Two quick things before we get started.
Firstly, we’re not going to insult your intelligence with a boring intro on what web hosting is or how affiliate marketing works.
Web hosting is where your website “lives” online.
Affiliate marketing is a business model where you earn a referral fee for recommending a product or service.
The amount of fluff other sites pack into their “recommendation guides” is amazing.
Secondly, we’re also not going to review “best web hosting” companies like BlueHost or Hostgator.
Yes, they are legitimate web hosting services.
But no, they don’t fit in with what we’re trying to achieve here.
Which is helping you find the best web hosting for your needs – not earning fat commission checks from some affiliate program.
By the way, this roundup is based on you using WordPress as your CMS of choice.
Just to keep things simple.
So let’s look at the best web hosting plans out there.
The ones we’re happy to recommend to our affiliate marketing friends.
What You Need
We’re going to split our affiliate marketing web hosts of choice into 3 categories, based on your personal level of experience as an affiliate marketer.
This is to help you choose the best plan for where you are right now.
And to also completely avoid the “shiny object syndrome” issue of choosing the most expensive web hosting you can find.
You can see there are many options available by reviewing other successful affiliate marketing websites and using a hosting detector site to analyze your competitors.
More is not always better when you’re in the early days of your affiliate marketing career.
Plus, not all plans are created equal i.e. they’re not really the best web hosting for you.
Entry Level Web Hosting
First up we have the best hosting options for brand new affiliates or those working to a budget.
SiteGround
SiteGround is the web hosting option we recommend for our TASS students.
And no, we have no vested interest in the company – it’s just that they’re one of the best web hosts for affiliate marketing newbies.
The entire setup process is very straightforward.
Which is ideal for those of you brand new to the affiliate marketing game.
So what have they got to offer you?
Cost
Their ‘Managed WordPress Hosting’ hosting plans start at $6.99/pm.
Which is one of the best web hosting deals you’ll find online right now.
But there are two things to watch out for here.
The first is that their ‘Startup’ WordPress hosting plans are heavily discounted right now – they normally cost $14.99/pm.
So you’ll need to prepare for your bill to double after your first year.
And secondly, that price only covers the cost of hosting one WordPress site with them.
Also, your site will sit on a shared hosting server – along with dozens of other affiliate marketing sites.
Features
Their entry-level hosting plans offer 10GB of web space which is more than enough for all but the most massive of affiliate marketing sites.
Your basic web hosting plan can deal with 10,000 visitors each month, is enough for a basic affiliate website.
You also get a free CDN (Content Delivery Network), free SSL, daily backups, and the fact that their servers are powered by renewable energy.
A 1-click install service for WordPress is also part of the package, making them ideal for technophobes and novices.
But they don’t offer a free domain as part of their plan, so you’ll need to factor in that as an additional cost.
Customer Support
They do provide their customers with multiple help channels – far more than certain premium web hosts.
If you’re looking for a quick answer to a straightforward question you can use their pinned help, chatbot, or automated solutions.
But they also offer live chat, phone help, and technical assistance via their ticketing system.
As affiliate hosting services go, SiteGround offers a very comprehensive and reliable service for the amount of money they charge.
Are they the best web hosting service in their price range?
Pretty much – they’re head and shoulders above other web hosts competing with them.
And, as we said earlier, it’s the web hosting service we recommend for our new students.
URL: SiteGround
Free domain name: No
Daily backups: Yes
Shared hosting: Yes
Hosting plans: From $6.99/pm for 1 website
A2 Web Hosting
A2 is another hosting company that’s popular with Authority Hacker students and affiliate marketers in general.
There are several reasons for this, but what A2 is best known for is the speed of their servers.
And this is because they use SSDs (Solid State Drives) instead of regular hard drives.
Which is why they claim/offer speeds that are up to 20x faster than any other comparable web host.
And by fast we’re talking about sub-1-second page load times.
Or what you’d normally get by combining a CDN and caching plugin for the best web page loading times possible.
