Self-hosting

When you’re looking at a host’s price, look at what the asterisk or price details say. Usually the price you see is only for a limited time.

You should also check the reviews of the host you are considering. What are their uptime statistics, how much downtime is there, and what is customer feedback on performance and support? The problem with a shared server is when a website starts using the server very intensively, overstretching the server’s resources. That’s when I (author Ted) found out about other things that are important but most hosting companies don’t mention, like CPU cycles and throttling. CPU cycles are how much processor time you are using. Throttling is when you are using more server resources than the hosting company thinks and should automatically throttle or slow you down so that all sites on that server are working at capacity.

Towards the beginning of my affiliate marketing career, I was on a shared host and most of the time things were fine. However, one day I went to my site to add new content, and it was so slow it was unusable. I contacted the hosting company, and they said the problem was that one of the users on my server was sending a large video to a large email list, which slowed down the server. They agreed to move me to a server with fewer users on it, but I could see that this was not a permanent solution.

Today the speed of your website is important to how Google ranks your website. Slow sites don’t rank high. Today’s consumers also want speed. If your site doesn’t load quickly, they will click to another website for information and perhaps make a purchase that would have earned you an affiliate commission.

As your website grows and your email list and visitor numbers increase, the demand on your host’s shared server can become a problem. Your visitors can get slow service and just click away. This is your lost money.

Virtual Private Server (VPS): This is the next step up from a shared server. With this hosting you have your own dedicated server resources. Your performance will not be affected by the actions of others. Although it may physically be a single computer server, you have your own virtual server. So another user cannot hog the server resources and take over from you because your resources are dedicated only to you. There are several tiers of VPS hosting, but the cost is typically $20–$30 per month.
Dedicated Hosting: In dedicated hosting you have a server whose resources are entirely yours. You don’t have to worry about someone else slowing you down. However, this is a big step up in monthly cost. Dedicated hosting is typically $100-$150 per month.
Content Delivery Network (CDN): With the delivery of digital content such as images, videos, and audio, content delivery networks were developed to increase speed, reduce latency, and increase redundancy. Latency is the delay in delivering your web pages to your web visitor.

In a traditional server setup, a server is located somewhere – for example, it’s located in Texas. This server serves your website to your web visitors wherever they are located. The distance makes a difference in the delay (delay) in serving these files to your visitor. A web visitor to your site who is located in Texas will find your website in no time. Your New York web visitor will see a slightly higher delay because the distance the files have to travel means a slightly longer delay. Your British web visitor will notice a slightly longer delay. It’s just a matter of physics. Even at lightning-fast Internet speeds, distance makes a difference.