Web Hosting

Daniel M. Clark—the website, not the person—is hosted on WP Engine. Why? I've been building websites since the late 1990's, and I've bounced around to a variety of web hosts over the years. I won't tell you that I've tried them all. I won't even tell you that WP Engine is the absolute best and OMG YOU HAVE TO PUT ALL YOUR SITES ON THERE RIGHT NOW. Different people, different companies, have different needs. But managed WordPress? WP Engine has been doing it longer and better than just about anyone. The dashboard is easy to work with, and the staging area makes development and testing of themes and plugins safe and easy. Their uptime is great. Their support team has gone above and beyond with me—I seriously can't sing their praises enough. They helped me troubleshoot a network problem that had nothing to do with them; we discovered early in the process that the fault wasn't on their end, but they still worked with me to come up with solutions. How many companies do that?

Now that I've piqued your interest…

Here, you have a choice, and every affiliate marketing colleague of mine is going to take issue with this, but I like to give people the option. If you click this link to sign up with WP Engine and sign up for their service, I will earn a commission. If you worry that my opinion is biased because there's money involved, click the plain link in the next paragraph. I won't mind. The company deserves your coin, and you'll pay the same amount whether I earn a commission or not. If you just want to check them out without clicking an affiliate link, click this link instead.

If you'd like to promote WP Engine…

(Stand back, I'm letting my inner affiliate marketer out) Sign up for the WP Engine affiliate program on ShareASale. I've known the folks that run it for ages; they're great. You can earn a $200 commission (or 100% of the new customer's first month payment, whichever is higher) on a 180-day tracking period. You can also earn $50 from sub-affiliates; $50 per customer referred by affiliates that you bring to the affiliate program. I prefer text links (you can tell) but if you dig banners, their selection is great. They've got a datafeed, they're on auto-deposit, and they auto-approve. They've got a 2-tier signup bonus and incentive bonuses starting at just 5 referrals per month. Newsletters are sent regularly. Honestly, apart from the auto-approve (which we don't do), this looks like the kind of program we run at Apogee. I love it.