Cost
Now in terms of the plans on offer, you can choose between two basic flavors of WordPress web hosting – Shared or Managed.
Shared basically means you’ll miss out on some perks like backups, website staging and a Jetpack license.
Managed means you get their best possible speeds, a WordPress install optimized for speed, backups, etc.
So we’re going to focus on their managed hosting plans.
Hosting plans start at $11.99/pm for a 1-site plan, and go all the way up to $36.98/pm for unlimited sites.
That’s a discounted price, so expect it to increase after your “grace” period ends.
Features
Their basic ‘1-site’ WordPress plan offers 10GB of storage space, a free SSL certificate, website migration, site staging, automated WordPress install, and automated backups.
But again, no free domain name.
They also include a Jetpack personal license as standard.
They also appear to offer unlimited visitors to your website each month – they don’t specify otherwise.
Also, take at face value the 1-second page load times sounds incredible.
You do also need to consider that those results were most likely created in an ideal test environment.
Customer Support
You get 24/7 support via phone, via their live chat service or you can simply open a ticket instead.
Which is what you’d expect from a web hosting company in this price range.
Their customers are, however, full of nothing but praise for their technical customer service.
A2 Hosting is ideal for affiliate marketers who are currently using a low-end hosting solution and have outgrown it
You’ll pay quite a bit extra, but then again the best web hosting options should cost more.
It’s also an investment in your affiliate marketing business – not an expense.
URL: A2 Hosting
Free domain name: No
Daily backups: Yes
Shared hosting: Yes
Hosting plans: From $11.99/pm for 1 site
Mid Range Web Hosting
Let’s say you have an affiliate site that’s generating in excess of 25,000 uniques each month.
You’ll be left with the choice of upgrading to a more expensive package with your current host.
Or take the next leap up the technology ladder to one of the best mid-level WP hosting services.
We’d suggest the latter if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing business.
Let’s take a look at the best hosting services in this category.
Cloudways Web Hosting
Cloudways is a major departure from any of the web hosting companies we’ve featured so far.
It’s not that cloud hosting is revolutionary.
It’s just that this host allows you to tailor your hosting package to your exact needs – you can choose from five different cloud providers.
So your cloud hosting account can run off a Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Google Cloud infrastructure.
Which one you choose will come down to your budget and how much speed you need.
You probably just read that in the voice of Maverick from “Top Gun”…didn’t you?
Cost
On face value, Cloudways can appear to be very cheap.
And to a certain extent that’s true, but only for their most cloud hosting basic package, which is $10/pm for a single website with hosting by Digital Ocean.
But affiliate marketers moving to Cloudways are looking for high-end performance.
The real beauty of their pricing structure is that you can spend anywhere from $10 to $200 per month to host your site.
It’s just a case of finding the package that best suits your affiliate marketing needs.
Features
We’re going to use their $42/mo Digital Ocean plan as an example of what you get for your money.
This is a reasonable amount of money to spend on a hosting plan for an established affiliate marketing business.
So for that money, you’d get a server with 4GB of RAM and a 2-core processor.
You also get 80GB of storage space and 4TB of bandwidth, plus the Cloudways CDN, monitoring, free site migration, free SSL, staging, automated backups, advanced content caching, and regular security patches.
Customer Support
But…what happens if something goes wrong?
Well, you have 24/7 customer service to fall back on.
But there are three different tiers to work with…which is a little confusing.
Standard assistance comes free of charge and includes live chat and their ticketing system…but no phone assistance.
An extra $100/pm gets you their ‘Advanced Support’ add-on.
But you have to pay an extra $500 each month to be able to call their technical team or contact them via their Slack channel.
Cloudways treads a fine line between mid-range hosting and high-end.
It can actually occupy both at the same time.
But we know many in the affiliate marketing industry who stop just short of worshipping them.
URL: Cloudways Hosting
Free domain name: No
Shared hosting: Yes
Daily backups: Yes
Hosting plans: From $10/pm for one site
WPX Web Hosting
Oddly enough – and by sheer coincidence – WPX is the web host I’m just about to swap my affiliates sites over to.
