Hosting Sales and Promos Roundup (November 21, 2008) - This week's hosting sales and promotions have already begun capitalizing on the upcoming holiday season, steering away from the doom and gloom of last week's economic crisis-driven deals, but rather appealing to budgets constrained by the price of putting presents under the tree.
Discount hosting customers are promised a number of deals. Purohits.com has lowered its domain prices for its "Big Holiday Sale" and FastDomain is offering significantly discounted hosting at $3.95 per month. At least one hosting provider, Globat.com, has vowed to give its hard working web hosting affiliates Christmas bonuses.
Other special presents include Host Department's pre-launch of its UNIX Premium Shared Hosting offering and the immediate availability of The Planet's new, high-performance Xeon server.
The Planet Offers Xeon 5405 Server IT hosting giant The Planet (www.theplanet.com) has added the Xeon 5405 to its Planet Alpha line of high-performance dedicated servers, featuring up to 32GB of RAM and storage capacity able to support up to six storage drives. Available in both SATA and SAS configurations, the Xeon 5405 is one of Planet Alpha's top single-processor servers.
Last week, The Planet announced its November server sale which offered lower prices on select Planet Alpha servers, cutting prices by more than 50 percent on certain models including Dual Xeon servers. Additionally, The Planet also discounted its data protection servers, secure backup appliances featuring CDPServer software from R1Soft (www.r1soft.com) and the options to choose between doubling hard drive space, RAM or bandwidth for free on select servers.
Host Department Pre-launches UNIX Premium Shared Hosting
As part of its premium line of hosting solutions starting at $10.95 per month, Web hosting and domain name registrar Host Department (www.hostdepartment.com) has announced it will launch a new plan called UNIX Premium Hosting, offering shared hosting with better features, higher reliability, and prompter support.
Host Department offers three Unix Premium Hosting packages: "Advance," "Professional," and "E-Commerce." All offer MySQL 5.0, Perl 5, PHP 5, CGI, Ruby on Rails, a dedicated SSL module, and dedicated e-commerce setup. It will also use a new server from IBM's xSeries Hardware blade-server line, hosted in Host Department's Interserver, New Jersey data center.
Globat.com Gives Web Hosting Affiliates Holiday Bonus
Los Angeles-based web hosting provider Globat.com (www.globat.com) has announced a new bonus program for its affiliates. Until the end of November, its Web hosting affiliates will be able to earn a special cash bonus on top of their commission earnings, granting a bonus to members who have recorded at least five sales. Higher performing affiliates could earn a bonus of up to $500.
"With the holiday season around the corner and the economy in a slump, we decided that our affiliates deserved a special holiday bonus for their continuing support and hard work," Globat.com president Chris Ueland said in a statement.
FastDomain Offers 45 Percent Off Web Hosting
Competitive pressure has led FastDomain (hosting.fastdomain.com) to reduce its monthly hosting cost to $3.95 a discount of roughly 45 percent off its normal monthly Web hosting service. The end date of FastDomain's promotion has not been announced. FastDomains sees the promotion as a way to further strengthen its quickly growing client base, which has grown to thousands of businesses and personal websites since its debut in 2005.
Purohits.com Slashes Domain Prices For Its "Big Holiday Sale"
Purohits.com (domains.purohits.com) has cut domain name registration, renewals and transfer prices for .com, .net, .org, .info, and .biz top-level domains to $8.99 per year. Now offering some of the lowest price in the industry, Purohits is also offering an additional promotion for .ASIA domains, priced at $8.49 per year, ending December 12. Purohits also provides PrivacyProtect for free with every domain purchased as well as many competitively priced value-added services such as web and email hosting, digital certificates, website design services, domain forwarding, mail forwarding and managed DNS.
FatCow Rolls Out the Welcome Wagon for New Customers Web hosting services provider FatCow (www.fatcow.com) expanding its hosting offerings to include unlimited disk space, unlimited monthly bandwidth, and a new customer orientation solution, the FatCow QuickStart Wizard, to appeal to individuals and small businesses new to web hosting. The QuickStart Wizard is a mini-suite of control panel tools walks FatCow customers through the basic steps of starting a hosting account in a matter of minutes.
