Netfirms Transition

After your account has been moved to the new platform, you might notice in the first few hours that your domain information (registrar, days remaining) is not showing correctly. That’s just a temporary situation. Usually, within the next 24 hours, that data will be up-to-date.

Once your account has been moved, it takes a little while for us to sync up your domain information with the domain registry to ensure we have the exact right info. This is just a display issue — we will still renew your domain, your information is still at the registrar, but we just are waiting to get the most up-to-date version.

Affiliates — if you haven’t already done so, make sure you complete the tax form in your Netfirms Affiliate Console. It only takes a moment, and we can’t pay you if that form is incomplete. You’ll need to have completed the tax form by May 1 to be included in May’s payout.

Also, please review the following notes about the payout schedule:

• Commissions earned before March 23, 2011 are subject to the previous affiliate agreement ($100 payment threshold, 60-day wait period). If you earned $100 or more prior to March 23 (the date we launched the new Netfirms website), you’ll receive those payments in May.
• Commissions earned since March 23, 2011 are subject to the revised affiliate agreement ($50 payment threshold, paid during the month after they’re earned). You must fill out your tax form to get paid.
• If your pre-March 23 commission is less than $100, but greater than $50 (either on its own or combined with commissions earned after March 23), you’ll receive your commission payment in May under the terms of the revised affiliate agreement.
• Any pre-March 23 commissions that don’t meet the $50 payment threshold (either on their own or combined with commissions earned after March 23) will expire after April 30, and you will not be paid out on these commissions.
• Commissions earned on March 23 or later that don’t meet the $50 payment threshold will get carried over on a rolling three-month basis before they expire.

Going forward, we’ll pay you on a monthly basis (towards the end of the month) for commissions earned the previous month that meet the $50 payment threshold. (Again, you must fill out your tax form to get paid.)

If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to email us at affiliate@netfirms-inc.com. We’re very excited about the future of the Netfirms Affiliate Program, and we think the new changes (decreased payment threshold, shorter wait period to get paid) will make the program more profitable for everyone.

We’ve received a number of requests from customers looking to migrate their accounts themselves, via the manual migration path. Customers that select a manual migration path will have access to a wide range of tools and scripts they can use to test their sites on the new platform and move them over when they’re ready. Most accounts are best served by our automated migration path, where we take care of the details and migrate the account automatically, but we’ve created the manual path option for customers who want to take a more active role in the migration.

We expect that the manual migration path will be fully operational within a week or two. We apologize for the delay — we’re still fine-tuning the process, and we think another week or so of testing will make it significantly easier for customers to test and review their sites themselves on the new platform. We’re very excited about the opportunities the new platform provides for our customers, and we’re doing everything we can to make this transition a positive experience!

If you think you want to migrate your account manually, there are two steps you can take ahead of time:

1) Log into your Transition Kiosk and schedule your migration for the first week of May. That way we won’t assign you a date in April and migrate your account before the manual path fully operational.

2) Keep checking this transition information site. We expect the manual path will be fully ready shortly, and we’ll announce it here when we do.

Thanks for your patience. We’re excited that so many customers want to proactively migrate their accounts themselves — that’s exactly why we created the manual migration path. We can’t wait for you to get onto the new platform, too!

We know that the last few days have seen some performance problems on the original hosting platform. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience these issues may have caused you, and our technical team has been working very hard, not only to resolve them as quickly as possible, but also to avoid them in the future.

The silver lining (as much as there can be one) is that these problems have been completely unrelated to the transition. The performance problems of recent days have been hardware related, and while they are indicative of why we wanted to make this move to the new platform (where our new storage system is more reliable and faster), the problems are not related to the transition itself. These issues would have happened regardless, and for that we are sorry and we will continue to try to do better.

While we continue to address these original-platform issues in the short term, the best long-term solution is to get your site up and running on the new platform. We are taking great care to ensure that the new platform performs and scales as well as we can make it, and more than well enough to keep your sites running as good as (or better than) ever.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been working hard to bring the first batch of customers to the new platform. In fact, we have already brought almost 13% of all of customers over to the new platform! By the end of the week, we estimate that close to 30% of all customers will be on the new platform, and we will keep working at it over the coming weeks and months to get your account over as soon as we can.

We appreciate your patience with this migration process, and once again, we are truly sorry for any inconvenience you’ve experienced in recent days.