I’ve had really random issues with my current host and Cloudflare.
Plus, their founder, Terry Dean has been part of the affiliate and SEO for a long, long time.
So he understands what affiliate marketers need from their web hosting better than a bog-standard provider.
This is a web host designed with the affiliate marketer in mind, so there are lots of features but very little marketing fluff.
This is why many affiliate marketing types regard WPX as the best web host in its class.
Cost
There are only 3 hosting plans to choose from: ‘Business’,’Professional’ and ‘Elite’.
Which is the exact opposite of what you get with most web hosts where you have to navigate dozens of options.
Their entry-level web hosting plans come in at $24.99/pm if paid monthly.
But that comes down to $20.83/pm if you pay a year in advance.
There’s no “introductory” pricing to worry about with their hosting plans though – you pay full price from day one.
Features
Their basic plan comes with 10GB of storage space and 100GB of bandwidth, which is enough for several large WordPress affiliate marketing sites.
But they also take things up a notch with their very own CDN.
That would cost you $20/pm alone elsewhere, so you can potentially save yourself $240 per year here.
Money that you could then reinvest elsewhere in your affiliate marketing business.
Automatic backups come as standard, as do 1-click WordPress installs, staging, site migrations, and daily malware scans.
So you get a whole slew of premium features but at budget-friendly prices.
Customer Support
WPX understands that affiliate marketers prefer to spend as much of their time as possible making money.
So they want to spend as little time as possible worrying about how fast their site is running, or other issues you’re experiencing.
That’s why WPX reply to live chat queries in 30 seconds, on average.
Some shared hosting services can take days to get back to you, so this is an impressive claim by WPX.
WPX tends to be where a lot of affiliate marketers wind up after bailing out on cheaper hosts that drove them to tears.
$25 for a monthly hosting plan might seem like a lot to spend, but don’t forget you’re getting a CDN thrown in for good measure.
And you should expect to pay more for one of the best web hosting services for affiliate marketers.
URL: WPX Hosting
Free domain name: No
Shared hosting: Yes
Daily backups: Yes
Hosting plans: $24.99/pm for 5 sites
Professional Web Hosting
And now we come to the big hitters of affiliate web hosting – far removed from the world of shared hosting.
Actually, these are some of the best hosting services out there, period.
For affiliate marketing sites, e-commerce platforms, or even huge media sites.
How will you know if your business is ready for professional web hosting?
Your sites are earning 5 to 6-figures per month and generating well over 500,000 uniques per month.
But probably more like 1 million.
WP Engine Web Hosting
WP Engine is a name you’re no doubt familiar with.
And that’s probably because they power the sites of 120,000 customers in over 100 different countries around the world.
Roughly 5% of all WordPress traffic lands on a site hosted by them.
The reason for their success is because they didn’t try to be a web host for everyone.
Instead, they focused entirely on WordPress users who need fast, reliable, secure web hosting that can also scale to meet their future needs.
This is why brands like National Geographic, RyanAir, Dropbox, and major media websites rely on them for hosting.
As well as a lot of the big names in affiliate marketing.
Cost
Professional managed WordPress hosting means just that – professional.
And in this case, that means plans that start at $30/pm.
But bear in mind that’s the entry-level pricing for “beginner” sites.
If, however, you’re at the stage where your existing host is “complaining” about your traffic levels, you can expect to part with more like $290 per month to host your website with WP Engine.
You can drive that down to $241 per month though if you’re willing to sign up for an annual hosting plan.
Features
One thing that sets them apart from their competitors is that they’re also the team behind the Genesis Framework and the StudioPress theme.
Both of the above are actually included with each hosting plan on offer.
Their ‘Startup’ plan ($30 per month) provides 10GB of storage, 50GB of bandwidth and up to 25,000 unique visitors per month for one site.
You also get a free SSL certificate, a CDN, staging, development and production environments, free migration for existing sites and built-in caching for your site.
