Whether you have created a new affiliate website, or looking to expand your current site, choosing a web hosting provider can be one of the most important decisions you will make. This article outlines the key things to look for when you choose a web hosting provider for your new affiliate site.

To start off with, you need to do a bit of forward thinking, a few points you need to consider:

* Bandwidth & Disk Space
* Multi Domain Support
* Uptime Guarantee
* Reliable, 24/7 Support
* Full Statistics

Lets go through each of these items one by one.

Bandwidth & Disk Space

Every time a potential sales lead hits your website, they eat away at your bandwidth quota. Obviously the whole point of the exercise is to get as many sales leads as possible, therefore you want to find a provider that offers as much bandwidth as humanly possible. These days even the smallest providers offer tens of GB's, so this shouldn't be too hard, see our recommendations at the end of the page.

Unless you have a huge site, disk space isn't so much of an issue, but there's no harm in having too much.

I would recommend for starting out, you should probably look for about 10GB's of bandwidth, and 100-200MB's of disk space.

Multi Domain Support

This can be a godsend when you want to branch out. This basically means that you can host more than one domain from the same account. When you want to expand, you can simply register another domain, and use all your same hosting account information.

Uptime Guarantee

When you have a popular affiliate site, the last thing you want is to wake up and find your site down, losing potential customers. An uptime guarantee will mean that you are compensated (to a certain extent) when your site downtime falls below a certain threshold. Be careful with this, make sure you read all the small print, and terms of service, some providers just use this as a clever marketing ploy. Most providers offer between 99.0% and 99.99% service uptime.

Tip: Sign up with a website monitoring service like most of them are free and will alert you via email or SMS when your site is down. They also mean that any downtime is logged. You can use this information to claim money back if your site falls short of it's uptime guarantee.

Reliable, 24/7 Support

Fairly self explanatory. This is the most difficult, but in most ways, most important aspect of choosing any web hosting provider. When your site run's into difficulties, you want to be able to call/email a human being. Look for a provider that offers a toll free telephone number.

Full Statistics

Another important feature to look for. An important aspect of becoming an affiliate is to be able to track your visitors. Where they come from, how long they spend on your site, where they exit to. All this information can be extremely useful when targeting AdWords adverts for example. Choose a host that offers full statistics, or some hosts provide access to raw log files, these can also be useful, but require you to run these log files through a separate application to make sense of them.

In summary, choosing a web hosting provider for your new affiliate site isn't rocket science, but you need to make sure you do some forward planning, and more importantly research.