Shared Hosting, Paid Traffic, Tracking

[garvante]

Hi,
I'm very new to Affiliate Marketing. I've been sucking in information for the last two weeks, bought a domain and set it up with the hostgator.com baby plan. I'm on the verge of trying my luck with my first cpa-campaigns and I've been planning to use paid traffic directed to sites on my hostgator account. Right now I wanted to get familiar with Prosper 202 but I noticed that Hostgator does not support it with anything but VPS Level 5+ or a dedicated server. After browsing several forums on the issue, I have encountered several statements like

"Installing Prosper on shared hosting just shows how little you care about making money online."

or

"Never use shared hosting with paid traffic. You will lose traffic and money on your campaigns."

So, what's the general problem with shared hosting and paid traffic? (Hostgator's restrictions when it comes to Prosper 202 are apperantly linked to security- and performance issues.) I hope, someone could clear that up for me. Thanks in advance.

 

[chiruraaj]

Hello,
If you are planning to use paid traffic, i highly recommend that yiu take a vps. as you will send a lot of clicks with paid traffic, the shared hosting wont be able to take that much load and also your pages will be slow to load which will hurt your conversions badly. Right now, I am using beyond hosting starter package which is pretty awesome and good for upro 50,000 clicks a day and it is quite affordable after applying a coupon. I hope this helps a bit.

 

[Andy Haskins]

It's one of those things where if you're serious about making money it never hurts to make the investment, especially at the price of VPS servers these days (we're talking $10+).

However, if you are literally just starting out and sending small volume it doesn't hurt to go shared hosted, I did at first all those years ago (although you will soon out grow it and start seeing click loss as you send volume). Just remember that your server can play a big part in the load time of your site and when you're paying for your traffic you don't want any delay (so I would advise against it as much as I could).

All I'm trying to say is don't be put off by it, don't let it stop you getting stuck in but just consider the impact a server has on a whole campaign, from speed, reliability, security and of course for tracking.

IMO I would definitely consider VPS if you can and DEFINITELY make sure you track your campaigns (which Hostgator won't allow you to atm)

 

[garvante]

Thanks to you both. Considering your advice, a VPS seems more reasonable. Since I find an unmanaged VPS too intimating at this point, I'll probably go with a managed one from knownhost.com.

 

[radium]

Yes, a VPS is definitely the way to start with if your plan is to grow a profitable online business, especially when driving loads of traffic in the end. Personally, I am with WiredTree and so far it's been great, even though I figured that I don't need all the support that a managed VPS provides.