Every SmartyHost customer and all of our Reseller customers receive a $50 Google AdWords advertising voucher. Collectively that’s a few million dollars worth of free advertising credits for our customers. For more information on the Google Voucher please go to: http://www.smartyhost.com.au/googleadwords.php

This voucher can be found in the customers control panel and it is automatically generated and available.

We have just secure a special deal for our Resellers!
Every SmartyHost Reseller not only gets a free $50 Google AdWords voucher for each customer that hosts with SmartyHost, they ALSO receive 10 x $50 Google AdWords vouchers ($500 in value) to distribute as they wish. Resellers can use these vouchers to value add to their existing services or they can simply use it to attract new business.

For more information on the offer: http://www.smartyhost.com.au/reseller_googleoffer.php

When you launch a new business one of the first things to do is register a domain name. Even if you have not built your website it is important to buy a domain and secure your online brand to avoid disappointment later. The challenge with every new business is creating the first website. Do you build it yourself via web design software or do you outsource to a web designer? What are the cost of building it and the cost of ongoing maintenance?

We have come up with an easy solution that addresses these issues, it’s called 'The 40 Buck Website'. The 40 Buck Website includes:
1. Domain of your choice including .com.au
2. Free web hosting
3. Free email hosting with ability to integrate with Outlook, Webmail, Anti-spam, Email forwarding and Email Auto responders.
4. Full Web hosting control panel to manage your account
5. Easy to use Web based Site Builder with over 500 professionally designed templates.
6. ...all for just $40 per year (free setup).

Our engineers have created the tools for all these features to be created on the fly once you order. You can see more information about the package at;
http://www.smartyhost.com.au/40buckwebsite.php

The package is a great way to give life to your idle domain names and create a professional web presence. Creating a website takes only minutes and you don’t need an IT degree to do it. We have released 11 flash tutorials that shows you how to create a website in just 5 easy steps: http://www.smartyhost.com.au/smartydesign_tutorials.php

If you have already purchased a domain name you can upgrade to the 40 Buck Website. Depending on the type of domain and price you paid you may be able to upgrade for free or at worst pay the difference between your domain cost and $40, a nominal fee. Our engineers created an automated systems to allow you to upgrade automatically with a click of button. As soon as you activate the 40 Buck website package in your Domain Name control panel the package is created on the fly.

Click Here to see the demo of how quick it is if you had paid $40 for your domain, then upgrade to the 40 Buck Website is free.

Click here to see the demo if you have to pay the difference between the cost of your domain and $40.

We also have a couple of upgrade options including our 250 Buck Website and 400 Buck Website which includes 500MB of web space, free domain, ecommerce, and much more: http://www.smartyhost.com.au/webdesign.php

SmartyHost is only a few companies in Australia participating in the new .asia domain extension established for individuals and companies in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes Australia and New Zealand. The Asia-Pacific region has the largest internet population in the world.

The .asia domain is now live and open to all Australian companies and individuals. Even if you don't have a presence in Asia, it is important to protect your online brand as the .asia domain extension also includes Australia. The .asia domains are now available and you do not need an ABN to register. SmartyHost is charging $40 per year. To see if your .asia domain is available go to http://www.smartyhost.com.au/dotasia_new.php

The Australian Innovation Festival is comprised of hundreds of events ranging from seminars, exhibitions, trade fairs and workshops to increase public awareness of innovation in Australia. The Festival is increasingly recognised as the major national platform to celebrate, promote and enhance the value of Australia’s innovation. There are over 500 events held around Australia and over 400,000 people attend each year.

The Australian Innovation Festival has been running since 2002 and SmartyHost has been a supporter and partner of the event along with AusIndustry, National Press Club and others since 2004. You can find information about the events in your local area by visiting their website at: http://www.ausinnovation.org. SmartyHost provides Free Dedicated Hosting to the Australian Innovation Festival to help support this important event.

Max Design Workshops provides hands-on web design workshops. SmartyHost has secured a special price from Max Designs to offer our customers and resellers a 10% discount on the latest workshop and also $150 credit voucher.

The latest workshop is provided by User Experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSS expert, Russ Weakley.

Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

To register please go to:
http://maxdesign.com.au/workshop2008/index-smartyhost.htm

(Note: SmartyHost does not receive any financial benefit from the workshop and is not in anyway affiliated with the program)

SmartyHost is only a few companies in Australia participating in the new .asia domain extension established for individuals and companies in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes Australia and New Zealand. The Asia-Pacific region has the largest internet population in the world.

The DotAsia Registry was launched late last year and only open to government & trademark holders which resulted in over 30,000 registrations.

The DotAsia Registry will go live on March 26 and available to everyone to register.
However you do have an opportunity to secure your .asia domain name before March 26!

Between February 20th 2008 on 12:00 Noon UTC and ending on March 12th 2008 on 24:00 Midnight UTC you can apply for your .asia domain name. However all .asia domain names receiving more than one application will be auctioned between the applicants in an equitable process handled by the DotAsia Registry.

If your application is uncontested, your .asia domain name will appear in your SmartyHost account with no further action required on your part. If, however, there are other applicants for the same .asia domain name, you will be invited to participate in an auction for the domain.

