Gadooney.com

One of the common myths that still abounds is that setting up your own Web hosting is difficult, expensive, and requires a ginormous amount of technical know-how. The reality is that getting your own Web host is simple, cheap, and requires only the technical know-how of clicking a mouse.

Technically speaking, you can actually make money via affiliate marketing with just a free Blogger account, so you don’t even have to pony up cash for a hosting package. I highly recommend that you don’t go the free route, though, as hosting is dirt cheap and it’ll open up many nice options for you that you won’t have with a free service like Blogger.

I recommend keeping it simple when you get a hosting package, and to not get bogged down in details. Hosting is becoming more and more commoditized as time goes by, and these days there’s very little difference in most packages, and they’re generally in the same ballpark price range. Don’t worry about how many gigs of traffic you get and how many users that is and how much storage you have, etc. Pretty much any entry-level package you get will be just fine your needs when starting out and you can always upgrade your package later if you need to.

Here are a few things to look for when selecting a Web host:1) Unlimited domains: Most hosts offer you the ability to put an unlimited number of domains on your hosting account at no extra charge. This is a good thing, as you’ll be creating a number of sites over time and you want to have room to add them to your hosting package at no extra cost. It’s fine if they’re just name-based domains and not unlimited domains with a unique IP address.

2) Support for WordPress and mySQL: I’ll touch on this more later, but the best way to get started with affiliate marketing is to use the WordPress blogging software as a content management system (CMS). When I say “support for WordPress” I basically mean that it’s a nice bonus if you can find a host like HostGator that offers an add-on package that makes implementing WordPress very simple. You can install WordPress on just about any hosting package that offers you mySQL databases, but some hosts make it very easy to install.As far as mySQL databases, look for a host that provides you with unlimited ones, and preferably one that allows you to create the databases yourself. This is pretty common and isn’t hard to find. If they insist on creating the databases on their end, that’s cool and not a deal-breaker, it just adds an element of complexity as far as contacting customer support and waiting for them to create the database. Wordpress requires a mySQL database to work, so that’s why it’s listed here as something to look for.

3) Good customer service: Pretty self-explanatory, but you don’t want to be waiting for days to get a domain added to your hosting account.

4) Shared hosting is fine. When you have an empire of affiliate sites and ten billion unique users each day, then yeah, you need to go the dedicated server route. But for most of us normal affiliates, shared hosting is perfectly fine.

And that’s pretty much it. For comparison sakes, my hosting package at the moment is for 25 gigs of data transfer, 100000 MB of storage, and unlimited domains and mySQL databases, for $12/month. Anything in that ballpark is more than enough to serve your needs.

Below are some hosts that offer good entry-level packages that I’ve used in the past and have had good experiences with, that offer all of the above goodies:

HostGator

AN Hosting

1&1

GoDaddy.com

HostRocket.Com