We’ve been reviewing our affiliate scheme against the competition and believe we have the leading scheme in the industry. With the Heart Internet scheme you can earn 10% commission on all domain and hosting sales by referring new customers online.

Enrolling in our affiliate scheme is free of charge and we supply a range of banner and button sizes to place on your Website. When a visitor to your website clicks on any of these banners they are sent to our website and a special piece of information is stored on their computer (called a cookie). Cookies are used by many companies, including Microsoft, Amazon and Argos, so are widely accepted by computer users. The cookie stores your affiliate ID so that when that customer places an order for services from our website we know that the customer came from you.

Once an order is placed we automatically credit your account with 10% commission for web hosting and domain names from that sale. As long as you reach £15 by the end of the month we will automatically credit the amount you have earned to your bank account. If you don’t earn £15 in a given month we simply keep carrying this amount over until you reach £15.

To join simply login to your account/sign up for a new account and click the “Affiliate Link” once you have logged in.

Over the past few years I’ve always carried a USB drive around with me containing files that I need for home and work, but recently I’ve ditched it for a service that provides 30GB of online storage space for free. Who provides this service? Well, we do actually. It’s called the Heart Drive and if you’ve not used this innovative file storage system then I strongly suggest that you give it a go.

Heart-drive is an online storage service for all of your files.

Your files are stored centrally online so you can access and work with them from any computer or mobile phone. There’s no software to install, all you need is a web browser - one quick login and you are instantly connected to your personal drive.

When you want to listen to your music or watch a movie you can stream them direct from Heart Drive, wherever you are. You can even embed your favourite multimedia in your emails, blog and web pages.

If you’d like to sign up, just pop over to http://drive.heartinternet.co.uk

After reading Jonathan’s blog article about how bandwidth has changed over the last ten years it got me thinking about the hardware we use in web hosting. I’ve just placed an order for additional web servers of the following spec:

Dell 1950

• Two Quad Core Intel® Xeon® X5460, 2X6MB Cache, 3.16GHz,
• 8 GB 667MHZ FBD
• Primary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Secondary HD: 73GB, SAS, 3.5-inch, 15.000 rpm Hard Drive
• Perc6i SAS RAID Controller
• dual Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5708 Gigabit Ethernet NIC

When we launched WebFusion in 1997 we built our own servers for the first year then started to use equipment from Penguin Computing. We selected Penguin as they were one of the first companies to supply rack mounted servers to the Linux community. They are based in San Francisco and we often had to wait up to four weeks for delivery – having said that they always put toy penguins in the packaging to ease the wait! The spec of the servers in 1998 was:

 
• Two 300 MHz Pentium II w/256K Cache
• 128 MB ECC 100 MHz SDRAM
• Integrated Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI Controller
• Primary HD: Quantum 9.1 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
• Intel 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Adapter

Of course in 1998 we only gave 10MB disk space with each account and bandwidth was limited by the fact that nearly everyone was on dial-up, so these servers coped fine. Today’s websites are much more demanding of servers, so even though the spec is significantly higher, we still only put the same number of accounts on each server as we did ten years ago.