Landing page hosting can be a serious drag for affiliate marketers. It’s typically considered the most difficult and technical aspect of building up a campaign funnel.
The easiest alternative? Just doing affiliate marketing without a website. This is possible, and we’ve covered it before, so you can give it a shot.
But to be completely honest, putting in the extra effort of having a landing page, website and hosting is going to take your advertising, and in turn, your profits much farther. Long term affiliate success generally requires a landing page because they are proven to increase conversion rates.
And a landing page is going to need hosting.
That’s why I’ve compiled a list of the best landing page hosting services starting from the best.
Why even use a Landing Page?
There is no written or spoken law that requires you to use one. And in fact, you may be wondering: why the heck should you spend extra time and money to add an additional step in the funnel when it only puts an offer further away from the ad?
In some, admittedly rare cases, you shouldn’t. Some campaign funnels work better without it. Just get a visitor to click and present them with an offer – and that’s it.
But where’s the craft in that?
Landing pages bring a lot to the table. The additional space for text, images, links, for enticing, warming up and encouraging can do wonders for conversion rates. This is especially true in some more complex verticals and ad types that require some explanation.
Users will have a chance to get to know the product better. If you immediately send them to the pricing page after viewing the ad, they will probably be suspicious, deterred or simply uninterested. A landing page can give you the opportunity to present convincing arguments, studies, graphics to make your product more attractive.
If you are scared by the prospect of designing a landing page, then fear not, as we have already prepared the list of the best landing page builders that allow you to create a beautiful landing page in no time.
But creating a landing page is only step one of the two-step process. The second one is setting up your landing page with a hosting service. And here is where this handy article comes in.
A Good Landing Page Hosting Service is a Must
While you may be tempted to skimp on paying for a good landing page hosting service and go with a cheap or even (God forbid) free one (they are only good for training purposes, not for making business), there are serious reasons in favor of paying extra for hosting.
A good service gives you:
- Speed
- Scalability
- Stability
Let’s discuss them one by one.
Speed
How much does speed really matter in affiliate marketing?
As you may have suspected, we’ve also written about this topic some time ago in an article dealing with popular myths regarding speed in affiliate marketing.
I highly recommend you to read it from end to end but, as usual, I’ll give you the main point of this article:
Experience is what matters more for visitors, not the numbers.
This means that your landing page should work fast in order not to disturb the flow of a campaign. However, chasing numbers, shaving milliseconds off the page-load-time follows under the general rule of diminishing return:
Your time is valuable, dedicate it to what brings the most results.
Landing pages are not an esport game, where every millisecond is an advantage over other players. There is a sweet spot somewhere.
As a rule of thumb, you can take the following values:
- Maximal acceptable page load time is 2 seconds.
- Optimal page load time is anything below 0.5 seconds
Scalability
Your landing page hosting service should fit your business requirements in terms of scale. And it should give you the option to adjust the scaling if necessary.
What that means is there is no point in overpaying for top quality cloud hosting services if you can barely make ends meet.
On the other hand, skimping is also not recommended: as it was mentioned before, your campaign funnel has to work smoothly.
Landing page hosting services can take many forms and I elaborate on the various types of hosting later on in this article.
Stability
This point is rather self-explanatory. Your landing page has to be up and running to be of any use, even if you throw a significant number of visitors at it.
This will be your biggest challenge: to assess how many visitors you are realistically expecting.
Be honest.
Don’t count that your awesome Netflix gift card offer will attract legions of people at the start.
There are some types of traffic though where high volumes are expected. Chief among which are pops, or rather more generally, any kind of display traffic.
Native ads usually mean less visitors.
Try to guess your daily number of visitors. Some landing page hosting services come with certain limits of visitors set. Other services limit the monthly bandwidth. Either way, choose a hosting service according to your paygrade.
Types of Landing Page Hosting Services
There are 5 types of hosting you may use. They differ in terms of the scale and amount of resources at your disposal. Let’s go over them one by one so you will know what type of service to look for when choosing your hosting provider.
This is the cheapest and most basic hosting option. You get access to a virtual machine that others can also use (without accessing your data of course).
Since the virtual machine’s resource’s are shared among its users, there is no guarantee that all the advertised computing power will be at your disposal at any time.
In fact, the common scenario with shared hosting is that one person utilizes most of the resources, while the service performance for other users is hindered.
The price for this kind of landing page hosting service is decent and oscillates around just a few dollars per month – but there is a reason for it. Unless you really run very low volumes or just want to test things out, I do not recommend shared hosting for any affiliate marketer.
Virtual private server
A step up in terms of service reliability is renting a virtual private server. The ‘virtual’ part tells you that this is not a whole physical machine at your disposal, but a virtualized environment. However, the ‘private’ part ensures that only you have access to the machine’s resources.
A VPS is an entry-level solution for many affiliate marketers. Sole access to the machine ensures that there will be no ups and downs in performance. Get this option if you don’t plan to run high volumes of traffic in many different GEOs.
Dedicated server
A similar solution to the VPS is a dedicated server. It is a whole physical machine that only you can use.
