HostGator.com offers a wide variety of products that you can promote as an affiliate and make money, but honestly, is this program worth it to join?
In this honest and unbiased HostGator affiliate program review, I will tell you the good and the bad about this hosting affiliate program, and whether there are better alternatives to join today.
Without further ado, let’s begin!
HostGator Affiliate Program Review Summary
- Name: HostGator Affiliate Program
- Website: www.HostGator.com/affiliates
- Founders: Brent Oxley
- Price: Free to join
- Legit/Scam: Legit, but comes with many disadvantages
Overall OnlinePassiveIncomeGuide.com Rating: 70 of 100
Summary: HostGator affiliate program is legit, and they offer a good commission rate structure, but it comes with many disadvantages that might make your efforts in promoting their services inefficient such as the many complaints from customers about customer support.
What Is HostGator Affiliate Program?
The HostGator Affiliate Program is a program that allows affiliates like bloggers and website owners make money by promoting the web hosting services that HostGator.com offers, in exchange of a commission for every customer they bring.
How Does HostGator Affiliate Program Work?
1 – Sign Up for HostGator Affiliate Program to Get Your Affiliate Links
This is the first step of joining any affiliate program.
And the process is usually the same, you need to sign up by filling a certain form where you provide some basic info about you and your business, such as: your name, your website, your country, your experience with affiliate marketing, how you plan to promote HostGator and some other questions.
The HostGator affiliate program is hosted on an affiliate network that is called Impact Radius, and here’s a screenshot from the HostGator affiliate program signup process.
After you apply for joining the HostGator.com affiliate program, you need to wait for upto 48 hours (2 working days) so that they do the manual review and decide whether to approve your application or not.
In order to increase your chances of getting approved, you better have your site in place and it should have enough quality content and traffic coming to it already before you apply.
2 – Start Promoting HostGator
Once approved to become a Hostgator Affiliate, you can now login to your affiliate dashboard through the affiliate network and start creating affiliate links for the HostGator products you want to promote.
You can promote HostGator as an affiliate in different ways, but here are some of the main methods:
- Starting a niche blog where you help people learn how to create websites, migrate from one hosting to another, fix web hosting issues, and other topics, and you share your affiliate link in your content to drive your website’s readers to signup for one of HostGator’s plans.
- Start a niche YouTube channel and create video walkthroughs to teach people how they can use HostGator to create a website based on a certain CMS or how to migrate to HostGator from other hosting providers.
- Promoting HostGator to your web development clients.
- Create discount codes and offer them to people looking for web hosting.
- Helping people on forums and Q&A platforms with questions related to hosting and website building, and promote Hostgator whenever it is relevant.
And many other ways.
And although you can do affiliate marketing in many ways without a website, however, the most efficient way and the one that works best on the long run is the first method using a niche blog that you own, and where you create helpful content with screenshots, and you optimize it to rank on Google and other search engines so that people find it when they are looking for something relevant to your website on Google.
Not only that you get the organic, free traffic, which converts the best, but also this method shows more trust and it is better on the long run.
Don’t worry if you know nothing about building websites to do affiliate marketing, this platform and community helped me start with this method in a step-by-step process and provided me with all of the necessary tools.
3 – Start Promoting Your Content to Earn Affiliate Commissions from HostGator
After you created the helpful content on your site, and after doing the necessary steps to rank it on search engines, you can also use other methods like search ads in order to drive more targeted people to your articles where you promote HostGator services through your affiliate link.
And depending on your performance and on how many customers you bring to HostGator every month, you get a commission on every sale ($65-$125), which will be paid to you after a specific period (2 months and 10 days).
And that’s how the HostGator affiliate program works and how you can make money with HostGator.com as an affiliate.
HostGator Affiliate Program Breakdown
Products to Promote As a HostGator.com Affiliate
HostGator offers a good range of products and services that you can promote as an affiliate, such as:
- Shared web hosting.
- WordPress hosting.
- A website builder.
- Dedicated hosting.
- VPS hosting.
- Reseller hosting.
This gives you more opportunities to promote HostGator as an affiliate to a bigger audience.
HostGator Affiliate Commission Rate Structure
HostGator’s affiliate program offers a performance-based affiliate commission structure, which means that the more customers you bring per month, the higher your per-sale commission will be for that month, as follows:
- 1-5 Sales: $65 /Sale
- 6-10 Sales: $75 /Sale
- 11-20 Sales: $100 /Sale
- 21+ Sales: $125 /Sale
This is a good structure and it is normal among some other affiliate programs, especially in the hosting industry.
HostGator Affiliate Payment Method
The HostGator affiliate program is hosted on the Impact Radius affiliate network, which means that the affiliate payout can be received through any of the payment methods of the Impact Radius, which are: PayPal, Check, Wire Transfer, Direct Deposit, and ACH Transfer.
That’s great because different affiliates of HostGator might have different ways or abilities of getting payments online, and not many other web hosting affiliate programs offer this range of payout methods for affiliates.
For example, the Bluehost affiliate program pays only through PayPal.
HostGator Affiliate Cookie
Another good thing about this program is that HostGator’s affiliate cookie duration is 60 days, which means that if someone clicks on your affiliate link, and signs up for a HostGator plan 59 days later, you still get a commission, provided that they didn’t click on another affiliate’s link.