Following its "one plan one price" philosophy, FatCow's new, signature plan also offers all new customers unlimited e-mail accounts, point-and-click site-creation tools, easy-to-install blogs and forums, e-commerce capabilities and search engine advertising credits.
Free Reseller web hosting from Daily.co.uk
Domain name and web hosting provider Daily.co.uk (www.daily.co.uk) is giving away a year's free Reseller Web Hosting. According to the UK-based company, its Reseller v2 Starter account will be free of charge for a full year for all customers who sign on before December 31, 2008. Normally £199.90 for the year, the account includes hosting accounts and "Instant Website" accounts to resell, plus extras including search engine optimization tools and SSL certificates, which can also be resold.
In addition, Daily.co.uk's free reseller hosting account has no minimum contract length or charge for cancellation, and includes a white label control panel and built-in ticket system to automate customer communication.
ShopSite Launches Version 10 (October 20, 2008) - E-commerce shopping cart and catalog software provider ShopSite (www.shopsite.com) has released ShopSite version 10, an industry-leading e-commerce software option for hosting providers, online merchants and Web designers, with the addition of an HTML editor, inventory API, and support for Doba drop shipping service.
"We are excited that ShopSite has achieved the status of a Certified Integration Partner, having recently completed an integration with Doba's product sourcing API," Doba chief executive officer Blaine Nielsen said in a statement. "Their integration gives ShopSite merchants the ability to choose from over 1,000,000 wholesale products that can be simply added to their website with a click of a button and also automates the ordering and drop ship fulfillment process."
ShopSite announced version 10 last week. Previously, the software has been incorporated into many Web hosting offerings including those from hosting giant Verio (www.verio.com), IPOWER (www.ipower.com), FatCow (www.fatcow.com), LexiConn (www.lexiconn.com), pair Networks (www.pair.com) and Globat (www.globat.com).
ShopSite CEO David Hills said the new features will be available in all ShopSite product levels: starter, manager and pro. "Additionally some features previously available only in the top of the line Pro level are now available in Manager," Hills said in a statement. "Manager merchants can now enjoy features such as Google Analytics, Custom Page and Product Fields, and Page Sort."
The Pro release of the software includes a new API for third-party inventory control application developers, enabling merchants to use an add-on application to track and manage product inventory in ShopSite. Otherwise, Pro and Manager customers can use ShopSite's included multiple shipping carrier shipping rate calculator in the shopping cart. Merchants can subscribe for UPS, FedEx, and USPS real-time shipping quotes, which the end-user can select.
Globat Post Explains Outage (February 22, 2008) - Web hosting provider Globat (globat.com) says it has fully recovered from yesterday morning's outage, which caused almost all customer sites, as well as Globat's own site, its service infrastructure and phone systems to go offline throughout the entire day. As reported yesterday, the major outage left hundreds of upset customers without answers as the service provider was unable to be reached by phone.
In his blog (benneumann.com) posting late last night, Globat CEO Ben R. Neumann offered a full explaination for the network outage. The primary switch in Globat's main data center in downtown Los Angeles failed completely at approximately 5:00 a.m. PST yesterday, says Neumann. Globat's technical emergency response team tried to bring the network back online but could not.
The company then switched over to the back up circuitry, at which time the entire devise, including the backup system, failed completely. Globat rush ordered a new switch from its vendor's nearest warehouse, and after installing and testing the equipment, it was able to successfully bring all of its services back online. However, it experienced another five hour outage for email services and an eight hour outage for Web related services, which affected its own website and its phone lines.
Since it was unable to communicate with customers through telephone or email, Globat staff members posted updates on popular Internet forums to update customers on any new information.
Neumann apologized to customers for the outage in his blog: I would like to tell you that we ABSOLUTELY KNOW you count on Globat.com to maintain a high degree of uptime to host your Web sites and that we take this trust very seriously. Today, however, my team and I let you down and we all feel terrible because of that. This has never happened before and we will do whatever it takes to never let it happen again! I deeply and sincerely apologize for this outage and the inconvenience and problems it may have caused.
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