What is a Good Hosting Service for Selling EBooks
If you’re wondering “What’s a good hosting service for selling my EBooks”, then you’ve come to the right post. Pull up a beer and have a seat.
I’ve tried a few hosting services and have settled on HostGator for a few reasons. I’ll walk you through what I’ve experienced so you can see whether it’s a good fit for you and your plans for selling ebooks online.
My First EBook Hosting Site Story
Initially, my first EBook came from a blog where I was writing about personal training. After I had written about 40 posts on the process of becoming a personal trainer, I decided “What the hell, let’s throw this into a book and sell it”. (Ahhh, the innocent days…)
At that time, I didn’t know what I was doing nor where I was going with my idea of selling EBooks. I had no idea I’d write another, and another, and another. Incidentally, I still don’t know what I’m doing today nor where I’m going tomorrow, but bear with me for a bit…maybe something genius will come out!
Since I didn’t know my long term plan, I signed up with my favorite web hosting company LaughingSquid out of San Francisco. These guys really are fantastic, they’re a small shop that runs reliable servers for your website. I never had a single bad experience with them and only stopped using them because my needs changed outside of their specialty.
Specifically, my issue was LaughingSquid charges you for each domain you host with them. After my first couple of books and websites, I had 6 domains…each costing about $10 a month.
Now, here’s my issue with that situation…if I had a fleeting idea that I wanted to put on the web, it required at least 48 hours turnaround before I could set up a new domain with LaughingSquid. Plus, it cost me another $10 a month, $120 a year, etc…That’s real money. And real money equals real beers.
What I found was that the cost of adding a new domain and the time I had to wait before I could use a new site retarded my entrepreneurial ideas…the cost and time made me shelve projects to ‘think about it for a while‘ before I went through the hassle and expense on an unproven idea.
I’m an entrepreneur at heart. Shelving ideas does not sit well with me. So I looked for a better solution.
A solution where there was no additional cost to try new ideas online.
I came across HostGator and found that for the same price per month, I could have as many domains hosted as I wanted. (Well, at least as many as I was going to be able to run effectively. If you’re putting up 294,492 sites, it’s probably not the best option.)
HostGator, so far, has been effortless to use. And it has no ‘friction’ cost when I decide…after 4 too many beers on a Saturday night…to buy a domain name and put up a new website in the weee hours of a Sunday morning. It costs me nothing to add a new site (other than the DNS registration fee, that one-time fee to buy the domain name). Basically, HostGator allows me to do multiple “trial and triage” ideas for different website ideas and offerings. If you think you may want 2 or more websites, this is the type of hosting you need.
Why does this matter for an EBook publisher? Because, like me, you may find that you want to sell more than one EBook. If you use a hosting service, like HostGator, that allows you to add multiple sites for no additional cost, you’re cutting down on expenses dramatically. Additionally, if you’re anything like me, you think like this:
Ok, if I bang out a new book…and it doesn’t cost me an extra penny to give that book it’s own website…and it doesn’t cost a penny more to sell it…why not bang out a new book? I’ll pocket 100% of the money it produces.
Get that? 100% of your incremental revenue is profit, if you already have a website running on HostGator and are using E-Junkie. Does it get any better?
So, my advice for hosting your EBook sales letters is to use HostGator or a similiar hosting service that allows you to add domains to your hosting package with no additional cost.
HostGator’s “Baby” plan sells for something ridiculously cheap like $8 a month for unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, and unlimited disk space. The customer service is adequate and has yet to fail me, but I’m always waiting for it to cause nothing this good lasts forever. For me, as a novice authority on EBook marketing, the best hosting plan for EBook sellers is HostGator.
Now where’s my beer? I’ll be right back…
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