The lack of a virtualization layer makes a dedicated server even more robust and a good option for most marketers.
Cloud
A great option for those marketers that decide to attack numerous GEOs at once.
From a behind-the-scenes perspective, cloud hosting is a service that uses a network of servers to deliver your web page to visitors scattered across the globe.
If that’s your use case, then go with cloud.
WordPress hosting
This is a special case of shared hosting, adjusted for WordPress. Generally speaking, WordPress is not a recommended solution to create a landing page, as it was never designed with speed and scale in mind. But again, if you expect very low traffic volumes or you are just testing stuff, most hosting services have a dedicated solution for WordPress.
Differences Between Various Hosting Services
There are plenty of hosting services to choose from and what sets them apart from each other is not only price, but many other factors like:
- The number of servers and their locations
- Machine specs (storage, RAM, CPU, etc.) and OS
- Limits (bandwidth, number of visitors)
- Addons (SSL, domains)
Digging through these options can be exhausting, but you don’t need to do that. After all, you have this awesome article that does the job for you.
Landing Page Hosting Services Ranking
The following platforms have been taken into consideration. The order is alphabetical:
From that list, after carefully examining their pricing details, we can select winners in each category. Note that most of these services offer hosting in all or most of the types that we have discussed above.
What to be careful of
When researching a landing page hosting service, you’re going to find a lot of reviews. And a looot of ultra positive, convincing ones. But be careful.
As with a lot of digital services, hosting services also have affiliate programs. Sometimes, bloggers take advantage of it and write review after review of the same service in order to get a sale and receive a commission.
In this case, they don’t necessarily have your best interest in mind always. But, that’s true with most anything in this capitalist world 😉 Plus, there are some truly credible and genuine reviews out there that, (even if they are affiliates) provide balanced, critical feedback of the given hosting service.
But the best part? If you’re just looking here, you can trust what you see. Voluum doesn’t stand to gain from you paying for one of these listed services. Except for the fact that we want all of our affiliates to succeed and be the best they can be 🙂
Voluum and Landing Pages
How does a landing page fit into the tracking end of affiliate marketing? With an affiliate tracking software like Voluum, you will add a landing page as an element of your campaign. By tracking your page and the various CTAs on it, we can determine what aspects are most effective and which aren’t as strong.
Thus, you can optimize your page eventually to make the highest number of conversions possible. Our documentation details how to add a landing page or “lander element” to your campaign funnel here.
That’s just one way Voluum is one of the best affiliate trackers out there 😉 But let’s move on to our ultimates ranking…
Best Overall Landing Page Hosting Service
The clear winner in this category definitely is:
Bluehost
There is nothing more you need to host an affiliate landing page outside Bluehost. It gives you a free domain, free SSL and a free CDN network for just $6 per month with an annual plan for shared hosting.
Add two more dollars and you will also get unlimited websites and SSD storage.
VPS hosting comes also in a generous package that includes a well-spec’d machine and it’s the same story with dedicated hosting.
Bluehost does not offer cloud hosting (hardly any affiliate needs it) or dedicated WordPress
Cheapest Landing Page Hosting Service
The clear winner in this category definitely is:
Hostinger
It is cheaper in each hosting category than all of its rivals. You can get the most basic shared hosting service for as low as $3 per month with a 12-month commitment.
Doubling that money gives you better specs and more monthly visit quota.
Conditions for other types of hosting are similar: the price is very low yet the specs and conditions correspond with this.
Hostinger is the way to go if you are on a budget. If you have a couple of dollars more to spend, take a look at some other options.
Most Advanced Landing Page Hosting Service
The clear winner in this category definitely is:
DigitalOcean
It is a real ocean of solutions related to hosting and cloud computing, No matter if you are a small-time affiliate or a big agency that needs to process tons of data, DigitalOcean has something for both.
Affiliates will be interested to know that DigitalOcean’s virtual servers are called ‘Droplets’. They can be optimized for various tasks: general, CPU-related, memory-related and so on.
Note that if you want to launch a single website, DigitalOcean may be overkill. However, if you are slightly more advanced, DigitalOcean will deliver everything it promised.
Most Versatile Landing-Page Hosting Service
The clear winner in this category definitely is:
Cloudways
It’s a multi-hosting service, meaning that you can use Cloudways to set up hosting using infrastructures from third party providers, such as Vultr, AWS or Google Cloud. It allows you to easily compare various options with each other.
Cloudways makes a seemingly difficult task easy. Use one website to find the hosting from your dreams. You even have an option for an hourly hosting, not only monthly or annual. If that’s not versatility then I don’t know what is.
Find a Personal Favorite
Truth be told, even careful studying of what different services have to offer will not replace your personal experience. The best service for one person may be worse for another, either because of different needs or by doing business in a GEO where this service lacks servers.
We did our best here to allow you to make the best decision but our final advice would be that you should test each landing page hosting service yourself for a month or two and only then commit to annual or longer plans.
Once you set everything up and your beautiful landing page is published, remember to add it to Voluum and launch your affiliate campaign with the best affiliate tracking software on the market.
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