A Quick Google Search

When you’re just starting out with blogging, it can be hard to know where to start. Most people begin by deciding on a website platform, and the most common CMS (content management system) is WordPress, so this is a great place to start. The next thing you need to find out is, what is the best hosting provider for WordPress.

Not all web hosting is equal, you’ll find this out soon enough. The first step in searching for a host is doing a little due diligence. A quick search on Google will present hosting companies like Hostgator, Bluehost, GoDaddy or SiteGround.

Upon inspection of these hosting providers, you’ll see that they all have a fairly cheap option to get beginners signed up. You may pay about $100-$150 per year for the privilege of having your website hosted with them. This may be okay if you’re only setting up a website for family or as a general hobby for friends to look at.

But what about if you intend making money from a website? If your intention is to start a new online career or bring in some side cash with adverts and affiliate marketing, you may want to consider a better option.

Wealthy Affiliate are an affiliate marketing training platform. They also offer you the option of creating a website within their own hosting known as SiteRubix. I’m astounded at the web hosting that Wealthy Affiliate provide and I’ll show you why.

Performance Matters

When you sign up with one of these larger companies on their cheaper hosting versions, you’re placed in a long line of websites that are together bundled onto a shared server with limited data space. This can be with thousands of other domains collectively which slow your site down.

Whilst this is fine if you don’t care about website loading speed, most people want their site to load as fast as possible. Why is this? Because statistics show that if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, visitors will go elsewhere.

The speed performance is critical to not only having visitors stopover at your website, but search engines will also appreciate this and rank your website higher.

Speed is an SEO factor, so the quicker your website loads, the more highly Google and co will boost your website.

Wealthy Affiliate could offer a low quality service like shared hosts do, but they’re not in the business of offering a second rate service.

They also have other speed integrations which I’ll touch on below.

How WA Speed up Your Website

Although WordPress is the most popular platform for building websites, it can be a little slow when you start to add images and plugins to your site. If you do a Google search, you’ll find many people are looking for ways they can speed up their websites. Unfortunately, many of the solutions seem to come from adding in another plugin.

One of the most popular type of plugins for this, is a caching plugin. So what does a cache plugin do?

In simple terms, a cache plugin will create a static version of your web-page. When a visitor typically visits a web page, your WordPress website retrieves all the information that makes up the post or page, including the database, so that your visitor can view it. This can take valuable seconds to compile it into a HTML page.

Most web pages you create will rarely change, so allowing a cache plugin to create a static version is a great idea. This way, any future visitors will see the static version which has already been created, and is much quicker to load.

This is where Wealthy Affiliate hosting is a huge bonus, as they have caching integrated so no plugin is required. A cached page can provide speed improvements of up to 20 x faster than normal page loading.

Now, just recently WA have upgraded their hosting and introduced an ‘Extreme’ speed accelerator which includes further optimisation. How have they done this?

Wealthy Affiliate have now included an option that’s available in most of the caching plugins which further speeds up your website. It’s known as ‘combining and minifying JavaScript and CSS’.

In simple terms, this will combine your Javascript files and CSS files into one single file. This helps reduced the number of HTTP requests on your server and reduced bandwidth consumption used on your website.

This all helps to reduce file size and speed up site loading execution times.

Check out the video below to see how Wealthy Affiliate hosing can help you.

Is WA Hosting Secure

When you have your website hosted at GoDaddy or Bluehost etc, you’ll just be presented with a website with no layers of security. You can see if this security layer is active on a website in the browser bar. If it says ‘http’, there is no security associated with the website.

Getting layers of security which encrypt things like your login password are crucial in today’s WiFi age. Especially if you are logging in from Starbucks for instance. Anyone that knows how to hack, can view your password when you type it on shared open WiFi connections.

Wealthy Affiliate give all websites this extra layer of security, so all their websites will have ‘https’ at the beginning of the domain name along with a green padlock. This is known as a SSL certificate. You can view it in the browser bar of this website which is hosted at WA.

