Referrals and rewards

Maybe this isn't the place to make suggestions to DH, but I have one. If I want to refer people to DH in an email, I have to use a URL that looks like this:

http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?mywebid

In addition to being long, it has the word "rewards" in it, not "referral" which makes it pretty obvious that I'm doing it for the money. And it has my web ID in it, which in my case stands out a bit since my web ID is a real word that is unfortunately (for me) a little odd.

How about changing "rewards" to "referred-by" and doing some simple (perhaps optional) obfuscation of the web ID? Like this, perhaps:

http://www.dreamhost.com/?referred-by=049CKA1

or even more obfuscated:

http://www.dreamhost.com/049CKA1

I think you're out of luck if you want DH to change their reward set-up (they're usually pretty helpful, but this is a little beyond the call of duty).

If you're sending an HTML-encoded email, you could make the 'click here' look/say whatever you want and simply enter your real referral code in the actual link. Once they click on it there is nothing you can do about what appears in their address bar.

Be careful how you do this... remember that DH has a zero-tolerance policy concerning all things that might be considered spam. If the people you're emailing to aren't your friends and family or have specifically opted-in to receive marketing messages, all the referrals in the world won't matter because your account may no longer exist.

Well, this calls for the recipient to take an extra step, but could you just make a web page on your site about DreamHost (perhaps a testimonial or the like) and then just put a link to that page in the e-mail message? If you put a link to DreamHost on this web page, then DreamHost would count it as a referral simply because they came to dreamhost.com from yourdomain.com. Well I'm assuming they still do that. Added benefit - you get a chance to see how many recipients respond to that part of your message.



Perl / MySQL / HTML+CSS

That might work.

Though I only tell people about DreamHost if they ask me who my hosting provider is, so it may not be worth the effort to make a page just for the few times that happens...

You can also create a redirected subdomain that goes to the referral page; that way, you can give out the address "dreamhost.yourdomain.example", which in turn redirects to the actual referral address.

-- Dan

Brilliant! I just set it up.

Thanks!

I actually tell them I get a referral, up front. Once they're a customer, they'll see it themselves one way or another. I point out if they get the cheap plan, that's like 99¢/mo so it's not like I'm telling them to host here for the cash.

If people are looking for hosting on a forum, I'll give them two links - one for which I get a referral, one for which I don't. Their choice. So far, haven't had anyone click the non-referral one.

Thanks for your inspiration. I actually registered a brand new domain name JUST FOR THAT today. (However, I have not been able to add it to my account: getting error saying that "another user owns it". Contacted support and waiting; quite frustrating, I was really excited when I first read your post.)

I set up something like this:

http://www.mydomain.com/go/?h=dreamhost

which redirects them with the actual http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?username using the
header("Location: http://www.....com"); in my php script.

What is considered spam with the dreamhost referal?

I just put the link on the bottom of all my emails.. its their choice to click on it? Its not like my only intention is to just email them with the link.. the email actually has content other then the referal link. Is that considered spam or no?

Also, what about posting the referal link in your sig on the forums?

> Also, what about posting the referal link in your sig on the forums?

Nah, you don't want to do that. :-)

Cheers,

BobS

you did :)

So does if DH gets traffic directly from my DH site (without the referrer link) and they sign up for hosting do I get the referrer credit? Or do I have to use my referrer link?

The latter.

See also:
http://dreamhost.com/rewardsmoreinfo.html

You don't have to put your webid in the link if you are linking from a site hosted with us - just to rewards.cgi.Edited by will on 06/13/04 09:23 PM (server time).

I should be on the platinum level (7 direct referrals,) but am still getting the "Oops! You currently have no unallocated Rewards to allocate. Please return when you do!"

Also, it looks as if my rewards payment report is missing some of my referrals. The referral Web IDs are in Recurring Direct Referrals, but not in the rewards payments report. Should I send another email to dreamhost, or is this something that will eventually be fixed, and should I just wait?

I want to use my referral rewards to add on some goodies, etc to my account, but it still says I can't do that.