Keeping Legitimate Email From Ending up in Your Clients’ Spam Folders

Editor’s note: A few months ago in the Tech Bench, we featured a support ticket between a customer of ours and our Director Network Compliance, Mike Witty. He had some great advice about controlling spam and blacklisted IPs.

A comment on that post about Mike’s preference for the spam software, SpamAssassin, prompted a reply from Mike that delves further into some of the nuances of spam software and how to prevent your legitimate correspondence from ending up in your clients’ spam folders.

Reader’s comment:

“[SpamAssassin] is smart and does a good job. But it still erroneously categorizes some kinds of email as spam when it is not. Deleting valid email that has been mis-categorized as spam is NOT acceptable except in special circumstances. For example, my web-based order form sends an automatic email to the customer giving them a code to enter on the form. This establishes the validity of an email address they have entered and proves it can reach the customer. But this automatic email looks like spam to SpamAssassin. So some of my customers don’t get the email and give up.”

Mike’s response: Read more

ServInt Wants to Give You Free Money

Who turns down free money?

Really, we want to know that.

Our guess is that nobody turns down free, no-strings-attached cash.

We’re asking because, everyday, we see forum posts on the Internet recommending web hosting with ServInt, and we see new customer comments saying how happy they are that their friends or colleagues told them about us. But inevitably, when we track these comments down, even if the source was a customer of ours, they didn’t ask for or receive a referral fee.

Did you know that you can receive up to $799 cash

for referring customers to ServInt?

Our PowerPartners program lets you earn discounts on multiple server purchases, save hosting packages in the Custom Shop, and earn cash or hosting credits for referring customers to us.

And you don’t even have to be a customer to earn those credits. Just use your PowerPartners customer URL on your website or as the hyperlink when you recommend us in a forum. Then watch the money roll in.

You earn the value of one month of the base price of any hosting package purchased through your link. That’s anywhere from $49-$799 dollars per referral!

(Remember, practice being a good netizen and always remember to let people know when you are receiving a referral fee for a recommendation. If you’re up front, they will understand.)

We have a strong and loyal fan base on the Internet, and we want you to share in the success you’ve helped us build.

So, if you find yourself recommending ServInt to your friends and fellow techies, stop turning down free money. Sign up for your PowerPartners account today.

Photo by tim ellis

The Mobile ServInt Portal App is Here

You’re on the go, but you need to stay in touch with ServInt. We hear you, and we’re here to help. Introducing the ServInt app:

ServInt has launched an all-new free mobile ServInt Portal app compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android devices. The app allows ServInt customers to open, view and manage support tickets, access information about their servers, and provide quick access to important ServInt web sites and KnowledgeBase content.

It’s that simple.

Download the app today.

 

Earning Cash the PowerPartner Way, With ServInt

$13,000

That was the cash value of what our top affiliate marketing partner earned in one year with ServInt.

ServInt’s PowerPartner program is your portal into our affiliate marketing community. With cash or hosting credits available for referrals, simple, regular payments via Paypal, our proprietary Custom Shop tools to help you land more referral business, and a newsletter to keep you up to date on the latest tips and tricks for affiliate marketers, ServInt’s PowerPartner affiliate marketing program is simply the best web hosting affiliate marketing program in the business.

ServInt offers cash payments as high as $799 for referred hosting business, and there’s no limit to how much PowerPartners can earn. Every referral fee is equal to the first full month of service for the referred server at the base price. Read more

Planning For Growth

Most customers come to ServInt understanding that their need for hosting resources will grow over the lifetime of their website and other online applications. Some have already experienced this, outgrowing a shared hosting service or small VPS plan at another company. And, nearly all customers share the dream of hitting it big — seeing massive success in their business that draws viewers to their website and necessitates a larger hosting package to handle the traffic.

That’s just what today’s virtualized hosted infrastructure is built for: rapid server scaling and room for growth.

But how do you ensure that the host you sign up with today is the host you want to be with when your sites explode with traffic?

In this revealing interview, 18-year hosting industry veteran and server design consultant Devon Rutherford takes aim at the hidden pitfalls of relying too heavily on today’s cloudy server technologies — and not enough on planning, coding and other less glamorous forms of online business management. This is serious insight that could save your business serious money! Read more

The Best Questions to Ask a Web Host

Many readers of the ServInt Source are current and long-time customers. But for those of you who may have just found us — or have been reading for a while, but are not ServInt customers — this one’s for you.

We recently sat down with our sales team and were talking about some of the questions prospective customers ask before they purchase a server. As you might guess, some questions are better than others if you want to really learn something about a web host.

The first question that came up was from our Director of Sales, Devon Rutherford. Without hesitation, he said that the best question a customer can ask is, “Which package is best for me?” But that came with some qualifications: Read more

The more things change, the more they… make your web hosting life a whole lot easier.

This week’s a big week at ServInt. After a lot of hard work, we have an all-new ordering system for our entire line of products. Not only is it simpler and more intuitive with only three pages for the entire order process, but we’ve also built in some pretty exciting functionality.

The Custom Shop allows you to configure and save server packages

Our all-new Custom Shop is a powerful tool that lets customers and non-customers alike configure and save servers packages for later purchase or to send to their referral clients. More than a simple shopping cart, the custom shop allows you to: Read more

The Great Migration: VPS host migration versus server migration within a host

Just about every hosting customer with a virtualized product, whether they know it or not, has been migrated from one server to another at some point. Some of these migrations — hardware migrations within a web host’s own infrastructure — are so simple and commonplace, that most customers don’t know when or if they’ve ever been migrated. Others — migrations between hosts — are more complex and can necessitate considerable forethought and planning.

Why are these processes so different? Aren’t they — after all — both simply different forms of server migration? Read more

Ain’t No Free: Thoughts on the marketing utility of Facebook

One of my favorite bands is an essentiially defunct group called NRBQ. On their 1978 album “NRBQ At Yankee Stadium,” there’s a track I’ve enjoyed, and, in my role as marketing guy, quoted from many times over the years. The track is called “Ain’t No Free,” and — to the accompaniment of a rollicking New Orleans beat — it details the many ways that none of us ever receive anything, from anybody, at any time, without paying for it:

Well, it might be credit
Or it might be barter
But they always find a way
To make you pay, pay, pay!

Much has been made over the last decade about how the Internet is changing this paradigm. All kinds of companies (including ours, on occasion) launch new products or entice new users, by offering goods and services at no cost. The reality, of course, is that in most cases, these things are only being offered at no immediate cost. Like the song says, “ain’t no free.” Read more

Dude, I Got Nothin’

At the ServInt Source, we try to keep up with two posts a week, one on something technical as part of The Tech Bench, and one on some other pertinent topic. Our litmus test for all posts is: do they have actionable intelligence? (i.e. are we giving the reader information that they can learn from and act on?) Some weeks are content rich. Other weeks, like this one, the works grind to a halt. Sometimes there are a lot of topics we are just not ready to take public, sometimes writers ask for deadline extensions because work takes time away from their writing. And sometimes… well, sometimes it’s a slow news cycle and we’re flat out of creative topics on which to opine. Today was one of those days.

The following is an actual transcript of a series of calls today between me: ServInt Source editor, Andrew Loschert, and my boss: Fritz Stolzenbach, VP of Marketing and Business Development. Read more

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