.000 monthly visitors.

SiteGround is perfect for beginners for a few reasons:

• Their interface is user-friendly. Instead of using cPanel they offer their proprietary Website Tools. It’s incredibly easy to manage your sites through this, add an SSL-certificate, set up a staging version of your website, etc.
• They offer 24/7 customer support which you can reach within minutes. Even better, their customer support is extremely effective in solving whatever challenge you face (I should know, I’ve contacted their support dozens of times over the years). You can reach them through by live chat, telephone or through email tickets
• It’s affordable. Their cheapest plan starts at 3.99 €/mo

On top of that, SiteGround comes with the SG Optimizer plugin. This web performance plugin has basically copied most of the features from WP Rocket but adds some cool stuff on top of it. For instance, it turns your images into the super light WebP format.

Use SG Optimizer and you’ll need not a single other optimizer plugin for your site. Lazy loading, caching, minifying files – everything is taken care off. This will save you a lot of hassle and money.

Once you use SiteGround with SG Optimizer and a lightweight theme such as Kadence, you’ll easily pass Google’s Core Web Vitals and will get near-perfect mobile PageSpeed scores.

And yes, we’re still talking about SiteGround’s shared hosting plans here.      

Costs

SiteGround is definitely not the cheapest hosting provider out there, but their prices offer fair value.

SiteGround’s StartUp plan, which has room for one website, starts from 3.99 €/mo. However, upon renewal you’ll end up paying 12.99 €/mo. This is quite an increase, although it isn’t outrageous to pay this amount for quality hosting.

They also have two plans – GrowBig and GoGeek – on which you can host as many websites as you like. If you plan on launching multiple affiliate websites, either of these is a great choice, depending on your traffic needs.  

Cloudways – Great for experienced affiliate marketers

Cloudways is quite different from your regular web hosting company. They are essentially a middleman between you and 5 different cloud hosting providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, VULTR, AWS and Google Cloud.

You pick the cloud provider you want; Cloudways takes care of the rest. The advantage of this is that you’ll get access to superb cloud hosting, but you don’t have to worry about server maintenance and what not.

In Facebook groups you’ll see many people rave about Cloudways and recommending them unconditionally. While I understand the enthusiasm, Cloudways makes little sense for those who are starting their first website. Some technical knowledge is required to properly use it and as a fledgling affiliate marketer you already have enough on your plate. Plus, you’ll be spending more money than you need to.

For complete beginners, it makes way more sense to pick one of SiteGround’s shared hosting plans.

However, once you’re an experienced affiliate marketer who’s ready to bring his hosting to the next level, Cloudways could be a fantastic choice.  

Costs

Cloudways can be surprisingly cheap: you can get started for as little as $10 per month if you pick Digital Ocean.

However, this won’t exactly give you stellar performance. Most affiliate marketers that host their sites on Cloudways end up spending between $50 and a few hundred bucks a month.

Kinsta – Fully managed WordPress hosting for fast-growing websites

Kinsta is a juggernaut in the hosting industry. Choose Kinsta and you’ll find yourself in good company. Amongst their clients are high-profile bloggers and massive companies such as Ubisoft, General Electric, and Intuit.

Expect a VIP-treatment once you start hosting your affiliate websites here. Their customer support is the best in the industry and they understand WordPress like pretty much no other hosting provider. You can only host WordPress websites on their platform which means their entire operation has been built around WordPress.

This ensures that there are not many hosting providers out there which can offer better performance than Kinsta. No matter which of their hosting plans you pick, you’ll get access to ridiculous uptime rates and website speed.

Their approach is a bit more hassle-free than Cloudways, which is more DIY. With Kinsta you select a hosting plan based on your monthly visitors – they’ll take care of the rest. This is great if you’re looking to spend as little time on web hosting as possible.

Costs

Prepare to spend an arm and a leg on web hosting with Kinsta. Their cheapest plan will cost you $30 per month, but most affiliate marketers who go with Kinsta will need their $100 per month plan at least.

What you really need and when

With web hosting there is a time and a place for pretty much every kind of hosting. If you run a simple blog with no monetization intent anything pretty much goes – even Bluehost or GoDaddy.

However, as an affiliate marketer you’ll want to go for something more serious. But if you’re just starting out, going with shared hosting from SiteGround is fine. There really is no point in picking a more complicated and expensive hosting solution like Cloudways, or a premium managed WordPress host like Kinsta.

If you’re just starting out with affiliate marketing, a shared hosting solution by SiteGround will likely be more than sufficient for at least a year or two. After that timeframe you could still use them for your new projects. Whenever any of your new projects requires it, you can transfer them to a provider like Cloudways or Kinsta.  

Conclusion

I’ve tried to keep this hosting recommendation article as straightforward as possible. Here are once more my recommendations:

• SiteGround – Great for beginners
• Cloudways – Great for experienced affiliate marketers
• Kinsta – Fully managed WordPress hosting for fast-growing websites