With an affiliate program, you may be able to easily attract new affiliates (after all it doesn’t cost them anything), but it seems to me that unless you pay as much as the top unlimited hosts (that have lower selling prices = higher conversion) there is little motivation for affiliates to push FrogHost over say JustHost to new buyers. It seems to me the only type of people most FH affiliates, and affiliates of smaller hosts will be interested in pushing to are people who are already considering FrogHost.

For example, say someone is interested in purchasing a plan from FrogHost, they google “FrogHost” and one of your affiliates creates a site called “froghostcoupons.com”, it will intrigue the customer, because of the potential deals. The customer visits the site and will likely click on the affiliate links there. Eventually once the customer signs up, you would have to pay the affiliate, whereas you could have had this customer without the affiliate and his/her links.

To me the real value of an affiliate program would be to land in the top spot of the so-called top 10 review sites, but for that you would have to have very large payouts so to motivate people to primarily push your brand over others, rather than have them save the link for the odd person who is considering going with FrogHost anyway.

Without Hawk Host we could still do such an affiliate program. It’s better designed than most of where the problems in payouts come up.

I read all the time about people being denied payouts because the user signs up for one month at say $5 then their affiliate wants a $50 payout. Typically these situations don’t line up at all. So we find it easier to avoid such an issue and say 50% payout no matter the term or plan. So in some cases it’s less than the other host (monthly) but more when we start talking about annual plans. It reduces our risk while still making money.

I think affiliate programs are easier to push than hosting in general. The people have no cost involved in adding our link. We contact x site and say look we pay out potentially more than everyone else you should add us. It’s no loss situation for them typically unless they don’t have room for us.

The affiliate program with Frog Host itself already has 20 affiliates and most of them being just affiliates. Some have already referred customers to us as well.

As far as spending it on advertising instead. Most places you’re paying for web hosting related things nearly $5 per click. It’s not cheap at all and there is no guarantee you’ll get a conversion every 10 clicks which is about what your affiliate payout might be.

As for other companies pushing affiliate programs with cheap plans and say $60 payout. That plan is only cheap if you sign up for a long term. So that’s $3.95 every 36 months or if you do monthly that’s $7.95 so not quite as cheap.

So lets do the math here $142.20 every 3 years and you get $60 of that. On our same plan low cost plan that’s $5.95/month or 142.80 every 2 years. So it works out to $71.40 payout so it’s even more.

This though factors in just our 2 year plans and 3 year plans will be coming soon. So lets say it’s $4.95 to match with our current structure. So $178.20 is the total for 3 years. The affiliate would make $89.10 on that account.

The majority of users sign up for a year so maybe it makes sense to always payout say $60. For us right now though we wouldn’t have that much backing to deal with the scam portions of the system. If you’re selling 50 accounts a day it’s much easier to eat a $60 affiliate on a monthly account. For us though just not that big even with Hawk Host to do that for a decent period of time.

If you had started FrogHost without the existence of HawkHost and its financial backing, could you theoretically afford such an affiliate program? Also, how do you intend to reach people who would sign up for your affiliate program in the first place? Wouldn’t that alone require some investment in terms of advertising? Wouldn’t that advertising be better spent trying to attract potential customers to the brand?

I understand the “brand pushing” that comes with affiliate programs, but to me it seems that unless you have a huge financial backing to offer massive payouts, the brand awareness won’t get too far.

For example, JustHost’s affiliate program is appealing to a lot of people, not only because the payout is huge, but because JustHost is a cheap host, which in turn means a higher conversion rate for affiliates. Unless you have the huge financial backing to provide a minimum $60 payout on a $3.50/month plan, it seems to me that the competition for affiliates itself is just as tough as the competition for getting web hosting clients.

Affiliate systems are also a form of advertising. They may only have one of x amount of users convert. It’s still advertising that you’re not paying a CPM or CPC on it’s just a payment when conversion is made. So it’s not like paying $1-$10 per click who may not even sign up.

Finally what we pay for servers is not what a run of the mill company pays either. We’re not a customer with Softlayer with one server. So we have discounts not available to the small time provider. We also of course pay less for any licenses we purchase from providers. We have infrastructure already in place to run other aspects.

I agree it might not work for a small provider who doesn’t want to lose money in the short term. For larger providers or ones with financial backing it’s much easier to deal with.

So ultimately you can’t look at _only_ the bottom line regarding affiliate marketing – pushing affiliates in our case is much more than the revenue generated (Frog Host is a new company so we want to not only get conversions but put some umph into the brand).

Regarding how we can still survive with these numbers it’s quite simple really: we’re backed by our parent company which has been wildly successful. As a result we have an abundance of resources to launch another brand with a different niche and business model.

How is it possible for you to provide 2 years of unlimited web hosting, with support, and the SoftLayer server setup that you have for just $71.40?

i’m a communications/tech junkie aswell, i’m sooo jealous, i’m not able to use the google voice awesomeness, since i don’t reside in the US.

nice setup you got there.

me being in germany, i got 2 landline #’s forwarded to my cell, because cell numbers are priced higher for the caller (caller party pays sys).
one # for the area around my house and a second for the whole country, finally i got the cell #, texts to the landline #’s won’t get through

i like the US sys sooo much better, did i mention, that i’m jealous that you can use your gv account?