When we started setting up accounts on the new platform last week, we implemented new fraud prevention measures for domain registrations, as well as for hosting account registrations. We put these measures in place to help us prevent people from signing up with credit cards that aren’t their own, or who are creating accounts for illicit or even illegal purposes. However, we noticed a number of false positives on the domain registration side — many legitimate domain registration attempts were getting flagged as fraud.

We believe we have fine-tuned the process so that legitimate domain registration attempts should now go through just fine; we made the adjustment on Monday afternoon, and we’ve seen far fewer false positives over the course of the last two days. If you were having difficulty registering domains late last week or early this week, and we invite you to register the domain now.

We apologize for any inconvenience. Keeping our shared hosting platform free from fraud and spam improves performance for all our customers, and we appreciate your patience while we fine-tuned this process. We’ll keep a close eye on domain registrations and continue to make adjustments as needed.

If you have any questions at all about this transition process, please contact us. Our transition support team is available 24×7, and can be reached by not only by phone (866-317-4678) and email (transition@netfirms-inc.com), but you can also chat with us online.

To better accommodate some of the services available on the new platform, we’ve made some changes to the Netfirms website. If you’ve bookmarked the login pages for your control panel or webmail, you may need to update your bookmarks to the following URLs:

• Control Panel: http://www.netfirms.com/controlpanel
• Webmail: http://webmail.netfirms.com

As part of this transition, we’re updating our affiliate program, making it easier than ever to make money by promoting Netfirms.

Managing Your Affiliate Account: New Login URL, New Username

Beginning today, March 23, 2011, affiliates should log in at the URL below to manage all aspects of their affiliate promotions. We’ve assigned new usernames to affiliates; each affiliate should have received an email with the new username in it — you will not be able to log in using your email address. Affiliate passwords have not changed.
http://www.netfirms.com/affiliate/gettingstarted.bml

To ensure uninterrupted commission payments, please take a moment to verify that your payment information is correct in the Affiliate Profile section of the new Affiliate Console.

To access campaign statistics prior to March 23, you’ll still need to log into the previous console at webhostrevenue.com. This site will remain active for reporting purposes only.

Important Payment Information

We won’t be changing the existing commission structure, but we are dropping the payment threshold from $100 to $50, and we’re shortening the wait time before payments are issued. Beginning with May’s payouts, you’ll get paid commissions on qualifying sales in the month after you’ve earned them. See details >>

Please note: Beginning with commissions earned on March 23, we’re required to have a W8/W9 tax form on file for all affiliates. To make it a quick and easy process, we’ve made the form available in your new Affiliate Console; please take a moment to fill out the tax form online. If you do not submit this tax form, we cannot pay you for commissions earned on or after March 23.

Managing Your Promotions

All of your existing banners and links are now pointing to the new netfirms.com. If you would like to point your links to netfirms.ca, or to a specific landing page, such as netfirms.com/domain-names/domain-offer, please log into your new Affiliate Console. At the bottom of the Affiliate Profile page, you’ll be able to specify the landing page URL to which your promotions will link.

Please note: All banners and links will point to the location you specify in your Affiliate Profile.

To set up new promotions, visit the Banners and Links section of your new Affiliate Console. To review clickthrough and commission statistics from March 23 onward, visit the Campaign Statistics section of the Affiliate Console.

All new Netfirms accounts are being set up on the new platform, and corresponding commissions are subject to our updated affiliate agreement. By continuing to participate in the Netfirms Affiliate Program, you are agreeing to comply with and abide by this agreement.

For more information about managing your Netfirms affiliate account, please visit our detailed Knowledgebase, or contact us at affiliate@netfirms-inc.com. If you have questions or concerns, please let us know — we look forward to working with you!

As a non-E.U. supplier of web-hosting services to customers in the European Union (E.U.), we are required to comply with the European VAT (Value Added Tax) regulations by charging VAT to customers located in the E.U.

Customers categorized as Business users in the E.U. may be required to self account for VAT on our charges under EC Directive 2006/112, Art 196 using the reverse charge mechanism. In order for us to determine whether you fall into this category, and not charge VAT, we need to collect some information from you. (If you are not familiar with the VAT self-accounting rules in an E.U. country, please contact your accountant or professional adviser for more information.)

Please complete the required “Account Use Information” form for each of your accounts:
http://www.netfirms.com/secureControl/UpdateVATInfo.bml

If we determine that we are required to collect VAT from you, the VAT rate will be your E.U. member state’s VAT rate at the date of invoice. The VAT charge will be itemized separately on your invoices and billing information.

If you have any questions please contact us.