HostGator Affiliate Marketing Resources & Support
HostGator offers affiliates a set of banners, ads, and tracking links, in addition to the ability to create discount codes for their referrals in order to increase conversion rates.
You can also sing up for the email newsletter in order to receive promo newsletters and announcements.
HostGator Affiliate Program Cost to Join
The HostGator affiliate program is free to join, but you need a website in place, which costs some money.
Add to that, in order to research the market and know how to promote HostGator products efficiently, you need other research tools, which usually cost money.
But luckily, you can find all what you need to start and grow an affiliate site at one place for an affordable monthly fee (without hidden costs and upsells) the place I will reveal to you in the last section of this review of the HostGator affiliate program.
Pros & Cons of The HostGator Affiliate Program
Pros:
- A good commission structure.
- Long cookie duration.
- Ability to create discount codes.
- A wide range of products to promote.
- Many payment methods for getting your affiliate commissions from HostGator.
Cons:
- Long commission withhold period that goes for up to 2 months + 10 days in order to overcome all the money back and charge backs payments.
- The commission doesn’t differ based on the products promoted. For example, a VPS plan is more expensive and more difficult to promote than a shared hosting plan, yet, HostGator pays affiliates the same commission for bringing sales on these two plans.
- The customers’ complaints about HostGator.com, which makes it hard to promote it as many of your referrals would read the online reviews like the complaints on Trustpilot before buying any HostGator plan through your link.
Who Is HostGator Affiliate Program for?
The HostGator affiliate program is good for you if you want a good range of web hosting services to promote through one affiliate program, but it comes with many disadvantages as I explained in the previous section.
In my opinion, it is better to join any of the alternatives mentioned below and only consider HostGator if you were not approved by those alternatives.
Best HostGator Affiliate Program Alternatives
Here are some of the best alternatives to the HostGator affiliate program that you can join to potentially make money promoting their services as an affiliate:
1 – A2 Hosting Affiliate Program: One of the best web hosting affiliate programs as it offers a wide range of products to promote at good prices, and they have a high satisfaction rate from their customers. Check out my A2 Hosting affiliate review for more details.
2 – SiteGround Affiliate Program: Similar to the first alternative above, SiteGround is one of the most reputable web hosting companies that your referrals would love to use. Check out my SiteGround Affiliate Program Review.
3 – Shopify Affiliate Program: Another great affiliate program if you want to promote an easy and reliable ecom store builder and hosting company. I have been an affiliate for Shopify for a while and they don’t hold the affiliate commission for more than two weeks. Check out my Shopify affiliate program review for more details.
These three are all better alternatives to join than the HostGator affiliate program in order to make money promoting web hosting services thanks to their commission rates, payout period, reliability and customer support, and many other factors.
Conclusion – Is HostGator Affiliate Program Legit & Worth it?
The HostGator affiliate program is a legit one, and it pays well, but honestly, the alternatives in the previous section above are better to join because they have a better support and reliability, which helps increase conversions from your affiliate promotions.
- Name: HostGator Affiliate Program
- Website: www.HostGator.com/affiliates
- Founders: Brent Oxley
- Price: Free to join
- Legit/Scam: Legit, but comes with many disadvantages
Overall OnlinePassiveIncomeGuide.com Rating: 70 of 100
That’s my final conclusion to this HostGator affiliate program review.
Before You Go, The Best Hosting Affiliate Program Can’t Make You Money without…
No matter how good an affiliate program is, HostGator or any alternative, you won’t be able to make money with it if you don’t have the necessary skills and tools that you need in order to succeed with affiliate marketing.
When I started with affiliate marketing, I had access to the best paying affiliate programs, but I couldn’t make a sustainable income, because I lacked many skills and tools that would help me create a long-term success.
But this all changed when I joined a platform that offered me all what I needed, such as:
- The step-by-step, proven to work plan.
- The detailed affiliate marketing training.
- The research tools to find opportunities for making money with affiliate programs like the HostGator program.
- The great web hosting with a premium support so that I don’t need to worry about the technical stuff.
- And most important, the amazing and supportive community of 2 million entrepreneurs that are willing to help me whenever I ask for help.
And much more.
And you too, can join this amazing platform and community in order to get all of what I mentioned above, at a very affordable monthly fee that includes everything and doesn’t come with hidden fees and surprises.
This platform is called Wealthy Affiliate, and it has been there for 15+ years now, and it keeps growing and adding new training lessons and features to help affiliate marketers at all levels.
Even better, they offer a free plan that you can join now without a credit card in order to try it before you pay for the paid one, which is very affordable and underpriced.
If you are serious about succeeding in affiliate marketing and making money with the HostGator affiliate program or its alternatives, then this is the place to go in order to learn and find all the tools necessary for building your business the right way. (Only if you are willing to take consistent action)
Check out my review of Wealthy Affiliate to learn more about what this platform can offer to you, and maybe, join it for the free Starter membership in order to try it before you decide whether to get the paid plan or not.
It’s completely up to you.
I hope that my HostGator affiliate program review was helpful for you.
If you still have any question, or you need any help regarding anything mentioned in this review, please, let me know in the comments’ section below and I will try to help you asap 🙂