Hosting companies are resourceful when it comes to making money
I noticed that a lot of companies are very resourceful at finding ever new ways of making money. There are obviously those hosting companies that lure you in through the front door with a fairly cheap flat rate and then charge you extra for everything else you could possibly want from a host. None of those sites are recommended by me. Godaddy is one of those hosts that uses its cloud as the biggest registrar to push its hosting and extract money through offering related services.
It’s become standard practice even for some of the hosts on my site to offer Adwords and Yahoo or MSN Search Marketing Vouchers for which they will bag a referral fee when they refer a client. And you can bet they refer a lot of customers. Other services may include an improved Spam Protection, site templates, Search engine submissions, or other SEO related services.
Hostgator famously caused a storm of protest in the forums earlier this year when they decided to monetize the 404 error pages accross all of its hosted sites. When you hit a 404 on a Hostgator site that doesn’t have a custom error page installed you see a Google Adsense Search box and a Google Adsense Firefox referral link. Personally, I think Hostgator didn’t do themselves any favour by trying to optimize their cash flows on the back of its users. They claim that everyone is free to create a custom 404 page but that requires a certain level of knowledge which I think you can’t necessarily expect. It’s a bit like when you live in a house on a busy street and your landlord decides to plaster the facade with billboards to make some extra cash flow.
Very recently I caught a hosting affiliate program that tried to make a little extra by including a referral link to Paypal. This will work nicely accross a big affiliate base. On the other hand affiliates are by and large pretty web savvy so they are probably more likely to have an account already.