In my previous post I discussed Black Friday sales and how they are nothing more than an attempt to get you in the door. Long story short, the goal is to make money off of you by jacking up your renewal rates. However, they aren’t going to get you in the door with their sales unless their affiliates are promoting them. How do they inform their affiliates? HostGator, for one, sends an absurd amount of emails.

I was sent 6 emails in 8 days reminding me about their sales. A little bit of overkill if you ask me. But these emails were only the newsletters that I assume were sent out to every affiliate in their system. I also received an email from their affiliate manager which you can see below.

It may be difficult to read because I had to resize it, but the jist of it is that the affiliate manager asked me to move HostGator up in my rankings in exchange for a commission increase “if that is of interest.” There are a few problems with this email:

1. He must not have reviewed my website before sending the email. It’s pretty clear that I am not interested in higher commission rates for higher rankings. If he took 2 minutes to read my home page he probably would have figured that out and could have saved himself some time.

2. He “noticed” that HostGator is listed at #9. No it isn’t. It’s listed at #6 (for now) which leads me to believe this was just a sloppy copy/paste of an email he sent to another affiliate where HostGator is listed at #9.

This is a standard offer that high-traffic affiliates will get from hosting companies. If my low traffic website got their attention then imagine what the big ones you see on the first page of Google are being offered.

The bottom line is that many web hosts, especially the EIG brands, and plenty of web hosting review sites are not to be trusted. They are working together to get you to sign up and screw you over in the long run.