Should I host images for affiliate partners or let them host the images?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 31 Jul 2025
Updated 15 Aug 2025
7 min read
When you're working with affiliate partners and providing them with email templates to promote your business, a key decision arises: who should host the images included in those templates? This isn't just a technical question about storage, but a strategic one with significant implications for your email deliverability, sender reputation, and even legal exposure.
The primary concern centers on maintaining your brand's integrity and ensuring your emails consistently reach the inbox. Affiliate marketing, while powerful, introduces variables that can impact your email program. If an affiliate engages in practices that could be perceived as spammy, the repercussions could extend to your domain, regardless of who is sending the email.
Understanding the interplay between image hosting, domain reputation, and affiliate behavior is crucial for making an informed decision. I'll walk through the factors to consider, the potential risks, and best practices to safeguard your email program.
The dilemma of control and consistency
One of the most immediate considerations is the control you have over your assets and the potential impact on your sender reputation. When you host the images on your own server or a content delivery network (CDN) under your domain, you retain full control over their availability, loading speed, and security.
This centralized hosting can help ensure consistent image rendering across various email clients. It also means that the images are served from a domain whose reputation you actively manage. For more information on this, consider how the hostname used for image hosting affects deliverability.
Conversely, if you provide the images to your affiliate partners for them to host, you lose that direct control. Their hosting environment, server uptime, and even their general web practices can influence how your emails are perceived. A poorly configured server or a blocklisted IP address belonging to your affiliate could inadvertently affect the display of your images and, by extension, the perceived legitimacy of your email.
Control: You maintain full control over image availability and performance.
Consistency: Ensures consistent image loading and display for all affiliate emails.
Reputation Impact: Directly links image loading to your domain's reputation.
Affiliate hosts images
Control: Reduced control over image hosting environment and uptime.
Consistency: Varies based on individual affiliate's hosting quality.
Reputation Impact: Affiliate's poor image hosting practices could inadvertently harm your emails.
Impact on sender reputation
Whether you host the images or your affiliates do, a critical concern is how their sending practices might impact your domain reputation. If an affiliate engages in spamming activities, even if they're using their own sending domain and hosting the images themselves, the negative reputation can still boomerang back to your brand's primary domain.
This is because mailbox providers use various signals to assess sender reputation, and one of them is the content of the email itself. If multiple affiliates use similar templates provided by you, and one of them gets flagged for spam, the template itself can be fingerprinted as spam, affecting all other legitimate users of that template. This is a key reason why sharing a sending domain with a partner carries risks.
Even if your images are hosted on your domain, and an affiliate uses a different domain for sending, the association can still be made. If their content is spammy, and your brand's images and links are present within that content, your domain's reputation could suffer collateral damage. This illustrates how images in emails affect deliverability
Beyond deliverability, there are significant legal and compliance considerations. Poorly managed affiliate email programs can expose your business to legal risks, including lawsuits related to unsolicited commercial email. Even if the affiliate is directly responsible for the sending, your brand can be held accountable, especially if your products or brand elements are featured.
This highlights the importance of rigorous vetting and ongoing monitoring of your affiliate partners. Guidelines from regulatory bodies, such as the FTC in the United States, often extend to affiliate relationships, requiring clear disclosure of endorsements and ensuring that promotional content is truthful and not misleading. You can review the FTC's Endorsement Guides for detailed information.
The legal landscape for email marketing is complex and varies by region, but a common thread is the requirement for opt-in consent and easy unsubscribe mechanisms. An affiliate failing on these fronts could lead to significant fines or reputational damage for your brand. This directly relates to best practices for gaining new customers from a partner using email.
Affiliate compliance warning
Even if your affiliate partners are technically responsible for their email sends, any legal or compliance violation (such as sending to unconsented lists or failing to provide clear unsubscribe options) can lead to your brand being implicated. Ensure your affiliate agreements clearly outline email sending guidelines and compliance requirements to mitigate this risk. Lawsuits stemming from non-compliant email practices can be costly and severely damage your brand's standing.
Mitigating risks and maintaining control
Given the risks, it's generally safer to host the images yourself. This provides consistent control and minimizes reliance on external parties for critical components of your email creatives. Utilizing a reliable CDN for image hosting, perhaps under a subdomain of your main domain, can offer both performance benefits and reputation isolation, if needed.
If you do decide to let affiliates host images, implement stringent checks. Require them to use reputable hosting services and periodically monitor the domains they use for any blocklist (or blacklist) issues. This proactive approach helps to catch potential problems before they escalate. You can also monitor your own domain reputation using Google Postmaster Tools.
Ultimately, the choice hinges on the level of trust and control you can establish with your affiliate partners. For most businesses, centralizing image hosting provides a more robust and secure foundation for their email marketing efforts, safeguarding both deliverability and brand reputation.
Final thoughts on image hosting
In conclusion, while the idea of affiliates hosting images might seem to offload some technical burden, the potential risks to your email deliverability and overall brand reputation often outweigh the benefits. Maintaining centralized control over your email assets, including images, is a fundamental best practice for consistent inbox placement and strong sender reputation.
Vigilance in monitoring affiliate activities and ensuring their compliance with email sending standards is crucial, irrespective of where images are hosted. Proactive measures will always serve as the strongest defense against negative impacts on your email program.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Always host images yourself to maintain full control over performance and security.
Use a dedicated subdomain for image hosting to help isolate any potential reputation issues.
Implement strict guidelines and vetting processes for all affiliate partners.
Common pitfalls
Allowing affiliates to host images on questionable or shared image hosting services.
Failing to monitor affiliate sending practices, leading to indirect reputation damage.
Not having clear legal agreements in place regarding email sending compliance.
Expert tips
Consider using a CDN to host images for faster loading times and improved user experience.
Ensure email templates provided to affiliates are optimized for deliverability, regardless of image hosting.
Educate affiliates on email marketing best practices and compliance requirements to reduce risks.
Marketer view
Marketer from Email Geeks says that if affiliates are not associated with spamming, hosting images yourself should not be a problem.
2020-09-03 - Email Geeks
Expert view
Expert from Email Geeks suggests minimizing different domains in email content to reduce risks and save mailbox provider resources, as mail filters prefer fewer domains. They also highlight the risk of malicious image sharing services affecting domain reputation.
