Becoming an online affiliate takes guts, so congratulations if you’re serious about starting an online business. The challenges (and rewards) that are to follow are beyond anything that you’ve ever dreamed of- the first day I made $1,000 online I was floored that I was able to generate that much income in one single day. Now I’m working hard to make every day a $1,000 day.

What An Online Affiliate Marketer Needs From Their Hosting

While a small business or a homeowner may not have too many requirements for their web hosting, affiliate marketers are not as fortunate. As your websites start to generate serious traffic you are going to been a host that is able to provide the amount of bandwidth that you are needing and the disk space necessary to host your websites.

At first, you may be hosting small landing pages and receiving little traffic. For this type of situation just about any hosting company will do. However, as soon as you ramp things up and start generating more websites and more traffic you can expect a small-time hosting solution to collapse, leaving you out of luck and completely stranded.

• Bandwidth and disk space - You want sufficient space and bandwidth to cover your present and future needs. Anything less than a gigabyte of web storage and 15 gigabytes of bandwidth is insufficient to your needs. Regardless of excuses that are made, you still need a decent amount of web storage and bandwidth.Be wary of hosts that offer everything for nothing, however, and always look around to ensure that the host has a good reputation.
• Additional domain support - One thing that your online affiliate marketing efforts will bring about is the necessity of having multiple domains. One or two won’t cut it after a while- you will soon need 10, 20, 100+ as your online business expands and grows. Make sure that your web host will allow you to include more than one domain name in your hosting account.DSBHosting.com, for example, allows you to host up to 30 different domain names in their $2.99 starter package, which is very competitive. I would set that as the benchmark for what I would expect from my hosting company.
• PHP, MySQL, CGI, and server side script support - As your online affiliate marketing business expands you will move beyond standard HTML websites and into PHP, MySQL databases, and advanced scripts that will allow you to integrate sophisticated features into your website, such as user interaction or tracking software.Make sure that the host that you choose offers support for all of those standards.
• E-mail accounts - You will need multiple e-mail accounts, for both personal use and the use of catch-all e-mail accounts and auto responders. You want at the very least 100 per hosted domain.

Of course, some kind of advanced control panel is also mandatory. cPanel 11 is the standard at the moment, though there are others out there that are feature rich and useful as well.

Setting A Budget For Your Hosting

Most online affiliate marketers will only need a basic hosting package at the start, but it may be wise to order a more advanced shared package (around $15-$25 a month) so that you are not as limited as your needs grow. Of course, if you are strapped for cash, starting off with a basic package and upgrading later is also a viable option.

If you are hard up for hosts, try reading my web hosting reviews section and checking out the ones in there.