[Theforum] announcement to send (was: Affiliate Hosting Program Fund Raising)

[Ron Dorman]

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David Ulevitch wrote:

><quote who="Ron Dorman">
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>>The affiliate program will pay evolt.org 10% of monthly billing, that means before any expenses are taken out.  Then bandwidth, servers, network equipment, utilities and employees get paid.  Anything left will be go to the supporter, NetWorth Enterprises, Inc.  If you will check some prices and do some math, you will see that 10% of billed amounts is more than a "Kickback".
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>>Beyond that,  it is more than we are raising today.  What's the problem?
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>[I'm going to explain this from a view of someone who has been in these situations many times before and not as someone who "represents" evolt since I do not have any role in evolt other than to help it when I can and try to voice my opinions to help shape the direction and focus]
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>The problem with this is that when Evolt puts this up it is NOT a simple "get hosting from them, we get paid" thing.  This is something that evolt is putting its *VERY* good name behind.  People respect evolt for it's awesome content and top-notch community.  When "we" recommend a web host we better  be pretty darn sure they are just as top-notch as us.  See what I mean?  I've never heard of NetWorth Enterprises (not that it matters) but I have no platform to say "host with these guys, they're rock solid and honest." -- They probably are, but I've done enough dealings to know that sometimes things aren't as they seem and so I'm cautious when I throw my support behind something.
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The background here is:
NetWorth Enterprises, Inc. is a company that has provided consulting and
custom software for many years to the mortage banking industry, mostly
the top 10 mortgage companies.  They have a very good name and
reputation in that industry.  They began moving into internet services
two to three years ago.  They are a current reseller of my companies
hosting services.

This means that my company will be managing, supporting and servicing
any hosting that comes in on this program and that I will be very
involved myself to provide the best that can be provided.  I like to
talk to our customers and help them in any way I can.

I am a founding member of evolt.org and my company hosted the mail lists
for the first year evolt.org existed.  Then evolt.org got it's own
servers and hosted the lists and sites with services paid for by Dan
Cody.  A few months ago those services were no longer available and my
company has been providing the co-location services for evolt.org's
servers for the past two months.  The evolt.org web sites and mail lists
are running from the same data center that the affiliate hosting is
provided from.

Affiliate hosting programs had been mentioned in fund raising
discussions.  I talked to my brother, the owner of NetWorth Enterprises,
Inc., about it.  I told him about evolt.org, it's mission and the need
for fund raising.  He was impressed with evolt.org and offered to
provide the affiliate program, build the site to support on-line signups
and get things working to provide funding for evolt.org.  The site is
not typical of hosting companies and the current domain name was
registered and not in use.  It was originally thought the domain name
fit the need, money for evolt.org with very little effort, just change
hosting providers.  It is now obvious that was a mistake, and it will be
changed, but it will take a little time.

We have built servers for linux hosting with CPanel web based site
management software to allow each site secure management capability for
name based and/or IP based hosting, email accounts, stats (3 packages
available, capable of adding more on customer request), sub-domain and
parked domain support, web based file manager, web based management of
file and directory access privileges, raw access log download, mysql
database support with phpmyadmin, domain cron job set up and
maintenance, 3 shopping carts, frontpage 5 extensions and several other
site support features.

We do not have any web based site management on the the windows servers
yet, but can host on Win 2000 servers.

>I think you and rest of TheForum can see my point.  By supporting this evolt is saying "WE TRUST THEM" even if it does not literally say that. So all I am trying to make sure or get people thinking about is, do we really want to endorse this group? Do we know them, do we trust them, etc, etc...
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I understand that and agree.  Do my previous explainations resolve the
question?

>Are there people here who use them and know them and can vouch for them? That's the real question.  All the services and offerings are a dime a dozen.
>

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