newbie vps and budget questions (5)
hi there ,
an almost complete newbie here , i am a bit confused about the vps hosting , at the moment i have an account for shared hosting at dreamhost , i have also signed up for amazon s3 as its free for one year
my questions are
1.is amazon sufficent to start with or should i just go ahead and list to a payed service ?
2. how do i know or find out which hosting specs / service i need ?
3. on the budget guide it is mentioned that we need about 3-5k for a couple of months ? how do you define a couple ? as in 2 months ? is it possible to make it work for say a budget of 4k for 5-6 months including tools ?
any help to clear these issues for me would help a lot !!!
thanks and have a good day
ofer
If you're using my guide to hosting your landers on S3, Amazon services are all you need for now. You WILL need a seperate account on a tracker, though -
Hope that helps! If you need more advice let me know below and I shall provide it.
As for budget - $4k for 5-6 months should be fine, provided you're cautious with your spend. Make sure you're not going beyond statistical significance and choose lower-payout offers.
Caurmen already covered the hosting part, also look up his guide to hosting your landers on a CDN, that might be of interest too :
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...hosting+lander
I'd like to add a few things regarding the budget requirements and how to handle it.
When planning your campaigns, you should aim for at least a decent traffic volume per day, so your budget has to reflect it. If you stay too low, the data will be inconsistent and will come in slowly. Too low budget will also put yourself under pressure because you wont be able to afford any significant loss, which will result in immature decisions, mistakes done under stress etc. If I had to set a minimum, I would say try to have at least $50 per day, $100 would be better.
The next step is to plan the cashflow, affiliate networks usually require at least $1000 revenue per week in order to pay you weekly and there is usually a 7 day holdback period. So even on weeklies, the turnaround time is about 2 weeks. This wont be the case since the start, you will get paid every 2 weeks or once a month. So you have to prepare enough funds to cover 4-6 weeks, then the first payments will start to come in. Of couse it might go faster, all depends on your volume, but 4-6 weeks is a safe estimate.
You mentioned $4k that you'd like to cover 5-6 months with. Its hard to say how fast you will start to see profits, but you should never be -100%. So lets say you will be spending $50 per day, $4k is enough for about 3 months, but you will of course make something back so you can definitely run for longer than that. This amount of money can very well be all you need to cover the first few months and get you into profit at some point, it all depends on how good you will be doing. $4k is definitely a pretty healthy starting budget so I wouldnt be afraid to move on with it.
thank you for the fast reply caurmen and matuloo , that helps a lot !!!
matuloo , would you suggest keeping it at 50$ from the very start or should i go up in steps ? its almost twice the budget i was thinking for that period of time as my mindset was about being able to not earn any profit for about 3-4 months , i can afford it however i have to admit i have some concerns that if i won't be able to gain some funds back by 3 months it would be stressing to keep funding it at the same pace , no chance a lower budget then 50$ per would be sufficient to make progress?
Please dont take my suggestions as something you have to follow to the last dot, its just a suggestion.
I said $50 cause that can bring in actionable data for a few small campaigns, but of course you can do it with lower amount too. The more you can afford to spend, the easier it will be to wait for data without freaking out, so it really comes down to what you can afford.
For the start, you can definitely decide to spend $20 a day or even lower, just expect everything to take longer to click. Spend $50 a day and you will get a day worth of data in some small geo, knock it down to $20 and you will have to pause it once half of the day is over, which means skewed data, harder to anlyze data etc ... or not, if you match the right GEO, spot size and low enough payout per conversion.
If you plan it carefuly, you can do with a lower budget too, many people did 
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