Wealthy Affiliate Web Hosting – Is It The Right Choice For You?

Company: Wealthy Affiliate

Website: wealthyaffiliate.com

Price: $49/month, or $29/month if paid yearly

Who it’s for: This hosting is a good fit for those starting out either with affiliate marketing, small blogs, or small company websites. No option for dedicated hosting and can only use the WordPress platform.

Whether you’ve heard of Wealthy Affiliate or not, you might be surprised to know that this affiliate marketing training center actually provides pretty decent web hosting for small bloggers and businesses.

Let’s go through what they have to offer so you can make a better decision about if you want to host with them, or choose another host (like Siteground or Bluehost).

And honestly, considering they’re not heavily marketed as a web hosting company (they are primarily an affiliate marketing training program) the hosting they offer is fantastic and worth the price alone. It isn’t given nearly the amount of praise and attention it deserves.

Before I get into this review of Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting plan, the most important thing for you to keep in mind is your needs. While they offer amazing fully managed WordPress hosting, that is what they are limited to for the most part.

It isn’t exactly fair to compare Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting with some of the bigger hosting companies because they simply don’t offer all the features that specialized hosting companies can offer.

For example, there are no plans to pick from like other companies offer. While there hosting technically hosts up to 25 domains (as well as an additional 25 of their free siterubix.com websites), you can’t just increase your plan if your websites outgrow their maximum capabilities. 

If you need dedicated hosting because you have a very popular website and need a lot of resources, you won’t be able to find that offered at Wealthy Affiliate.

However, for most people starting out in affiliate marketing and even established business owners, the hosting offered there is more than adequate.

What’s the advantage of using Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting?

Managed WordPress Hosting, Very Secure

While many other hosts are cheap, they are also not specialized for WordPress and that can leave many holes for hackers to attack your site. Since WordPress is the most popular open-source content management system out there, it’s also very vulnerable to hacks.

With Wealthy Affiliate (and other managed WP hosts) your website is much more protected against attacks. I’ve never had a security issue with any of the sites I’ve had hosted with Wealthy Affiliate throughout the years.

They monitor your site daily, remove infected themes and plugins and even do full daily backups of your entire site so you don’t have to worry about starting over if anything goes wrong.

Large Bandwidth and Website space included

500K monthly visitors and 30 GB of storage are more than enough for most people, and more than what’s included on many other hosting companies higher-tier plans.

More affordable

It’s also MUCH more affordable compared to other companies like WP Engine and Pagely that offer similar features. While they don’t offer features like dedicated IPs, or Cpanel access the pricing differences are large enough that if you don’t need the extra add ons (which most people don’t) and want managed hosting specifically for WordPress, choosing WA is a no brainer. (Pricing is discussed further below within the review).

Beyond that, they make it incredibly easy to build your website. They take out basically every technical aspect that’s involved and make it easy for beginners and non-technically inclined people.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of using the hosting at WA, however, is that it offers the combined community and training that no other web host provides. If you ask me, they should be charging much more for what they are offering.

Create entirely free Siterubix WordPress sites

Wealthy Affiliate uses a proprietary website builder called Siterubix. All your sites are built with this platform, regardless if you are building from a domain you actually own, or on one of their free websites.

However, something unique they offer is the ability to create 2 entirely free websites with their starter membership. These are WordPress installed sites with a .siterubix.com extension.

They’re a bit limited in features (if you’re a free member) but considering they’re free, it’s a great way to test their hosting platform and community to see if it’s something you would like even before you commit to spending any money!

What’s even better is if you create a website with your free membership on a .siterubix.com extension, you will be able to transfer that website to your own domain in just a few clicks.. complete redirects and all.

Incredibly easy to use website builder

Siterubix is super easy to use. From purchasing a domain to getting it up and running, they’ve streamlined the process and made it the easiest ever.

The strengths and weaknesses of Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting plan

What Wealthy Affiliate offers:

• Optimized, fully managed WordPress based hosting
• Super easy site installs
• Hosting for up to 25 domains you own, plus 25 of free SiteRubix websites (50 total)
• Cloud-based, supported by Amazon
• Full daily website back-ups, full redundancy
• Constant monitoring of your websites, automatic removal of infected plugins and themes, spam comment monitoring, automatic WordPress updates
• Fast, reliable servers and virtually 0 website downtime (servers are shared but not crammed)
• Support tickets for technical issues (submissions usually answered within 30 minutes or less)
• Site health monitoring
• Domain email addresses
• FTP access (allows much larger file uploads)
• 1,000’s of pre-installed themes and plugins within the database
• Can pay monthly with no contract or obligations
• Free SSL Certificates for each site you own

PLUS…

Since WA isn’t just a hosting company, you automatically will have access to the entire community with all its training, tutorials, videos, classrooms and more.

