SiteGround new Affiliate Program – did we sell our souls?

The standard web hosting affiliate market was a place we had been reluctant to go to. It somehow seemed wrong to us to pay more than a whole year of income for a sale generated by someone, who chooses which hosting services to recommend not based on personal experience but only based on the commission rates offered. And now here we are: launching a new affiliate program that is extremely competitive with commission rates among the highest and withhold periods among the shortest in the industry (see affiliate program comparisson PDF).

Why did we decide to have a competitive affiliate program?

So what happened, did we changed our philosophy? Well, actually we did not. We still believe that the main motivation for recommending our services should be its quality. We still believe that our own customers have a great potential to be successful brand ambassadors, based on their own experience. However, we realized that if we want to motivate more people to get to know our service and recommend it, even when they are not using it on a daily basis, we need to invest some more. Additionally, we believe that even among the hard core professional web hosting affiliates there are people that are willing to choose their partners more carefully, paying attention to quality too on top of commission rates and they are the ones we now target. We entered the affiliate market because we realised that it can offer much more than the standard directory with 10 listed hosting companies that are no different from each other, and we already see that we have made the right choice.

Is it really worth it?

Even though the new affiliate program is still quite young and it is just now that we are officially launching it and starting to promote it more actively we have already seen some really good results:

• We have managed to motivate many of our existing customers to spread the word even more.
• We currently count some respected open-source developers among our affiliates. These people know everything there is to know about getting the most from their web applications, and they have selected SiteGround as the best place for the job. To mention just a few of them:
  • WordPress and Joomla developer GavickPro refers customers to SiteGround because we go the extra mile to help people work with these applications.
  • BuildaJoomlaWebsite helps people get started with Joomla and recommends SiteGround due to our unique Joomla expertise.
  • Customer Paradigm, a Magento service provider, decided to send customers to us, after personally testing Magento performance on our servers.
• We have also seen some of the hosting directories actually go the extra mile by opening test accounts and writing detailed real reviews about our service:
  • Joomla Hosting Reviews give us 9.4 out of 10 after testing our services.
  • 100 Web Hosting have written a review of our account management functions.
  • Reviews Gurus has added an Expert review about us, based on his own experience.

For more information on the SiteGround web hosting affiliate program, visit this page.