Web Hosting For Poker Affiliates
By admin on Nov 17, 2008 in Web Hosting
So after you decide on how you are going to build and manage your websites, you will need somewhere to host them. Web hosting is a huge industry, and there are literally thousands of hosting companies to choose from. Many affiliates including myself have been burned in the past by choosing bad web hosts. The best advice I can give when choosing a web host is to ask around amongst other poker affiliates. Usually you can get a pretty good gauge on who is good and who is not by simply speaking with other affiliates.
Actually, the most important piece of advice I can offer you is to NOT under any circumstance sign up with a “free” webhost. These types of hosts are unreliable and greatly devalue your website with garbage ads.
There are a couple of factors you should consider when choosing a web host. Below are the 5 most important:
Bandwidth and Web Space – Every hosting plan will come with a certain amount of bandwidth and webspace. If you plan on hosting several sites, I suggest starting out with a reseller account. The amount of bandwidth or web space you need can very greatly by the amount and type of content you will be hosting.
If you are an established poker affiliate or webmaster, you probably already know what type of space you require. However if you’re newer, I would suggest using the following minimums. Most importantly though, make sure the hosting company is scalable and can allow you to upgrade as you grow. The suggested space below will cost you on average between $20 – $30 a month
Disk Space: 20,000mb/24gb
Bandwidth: 250,000mb/250gb
Reliability - This is very important, and one of the easiest ways to know if a webhost is reliable is by once again, asking other webmasters or poker affiliates. You can even go to any of the industry forums and run a search query on “hosting” and you will undoubtedly find some good information buried in there.
Price - Of course price is always important, and there is no question you can find web hosts for $5 a month. But always remember the old adage, “you get what you pay for”. In an industry where one website can make you thousands of dollars per month, it would be a bad decision to use a web host that is unreliable or not secure. If you’re sending players, the difference between $5 and $30 a month is negligible.
Backups - I cannot stress the importance of ensuring that your web host has weekly backups (at a minimum). If you are running a forum or blog, you may even want to ensure that you can get bi-weekly or daily backups. It is not uncommon in this day and age for a website to get hacked, or even for non savvy affiliates to accidentally delete something important on the FTP server. I also encourage poker affiliates to save local backups (on your hard drive) of your important sites on a weekly basis. Most web hosts give you the ability to download these backups on demand in a .zip or .tar file.
Customer Support - A web host is only as good as their customer support. I wouldn’t even consider a web host unless they had superior customer support. In your career as a poker affiliate, there is no doubt that there will be times that you need responsive or even critical support from your web host. Considering how much money our websites can earn in a day, we need customer support that is extremely responsive and available 24/7. The last thing you want is to have a site down, and wait 24 hours for a support ticket to be answered. Only choose a host with 24/7 technical support via phone.
These are all things to keep for poker affiliates when choosing web hosting for your poker affiliate portals. When in doubt, you can also ask other poker affiliates in our poker affiliate forum.
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