Hosting has always been a little bit of a dog eat dog industry, but with CDNs it gets a little more complicated because you are paying for a specifc quantity of a specific resource… bandwidth.
Read more on SimpleCDN – Being Killed By CDN Competitors (VPS.NET)?…
I first heard about Cloudflare when they presented at Techcrunch Disrupt. I am not writing about every startup that presented there, just a couple that caught my eye as something that I think will have a significant impact for my readers.
Read more on Cloudflare – Potentially Mindblowing e-Commerce CDN Solution…
I am actually a fan of your new Cloud Servers service. There are some huge benefits in using your service that as both a marketing geek and affiliate I can highlight and potentially drive you a lot of business.
However today you have just introduced a payola scheme that will make every one of my clean affiliate links look like a paid link, thus I am going to have to nofollow every single link I give you, forever.
You want me to use badges like this, and in exchange will give me “Goodies” of an unspecified nature.
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The links are visible, nothing is hidden, but all the same it is effectively a paid linking scheme.
Here is what they said in an email sent to customers
Our New “Link-To-Us” Program
We’re also launching a new “Link-To-Us” program today. In essence, customers who post new links or change their old Mosso links on their websites to our new http://www.rackspacecloud.com site will receive special goodies. The more sites you post a link on, the more great stuff you will get. How cool is that? Please check out all the links here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/linksThanks so much for being a part of the Rackspace family, and please keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to build the most complete and easy-to-use cloud platform on the web.
The sad thing is this would all be unnecessary if you just made some minor changes to your affiliate program.
For old-time affiliate marketers this post might stir up some unpleasant memories, or unearth some golden nuggets. It is primarily intended for people less familiar with affiliate marketing, who might otherwise feel it is all plain sailing if you can get a few sales.
