IXwebhosting.com was far from my thoughts (ok I mentioned IXwebhosting.com in my last post), as I already have 20 posts literally waiting for me to finish on my phone. Not to mention, this is an election year and I am hurting for free time, and I am not hurting for work. But I got this email (and others that provide me with new post ideas) just a few hours ago from Stepan who wrote me from an email address from ecommerce.com.
Email from ecommerce.com on behalf of IXwebhosting.com
Hello,
I’m currently Affiliate Manager at IX WebHosting and noticed you don’t have our review on your website! This is really sad, and I would love you to add us to your website.
You can check all our current Shared Hosting plans from the next page:
https://www.IXwebhosting.com/hosting-plans
You can even try them out for Free (7 days free trial)!Please notice that we offer also industry leading VPS and Cloud
hosting.What I want to offer you is not only to advertise us on your website (place review), but also get money out of it! As I said, I’m affiliate manager @IX and I would like to invite you to our Affiliate Program. You can get up to $300 per signup! I know this may sound like a lottery, but… This is the way our affiliates are earning up to $10K on a regular basis. As I see from your website – you may be one of those successful ones. You can check our Affiliate Program from the next link:
https://www.IXwebhosting.com/
affiliate-program Feel free to contact me in case you have any questions or interested
in future beneficial cooperation.Thanks,
Stepan
So, IXwebhosting.com does not understand what this site is about?
I think most hosts would be happy not to be featured on this site. No host has received a glowing endorsement from me. I am not about to endorse any company that offers unlimited resources like IXwebhosting.com.
Stepan had no problem finding the contact form for my site, where I made it clear I would post emails in the interest of full disclosure. Yet I am not sure Stepan understood the nature of this site. IXwebhosting.com is not on the main page of this site, but I did a post on IXwebhosting.com in July 2011. Part of my interest in them is, like many hosts that appear on this site, IXwebhosting.com and other large commission sites are often found on so-called top 10 sites.
After all IXwebhosting.com appears on hosting-review.com’s top 10.
My other interest in IXwebhosting.com is the founder was also part of a company called featuredprice.com.
https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/hosting-reviews/IXwebhosting-com.html
In short, the point of my post was I thought there was something common between all of the sites that did reviews for IXwebhosting.com. Which there was and that was they were all done in the same city, and all were filmed by the same crew. Remarkable Lisa Grice of IXwebhosting.com contacted me the next day after I did my review.
“I’m the Customer Service Director for IX Web Hosting (yup, in Columbus, OH). I am commenting here because while your post is factual – I’m confused at how we’re ‘busted’”
Despite my critic testimonial page has not much since I last reviewed. The page does not disclose the back story behind what I found.
IX Web Hosting is trusted by over 500,000 websites and their owners all over the world.
Not being the best person at marketing I think I could do a better job of disclosing the scenario by adding just this sentence. ”Here is what the people of Columbus Ohio think about us.”
What domains are still hosted at IXwebhosting.com since I looked at the videos back in 2011?
houndsinthekitchen.com – Left at least March 2012
kellsband.com – Still there
digitaldynamicdesigns.com – Still there
yunbootcamps.com – Still there
1canalgirl.com – Still there
djscolumbus.com – Still there
ryanomics.com – Still there
fox-counseling.com Left around April 2012
kellisautosales.com – Still there and still at risk of having their domain taken away because of crap info entered in the whois,
All things considered, IXwebhosting.com kept a fair number of sites that did reviews.
Lisa stopped responding when I asked why IXwebhosting.com had not joined the many hosts, such as Hostgator.com and Endurance International Group hosts, in asking their affiliates to follow FTC guidelines. I had two IXwebhosting.com customers who left comments on my blog and it looked like they could have also used some assistance from IXwebhosting.com. One of those customers seemed to be in need of industry-leading VPS service.
The IXwebhosting.com question part of the blog
1. Was this site targeted by IXwebhosting.com because it used the terms hosting + reviews?
I have had a lot of hosts ask me to do a review, but most failed to see that “exposed” part in my domain hosting-reviews-“exposed”.com. Most don’t realize this site was created because a review site (webhostingstuff.com) chose to delete my company’s positive feedback unfairly. This event made it a core mission of this site to expose the real relationship between hosting review sites and hosting companies.
2. Why is there no FTC compliance in the IXwebhosting.com affiliate agreement?
Many of the big names(Hostgator.com, Fatcow.com, Webhostingpad.com,……..) in U.S. hosting have required their affiliates to follow FTC compliance guidelines in regards to sites that make a commission based on a review or perception of a review. So why has IXwebhosting.com left that out of their agreement? Below is a copy of IXwebhosting.com’s affiliate agreement.
3. Has hostingsthatsuck.com been contacted by IXwebhosting.com as well?
I just ask because a few hosts have contacted this so-called review site around the same time they asked me for a review. As far as I can tell, they have not done a review on IXwebhosting.com. They use this whole so-called “*hostname* sucks” to get people to sign up, and I was wondering if I will be writing a third post to explain how hostingsthatsuck.com is wrong. One host, in particular, started up last year, and hostingsthatsuck.com failed to mention this was a new company. But they made it sound like a good company because search engines had no negative feedback (look up zyma.com on this site). I know a lot of hosts don’t like their methodology. Would “IXwebhosting.com Sucks? Is this Hosting any Good?” sound like a good solution for selling services for IXwebhosting.com?
4. I would love to hear the backstory of why alreadyhost.com removed their endorsement of IXwebhosting.com. Why did they lose/quit their affiliate account with IXwebhosting.com?
http://www.alreadyhosting.com/blog/tag/IXwebhosting-poor-service/
Unlike most review sites alreadyhosting.com barely tries when it comes to writing a review about a host. The review they have up on IXwebhosting.com is weak at best and I am supposed to take his word like every site (which has an affiliate program with a nice payout) that I was supposed to choose IXwebhosting.com or another site. I have seen content spinners put more effort into promoting a post. But I was in contact with one host that removed their affiliate program due to cookie stuffing.
http://www.alreadyhosting.com/blog/2010/07/mddhosting-com-review-removed/
http://www.mikedvb.com/?s=alreadyhosting.com
So it really is not hard to imagine that IXwebhosting.com removed alreadyhosting.com’s affiliate program for the same/similar reasons and alreadyhosting.com is just covering up.
I don’t have a problem with IXwebhosting.com finding new affiliates.
My concern is who IXwebhosting.com might be targeting, it’s one thing to ask internet related sites to do a review on IXwebhosting.com or place ads. It’s another to ask sites that are into reviews for pure profit like hosting-review.com, alreadyhosting.com, webhostingstuff.com, hostaz.com, hostingsthatsuck.com, and a list that is way too long. All of these sites want their viewers to think they are independent sources to trust when someone is looking for their hosting needs. Sites that want their viewers to pick hosts like ixwebhostin.com to get up to $300 commissions / $10k on a regular basis.
