Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Web hosting provider The Planet announced on Monday it has enhanced the commission structure of its affiliate program, in response to the program’s significant success.

Registered affiliates will now receive a one-time, 100 percent commission on the referred customer’s total monthly recurring order value. The Planet is also shortening the waiting period for affiliate commission-payout, reducing it from three months to 45 days after a referred customer places an order with The Planet.

“Since our January launch, our affiliate program has seen tremendous success,” says James P. Treuting, vice president of sales and operations with The Planet. “Making these improvements to our already competitive commission structure is another way to thank our partners for referring customers to The Planet.”

Launched in January, The Planet’s affiliate program provides commissions for both customers and non-customers who refer new business to the company. Prior to that, The Planet launched a three-tiered reseller program last November that provides Web hosting resellers with multiple options for building their businesses.

In May, The Planet announced it had added Internet products company Directi to its affiliates program. Share-A-Sale is The Planet?s affiliate network partner.

Affiliates can earn money by referring customers to The Planet on a commission basis. The Planet says it has optimized its website for affiliate-related traffic, as well as provides affiliates with marketing materials and promotions.

Affiliates can also track their conversion statistics through a specialized administrative portal.

Customer feedback and online reputation management services provider RatePoint and web hosting provider 1&1 Internet have announced a strategic partnership to integrate RatePoint’s platform within all of 1&1’s hosting packages.

According to the announcement Monday, the partnership also strengthens RatePoint’s international reach by extending its platform, which includes the latest Web 2.0 trends, web content authentication and consumer ratings systems, to businesses in Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Spain.

“As the world’s largest hosting provider, we are in a unique position to understand the needs of businesses with an online presence,” said 1&1 chief executive officer Oliver Mauss said. “Not only will RatePoint’s platform help our customers stand out on the Web and promote their business quality, it will have a tremendous impact in converting site visitors into loyal customers and improving customer satisfaction.”

RatePoint helps companies manage what is said about them online by providing a mechanism to collect, manage and promote authentic consumer reviews and feedback directly from their websites.

Having made enhancements earlier this year, RatePoint’s platform benefits consumers by giving them an interactive method to provide feedback directly to a business. The business can then use this important data to resolve potential issues.

“1&1 has established its place as a global leader in the Internet marketplace by continually providing progressive services to meet future trends in the marketplace,” RatePoint co-founder and CEO Neal Creighton said. “RatePoint is proud to offer our online reputation management services to help transform business websites into formidable marketing and customer satisfaction tools for 1&1’s international customer base.”

Web hosting provider Dotster announced on Wednesday that it has launched its “new and improved” hosting Application Vault.

Dotster says Application Vault, which is available at no extra cost with all of its hosting plans, enables customers to install and upgrade over 30 common open source applications from their control panel, like blogging, e-commerce, content management, photo sharing and project management tools.

Some of the specific applications available for download with Application Vault include Wordpress, OSCommerce, Joopla and DotProject.

Besides managing the installation, the Application Vault also manages latest version updates and automatic security patches, says Dotster.

“Dotster’s new and improved Application Vault helps our customers easily install popular applications for both their business and personal sites,” says Clint Page, CEO Dotster. “Many customers don’t realize that they can install and leverage these programs with little effort and have the ability to blog, conduct e-commerce, build intranets and more from their own websites.”

Application Vault marks the third new value-added service Dotster has launched in the last two months. Last week, Dotster announced it is offering EmailBrain, a new tool for creating, managing, sending and tracking newsletters and email campaigns.