WhoIsHostingThis.com: How You Can Help Support Our Site (For Free!)

(aka Our FTC Disclosure, and Why It Matters to You)

In short: We earn referral fees if you buy hosting from many of our partner web hosting companies via our site.

Referral Fees? Sounds Shady…

It’s not. This is known as affiliate marketing. The biggest brands on the interwebz all offer affiliate programs (eg. Amazon, eBay, Expedia), while many of your favorite sites use affiliate marketing to pay the bills.

The only difference is that some forget to tell their users (we’re looking at you, Pinterest)…

Sometimes people use banner ads like these…

…while other times you just see a special link unique to each webmaster to track referrals. Here are some real-life examples…

http://bluehost.com/track/qualitynonsense/ is a BlueHost affiliate link

http://justhost.com/track/qualitynonsense/ is a JustHost affiliate link

Sometimes, a naked link works too, if the webmaster and the webhhost have a special agreement.

Once you arrive at the webhost, you are tagged with a special cookie to track the referral. If you spend money, they’ll pay us a referral fee.

These vary from host to host. For a domain sale at Go Daddy, we might earn $1. For selling a budget hosting plan, we might earn $60.

Want to learn more about hosting affiliate programs? Visit our sister site Hosting Affiliate.com.

It’s the internet equivalent of a salesman getting paid a commission for selling a product. Just like real life, there are scrupulous and unscrupulous salesmen online.

In fact, we were the first hosting reviews site to disclose affiliate relationships back in 2008 – four years before the FTC started requiring affiliates to disclose in 2012!

We use the revenue generated to pay the hefty costs that come with running a free, popular site – millions of people visit us each year. It also pays for the huge investment required to support features like like our awesome reviews and coupons, comparison tools.

If everyone stopped buying hosting via our affiliate links, we’d have to shut the site. Sad face.

Why We’d Like Your Support…

Sites like this cost cold hard cash to build, run and maintain. Since 2008, we’ve invested enough money that – forgive our being blunt here – would buy a nice home in many parts of the USA.

We’ve a small-but-dedicated team – programmers, webmasters, writers, editors and bloggers. Unsurprisingly, we pay them for their time to get the best people.

Relax: It Only Takes One Click!

How can you help us out? It’s simple – buy via our special links, and you help support our site at no extra cost.

Any time you buy hosting, domains or any other service from the companies we include in our reviews section, comparison tool or discounts & coupons sections, please use the links on-site to help support our efforts.

Question #1: Will It Cost Me More? (Hint: No)

Never. In fact, our deals often save you money.

Web hosts are so keen to gain new customers that they offer us special discounts for our users. For example, say you are shopping for a host for WordPress that supports PHP and linux. You settle on iPage.com and so – at the time of writing – get a nifty discount on your monthly fee.

(Be sure to take a look at our coupons section for more deals).

In short: being awesome is not enough, and every business spends money recruiting new customers. The biggest web hosts in the world – including iPage, JustHost and BlueHost – all spend big bucks to generate new business.

New customers have to come from *somewhere*. Each of these hosts pay affiliates like us instead of spending more money on fancy print ads, human billboards or regular salespeople.

(Hint: anybody who shouts ‘word of mouth!’ has never tried building a business on word of mouth alone…)

Question #2: Wait! Can You Can See My Personal Details?

Nope. We don’t see any personal information: name, address, credit card details etc.

We usually see that an anonymous user has spent $x on date/time and which hosting plan they bought. Here’s what the reports for Go Daddy look like…

A few hosts also show their new customer’s websites, which is cool because we get to check out the awesome projects our users build.

Question #3: How Else Do You Make Money?

We also sell advertising space (and our ads look like ads, not endorsements).

Got Questions?

No problem. Drop us a line via our contact form and we’ll answer them and update this page, too.