If you are outbid or do not wish to participate in the auction and thus do not successfully register the .asia domain name, then your registration fee will be fully refunded.

To secure your place we recommend applying for as many .asia domain names as possible. We will refund the .asia domain names not registering.

SmartyHost is charging $80 per 2 years (MelbourneIT is charging $519.50)

To register your .asia domain name please go to:
http://www.smartyhost.com.au/dotasia.php

We about to launch our new TV commercial on Channel 7, 10 and Sky News nationwide. Let us know what you think.

Smartyhost has signed an agreement with Google. The deal provides every new web hosting customer and every existing customer that renews their web hosting account and a $50 Google AdWords advertising voucher free. Customers can find the voucher inside their SmartyHost web hosting control panel.

The $50 Google Adwords voucher is also available to all of SmartyHost reseller’s customers as well. SmartyHost expects to give away a few million dollars worth of free advertising credits over the next 12 months.

For more information:
http://www.smartyhost.com.au/googleadwords.php

Following my last post I thought to clarify our position regarding Dell. I think they make great products which are cheap particularly in the desktop market. I think their servers are fine too. We did deploy a large Dell solution a couple of years ago and Dell contacted us from the US and consequently did an international case study: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/casestudies/2006_smartyhost.pdf

The total solution cost us a few hundred thousand dollars. Importantly, not only did we deploy large servers but also an EMC SAN. A SAN is a Storage Area Network with a high-speed network of storage devices. The SAN contains only Fibre storage (not SATA). The benefit of the SAN is our customers’ information is stored and replicated across hundreds of redundant fibre disks. We don’t store any customer information on servers! You will find most of our competitors keep customer information on the same server they host on. Yes, they all use RAID but there is a single point of failure if the server fails or if there is corruption in the disks. The SAN can also perform round-the-clock data backup and restore tasks at high speeds without involving servers which is another real benefit. It should be noted that what we have done is nothing new. If you ask any Infrastructure Manager or CTO of large companies they will all be using SAN to manage and protect their data.

So why leave Dell? It is not that Dell is neither bad nor good. It is about matching the application to the right vendor. We wanted to keep our model of clustered servers connected to SAN but needed a more enterprise solution. We wanted more redundancy, more fibre, more clustering and we found SUN Microsystems’ (www.sun.com) solution was a better fit for us at this moment in time. One area where it has proved to be very beneficial is our new Vigabyte solution. I am still amazed by our competitors who offer virtual servers crammed onto a single server with no SAN storage. Some of the limitations of not having a SAN are:
1. Single point of failure - with no clustering of physical servers means if the server dies then so does your data.
2. With no SAN there will be disk I/O issues which will affect performance.
3. You cannot scale the storage as you are limited by the amount of storage crammed into the single physical server. SmartyHost has two SAN’s with capacity of one quarter of a petabyte! (1 petabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes)

Oh, and if you are wondering what F5 BIGIP’s are in the DELL case study these are load balancers which we still use. We purchased two of these at $45,000 each. They also have a compression module which means we are able to load our customer’s website faster (up to 8 times) and save you on bandwidth at the same time. Qantas has the same model BIGIP as SmartyHost and has an interesting use for it other than clustering. Depending on your Qantas membership level BIGIP will direct you to either the slow or fast network to access information on their website.

We have been looking to launch an affiliate program for our customers for some time. We found quite a few programs available including commission junction which I think is a good model for most websites. But we wanted a model that rewarded both our customers and their friends. We discovered the web hosting CRM system WHMCS has an Affiliate Program built into it but then we discovered the WHMCS, just like ModernBill, has had its fair share of problems. UK’s largest web hosting provider had a massive security breach with customer’s passwords being accessed: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/30/fasthost_hack_update/. Imagine running an entire hosting company on WHMCS that costs less than $16 per month. You really do get what you pay for.

Oh and we also found the personal letter sent by the founder and developer of WHMCS regarding a separate issue:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear WHMCS User,

Matt
Founder / Developer
WHMCS Ltd
www.whmcs.com
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We have always found big problems with third party hosting management software. This is why we always build our own to be reliable, scalable and secure.

Our affiliate program is no different; our only option was to build it ourselves. Our in house development team has recently released our own affiliate program that fully integrates into your customer control panel. The program is called ‘Mates Rates’ and here is how it works:
1. Simply go to your customer control panel and you will find your Mates Rates Discount Code.
2. Simply send your Mates Rates Discount Code to your mates, post it on your website, newsletters, etc.
3. Your mates can simply come to the SmartyHost website and in the order form add the Mates Rates Discount Code and receive 10% discount on the order.
4. You will also find in your customer control panel a special voucher. As your mates purchase services from SmartyHost using your Discount Code we will credit you 5% of the purchase value every time.
5. There is no limit or cap on how much money you can accumulate in your voucher.

The SmartyHost Mates Rates program was only recently launched and we have already paid out $13,388.95 as of today in discounts and vouchers to our customers.

If you are not an existing customer and want to try the Mates Rats feature, simply place an order on our website using the discount code 123 and you will get 10% off the order. I will only keep this discount code open for short time so if you want the discount you need to hurry.