Do you all publishers go for dedicated hosting or something like regular hosting with unlimited features will be good enough? It probably all depends on how viral the products goes right?
Right S! I think Earth4Energy was hosted on a shared hosting plan for a long time till it reached it's peak, (Swerd can clarify this for us) but well eventually if you need dedicated hosting for your product that means you can probably afford it because it is very popular So i don't think it's a problem.
Most of the publishers are still with shared hosting. But I strongly recommend a dedicated one if you don't have the financial problem.
Obviously Clickbank sites that sells a digital book can be considered mini sites, they dont need lot of resources to run, thus shared hosting is more than enough for most of them. However, shared hosting vary greatly from service provide to another. Beware of those cheap hosting companies that sell unlimeted accounts for $5 and so on - they get so loaded that the service is totally crap when thers some real load. Ideally one should subscribe with a trusted 3rd party monitoring company that will monitor your host uptime.
Security and stability concerned, the dedicated hosting would be the best choice for you if you have a lot of traffic. Also you need to have at least 3 hosts in case of 1 or 2 of them have problems.
Lets not exagerate While in an "ideal world" one should have multiple dedicated server for his products, the average publisher cant afford to spend/waste so much for such "luxury". Its better to just get a good host and spend the money on marketing instead...
IF the publishers were responsible for their customers and affiliates, they should need more than one dedicated server for their products. Lets say that he or she has one server, then some day the server is down for a few days, but the affiliates would not know this thing, they still send traffic to the publishers' sites, but now the server is down, then the affiliates would lose their money. IF you were an affiliate, how you feel? Is it still "luxury" NOW?
I never used shared hosting, haven't done for years. Whilst your ebook sales page may work fine due to little php and mysql processing, the other 60-150 customers packed onto the server could easily bring it down. It's not fair for the affiliates if a publisher is too lazy/cheap/doesn't realise the issues of shared hosting - as they may lose sales....