And finally, you get advanced site monitoring and security – they claim to block up to 2 million attacks each day.
They don’t appear to offer daily backups as one of their standard features though, which is odd.
Customer Support
If you do run into problems you can always turn to their customer service team.
Which is available to you 24/7 via live chat for the ‘Startup’ plan.
But you’ll need to upgrade to ‘Growth’ or ‘Scale’ to be able to contact via phone.
That’s pretty standard for premium web hosts though for some weird reason.
This is the web host that most people seem to gravitate towards once they’ve gotten over the idea that you can’t have amazing WordPress web hosting for $10 a month.
You get fast page load times, decent support, and “$2,000 in value” of added extras in the form of the Genesis Framework, etc.
URL: WP Engine
Free domain name: No
Daily backups: N/A
Shared hosting: No
Hosting plans: 30/pm for one site
Kinsta Web Hosting
And now we come to final hosting service in our roundup – Kinsta
Which coincidentally is also the same web host that powers Authority Hacker.
So we’re happy to recommend them because we know they can deliver the goods, day in and day out.
Our business depends on it.
That means you can rely on them for web hosting for any type of affiliate site you can think of.
This is also a company that understands WordPress in a way that 90% of other hosts don’t.
Cost
You need to be a really serious affiliate to sign up with Kinsta.
That’s because even though they offer the best WordPress hosting for affiliate marketers…they’re not cheap.
Sure, a web hosting plan for one website only costs $30 per month.
But if you’re a serious player with either a lot of traffic and/or multiple sites, your monthly Kinsta web hosting costs are going to be more in the $300 – $400 region.
So, as we said earlier, this is a web host for affiliate marketers who earn a full-time living from their business – and not a newbie affiliate still trying to figure stuff out.
Features
Each hosted site is powered along by their SSD-based servers, which come as standard with any hosting plan they offer.
But even more importantly, your website will sit on Google Cloud servers.
Which should mean blistering page load times for you – you can even choose where in the world your server is located.
An SSL certificate and CDN come as standard, which is par for the course at this level.
Automatic daily backups, site migration, site monitoring, and automatic optimization of your WordPress databases are also included.
Customer Support
Kinsta offers 24/7 support for English-speaking customers, but they also offer multilingual technical support during core business hours.
In terms of getting help you can use their knowledge base, or speak to an engineer via live chat…but no phone support.
With that said, every engineer you speak to is a “Tier 2” type – you don’t get passed around while junior staff try to figure out what’s gone wrong with your website.
Kinsta web hosting is expensive, but they also offer an awful lot for what you pay.
And, as of right now, nobody can touch them in terms of support, hosting quality, website speed, and a whole pile of other metrics.
But Kinsta hosting is only for the most serious of affiliate marketers, so please do bear that in mind.
URL: Kinsta
Free domain name: No
Daily backups: Yes
Shared hosting: No
Hosting plans: $30/pm for one site
Final Thoughts
As affiliate marketers, you really do get what you pay for when it comes to website hosting.
And that goes double for shared hosting services.
So, if you cut corners you’ll have months to regret your decision…and potentially a ton of lost sales and rankings too.
A high-quality anything costs money, and the best web hosting options are no different in that regard.
Just be prepared to pay more for web hosting as your business grows – it won’t take you long to outgrow the company you’re using right now.
But this is a good thing – it’s something you should look forward to.
Over to You
And that brings us to the end of our article on the best WordPress hosting for affiliate marketers.
As you can see, we’re very light on bullshit around here.
You can tell by the types of web hosts we recommended above i.e. the best ones for you and not for our bottom line.
We understand that when you first start out as an affiliate marketer that you’re wary of being ripped off.
And also that you have more questions than answers.
So, if you’d like to get a solid foundation in how affiliate sites work, why not check out our free training?
You’ll learn what it takes to get a basic affiliate website up and running.
Free of charge.
And there are no sleazy sales pitches – we’re not like other affiliate marketers.
Just tell us what email address to send your invitation to.
