What it is
HostGator is a mass-market shared hosting brand owned by Newfold Digital. It sells cheap shared, WordPress, VPS and dedicated hosting, mostly to people launching a first website.
The deal
This pays a flat amount per hosting sale rather than a share of the order, so a cheap 12-month plan and a long multi-year plan can be worth the same to you. Everyone starts at the base rate and moves up on performance, but the steps are not published and HostGator’s own two pages disagree on the ceiling: the affiliate landing page says commissions cap at $100 per sale, while its help centre article says tiers go upwards of $125 per sale. Only hosting counts, and add-ons earn nothing. The tracking window is short at 30 days, cut from 90 in a 2023 change to the Newfold agreement.
Getting paid
The wait is the defining feature. Nothing is payable until roughly two months and ten days after the month the sale closed, because HostGator is waiting out its 30-day refund guarantee. There is no referral count to hit before your first payment, but the dollar threshold and the available payout methods live inside Impact rather than being published by HostGator. Any dispute over a cancelled or withheld commission has to be raised within 45 days.
The rules
Paid search is effectively closed. The Newfold agreement bars running SEM campaigns for its products on Google without written approval and bans bidding on keywords that compete with the brand or product names. You cannot use the brand in a domain, in metatags or in ad copy. Coupons and discounts may only be ones issued through the program, and a sale is disqualified if the customer received a coupon or discount from you, clicked another affiliate’s link first, took an exit-popup offer, or fails to stay in good standing for 30 days. Applications are manually reviewed and need a working site with relevant content and some traffic.
Sources
Compare HostGator with
7 side-by-side comparisons, each marking the better term on every row.