Just under two weeks ago I posted about XSitePro being a superb simple yet powerful tool for creating adsense and affiliate websites. Paul from XSitePro has just emailed me that XSitePro has won the prestigious PC Advisor ‘Recommended’ award – recommendations don’t come much higher than that!

The reviewer comments that “Getting a good-looking site up and running within minutes is very simple” and “Where XSitePro 2.0 really stands out is by applying this ease of use to a wide range of additional features which, if coded by hand or created using Dreamweaver would be considerably more complex.”

Why not check out the full review at PC Advisor.

Many so-called ‘super affiliates’ will tell you that expensive hosting is required for AdSense and Affiliate websites. This is not the case.

In webhosting you do definitely get what you pay for, and the servers required to run a large site are very expensive indeed. Of course, the commissions on selling expensive hosting packages is much higher than the commission on selling a bargain basement package – and this is the reason why people push the expensive products.

I can tell you from experience that for hosting simple affiliate websites, the best kind of hosting is shared hosting – a server that has its capacity divided up into packages and sold to many webmasters. Want to know why?

Servers are time consuming and difficult to configure correctly. Keeping a server secure from hackers and other threats, applying patches and updates, monitoring uptime etc is a full time, specialist job. This job is done for you with shared hosting!

Think about what happens if your server goes ‘down’ and becomes unreachable. You have to:

• Notice the site is down
• Find the cause
• Pay for support (unless you’re super technical)
• Wait for the fix

All this time your websites are rejecting traffic, not earning you money and running the risk of being de-indexed by search engines! This has happened to me at 5pm Friday on a holiday weekend with no support available until 9am Tuesday! Just imagine how much this could cost you if you didn’t notice the fault and you were paying for traffic through AdWords!

If your site is on a shared server the support team will be sure to get the server back up and running super quick – there might be 100 customers on that server, which means the fault is 100x more likely to be noticed quickly, and there will be 100x more support tickets for them to deal with if they don’t fix it quick smart!

Also, don’t think that if you want to show video, photos or host large file downloads that you need a dedicated server – video can be hosted in many places such as youtube or google video, photos hosted on flickr or picasa, files hosted on rapidshare… get creative!

I personally always choose to use shared hosting with cPanel/WHM. It’s industry standard software used by most of the marketers I do business with. It is extremely easy to backup and restore sites which makes moving from one host to another easy. This has several advantages:

• If you have a bad experience with the host you can easily move to another (this also keeps hosting companies competitive – they know they have to work to keep your business)
• Buying and selling websites is easy (the seller simply provides a backup file to be restored on the new owners server)
• Keeping a backup on your home PC is easy

Another feature to look out for when selecting a host is fantastico. Fantastico allows ‘one click install’ of many software packages that are useful to affiliate and adsense marketers, including content management and blogging software such as WordPress.

Two cheap hosts I recommend are Hostgator (I have the baby package $7.95/mo) and BlueHost ($6.95/mo). Both are very similar in terms of cost and what you get. Be sure to choose an unlimited domains package so you can host as many sites as you need. You can get a discount on your first month with Hostgator by clicking here and using discount code: HGC25.

Please share your hosting experiences by commenting below

The original XSitePro was released in 2004, and was a major contributor to many adsense fortunes. XSitePro was designed to be the ultimate simple to use yet feature rich web designer especially for affiliate marketers. Many web designers who were struggling with complex softare like Frontpage or Dreamweaver found that XSitePro contributed to to their business by helping them design and publish websites in double-quick time.

In mid-2008 the XSitePro team released the next generation web publishing tool for affiliates – XSitePro2. XSitePro2 is not just an improvement of the original software – it is a reinvention, adding more than 100 new features.

XSitePro2 allows non-technical marketers to publish their content in a great looking template (hundreds included, and thousands available) along with adsense or affiliate links.

If you have a directories full of unused content on your hard drive or (like me) use writers from rentacoder or elance then you will love the import feature. Just point XSitePro at a directory full of articles and it will import them to your project formatting them correctly for publication, and adding keywords and tags on the fly.

XSitePro2 makes adding AdSense code and affiliate links to your website super easy. Advanced functions such as video and RSS feeds are also supported.

Download the XSitePro brochure, or read an XSitePro review on About.com.