So, if you have a WA hosted website and you login at Starbucks, the password will show as encrypted so nobody will be able to view it.

This used to be just for their premium memberships but they’ve now extended this to the free membership also.

So imagine this. You can join up at Wealthy Affiliate and create a free website with SSL security in the form of a SSL certificate! Yeah, for nothing.

Comparing The Major Players

The owners of Wealthy Affiliate have written a blog post comparing their hosting to the major hosting companies, confirming that their state of the art hosting is of the utmost quality. You can read this article which will give you some much needed perspective on WA hosting.

The Details You Need to Know

According to website.com, ‘an average page size of 50KB, 20,000 visitors per month, and 5 pages per visitor your website will need about 5000MB, or 5GB, of bandwidth per month. Note that 20,000 visitors per month equates to approximately 667 visitors per day. This is a number even most large websites cannot achieve.’

So, 5GB is plenty of space for way more than your average usage. Wealthy Affiliate gives you 30GB, so you know you’ll never have storage problems.

You’ll also not that the above comment suggests up to 20,000 visitors to a page per month is way more than large companies expect. The bandwidth at Wealthy Affiliate is at 500K Visitors/Mth, so no problems there either.

Add to this, the fact you can store up to 25 websites with full daily backups, enterprise security, unlimited email accounts, botnet security and 24/7 access to server administrators, and you know you’ve got an awesome service.

So, What Does it Cost

Firstly, you need to understand that Wealthy Affiliate it not predominantly a hosting company. They are an affiliate marketing training platform that hosts their members websites. This is what makes the program as a whole, that much more impressive.

WA have a free membership where you can get 2 secure hosted websites with SSL certificates. I’m not sure anywhere else on the internet offers this.

SiteSpeed is not available for free members, you can’t expect everything for free now can you!

So what will you pay for the best hosting for a WordPress website? You can join up as a Premium member at Wealthy Affiliate for $359 per year. This works out to under $30 per month if you pay on a yearly basis. Alternatively, pay month by month at $49.

Woah there, just hang on a second!

Although you’ll pay less than half a cup of coffee per day for WA hosting, you’re also going to learn how to monetise your website via affiliate marketing. Here’s where you can learn how to build a website to make money via the WA platform.

You Should Try before You Buy

Signing up to a program, or hosting for that matter, is an investment in your future. Finding out what exactly is involved before paying any money seems unusual these days, but that’s exactly what you can do at WA.

By signing up for a Free membership, you’ll get a weeks trial which includes a limited number of the premium features. You can also go through the first phase (10 lessons) of the ‘Entrepreneur Certification Course’. You can also use the website builder as part of your affiliate marketing and website solution.

After the first 7 days, you’ll have a good understanding of what you get for the cost. You’ll realise that the value for money is way beyond anything else on the internet. To not only have all your secure, quality hosting as part of the package, you get so much more in training, support and tools to help you make an online income.

Oh, and you’ll also get a discount on your first month. To get you into the mood of going premium, you’ll only have to pay $19 for month 1. From then on, you have the option of going yearly or pay month by month.

Wrapping Up

There’s so much to think about when starting a blog of your own. You’ll also find there’s so many places that will offer you advice and services.

If you’re in the situation where you just want to start a website and learn how to make money from it, then the Wealthy Affiliate platform cannot be surpassed. Everything I’ve mentioned is included and there are no up-sells.

For those unsure what an up-sell is, you won’t be offered to purchase any ad-dons or other programs for an extra cost. The fee is the fee. The yearly or monthly cost is all you’ll have to pay, there’s not added extras. And to begin with, you can learn how to create a free website with a free domain name.

If you want proof of how quickly your website can load, refresh this page. I have this website setup on the Wealthy Affiliate servers. Hopefully you’re NOT in a low reception spot, making me look like a goose!

So many people can benefit from what can be learned at Wealthy Affiliate, from work at home jobs for the disabled, to work at home for introverts. It’s even a great way to make money online in retirement.

Check out the Wealthy Affiliate hosting here

Good luck with your decision.