If you need help with WordPress, you can usually find a video tutorial or training piece within the database.

If you need help getting more traffic to your website, there’s plenty of training on that too. Whether it’s trying to rank in Google, paying for ad space within search engines or figuring out how to leverage social media, you can find it all there.

What’s really cool about the support within WA is that if you ever have any hosting issues or problems with WordPress, there are so many options for help and many of which let you solve the problem on your own rather than waiting for a response.

For example when you go to submit a hosting ticket for any technical issues, as you begin typing the search pops up for any training within the community that may be related. While you still may need to ask support, you may also be able to solve the problem on your own.

What Wealthy Affiliate DOESN’T offer:

This is important because while they do an amazing job of providing fully managed WordPress hosting, they don’t offer all the options that are available at other hosting companies.

• Limited to just WordPress (unless you know how to upload the site via FTP..)
• No options to upgrade (or downgrade) hosting package
• No dedicated server options
• No chat or phone support, site support is strictly a ticket system (although they are very fast in getting back to you, 24 hours a day)
• No CPanel access
• Restricts certain plugins for security purposes, must be willing to play by “their rules”

Pricing – Wealthy Affiliate vs Regular Shared Hosting vs Fully Managed WordPress Hosting

WA’s pricing

There are 2 payment options at WA, monthly and yearly.

$49/monthly
$359/yearly ($29 monthly)

If you pay for the entire year upfront, it’s quite a significant discount (nearly 20 per month less). There’s no obligation to go yearly though and you can pay monthly at first and then switch to the yearly payment option at any point in the future.

Grab your first month of hosting for just $19

Regular Shared Hosting Prices

This can be found for quite cheap. Most companies offer basic packages within the $3 – $4/month price range, and that may be an offer than seems too good to refuse, especially if you’re on a limited budget.

However, the advertised price usually comes with a catch. While they may display the lowest rates possible, that can mean signing yourself up with a 3-year contract to receive that particular rate. After that, they raise the price.

And again, those are just for the very basic options. Once you start upgrading to packages that allow similar bandwidth, site installs, security, support, backups… then you’re going to spend more.

Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Prices

Really this is what makes the most sense to compare Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting prices to since they are a fully managed WordPress host. They offer the same security and features as the major companies out there do, for a much cheaper price.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the pricing offered by the major companies:

Pagely 

$64 per month for their business plan, includes 3 sites
$149 per month for professional plan, includes 10 sites
$269 per month for ultimate, includes 20 sites

View full details here 

WPEngine

$29 per month for personal, includes 1 site
$99 per month for professional, includes 10 sites
$249 per month for business, includes 25 sites
View full details here

Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting does offer the same security and manageability as other hosts, and lets you host 20 of your own domains with the $49 monthly package (or $359 yearly).

Note the pricing of Pagely and WPEngine with 20+ sites, ($249+) and WA’s hosting begins to look incredibly affordable.

Who is it actually for?

• Anyone starting out in online business
• Anyone looking to host multiple WordPress sites (up to 25)
• Those interested in using WordPress that want extra security and protection from hacks
• People looking for more affordable managed WordPress hosting services
• People who would like extra support and the community aspect WA offers
• People who want to learn more about how to start an online business (total newbies to experienced)

Who is it NOT for?

• Sites that need dedicated servers – membership websites, extremely large scale sites, etc
• People that prefer Cpanel access
• People that don’t want to be restricted from what plugins they can use (Wealthy Affiliate does block some popular plugins, like Jetpack)
• People that don’t want to use WordPress

The final word – Is Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting a good choice?

Like I’ve said before, I’ve been hosting the majority of my websites with Wealthy Affiliate for years and the experience has been great. The downtime is virtually non-existent (99.99%), the speed is great (my sites load in half a second or less) and I have yet to have an issue with the security.

While I fully recommend their hosting to most people, there are certain restrictions that make it not a good choice for everyone. Being informed on the limitations of their hosting before you make a decision can help avoid any grievances along the way.

And, if after reading this review in its entirety you still are interested then, by all means, try it out. For those that are interested in fast, secure and reliable WordPress hosting combined with an online business community, training and support, then Wealthy Affiliate is a great option for you.

Try it here for $49 $19 your first month

If you have any further questions about anything to do with their hosting, please leave a comment down below and I’d be more than happy to help you out. 🙂