Aplus.Net offers ISPs an affiliate and a reseller program with extensive customization—and the offering is fully integrated with the Rodopi billing system.

by Jeff Goldman [November 20, 2007]

Aplus.Net was founded in 1993 as Abacus America, Inc., a hardware development company based in San Diego. "As the popularity of the Internet increased, we got piece by piece into the different components of Internet services," says Aplus.Net's Nathan Denny. They added shared webhosting in 1998—and Denny says hosting remains the company's focus.

Still, Aplus.Net's services reach far beyond webhosting to include domain registration (using the brand name Names4Ever), web design (via the company's recent acquisition of WebImage), internet access, online marketing and more. In 2007, Aplus.Net was purchased by Catalyst Investors and moved to Kansas City, but Denny says the basic functions of the company have not been affected by the acquisition.

In addition to Aplus.Net and its registrar and hosting businesses, Abacus America has another offshoot: the ISP billing company Ropodi Software. While Rodopi was spun off from Abacus in 2004, all of Aplus.Net's offerings are still fully integrated with the Rodopi billing system, making Aplus.Net a particularly good choice for Rodopi users.

And while many of the ISPs that work with Aplus.Net come to the company for a wide range of services in addition to domain registration, Denny says the company does work with ISPs that are just looking for a way to offer domain names to their customers. They've been doing it for a long time: Aplus.Net was the first accredited domain name registrar in the state of California.

Affiliate or reseller
There are two ways for an ISP to work with Aplus.Net: either as an affiliate or as a reseller. Both programs can be set up online and activated in a matter of minutes.

The affiliate program is extremely straightforward: the ISP simply places a banner ad for Aplus.Net on their home page, and receives a commission for each resulting purchase. Commissions range from $5 to $200 depending on the value of the service purchased—a domain name will result in a $5 commission, while an advanced web design package will bring in $200.

For an ISP seeking a branded solution that gives them total ownership of the customer, the reseller program offers a private labeled customer interface and control panel for a $150 setup fee with no monthly minimum. The ISP purchases domains from Aplus.Net for wholesale pricing that starts at $7.99 per domain, and can offer those domains to their customers at any price they choose.

And the degree of integration is up to the reseller. All source code for the control panel and API is made available to the ISP—and if that's not enough (or if the ISP wants to integrate directly with a billing program other than Rodopi), the open source Pirin XML interface allows an ISP to develop their own fully customized system to automate the domain registration process.

A collaborative relationship
Denny is quick to state that ISPs shouldn't be concerned that Aplus.Net will compete with them for customers. "We do offer Internet access in the San Diego, but it's basically negligible—we really don't push that as a service that we sell," he says. Resellers in particular, he notes, are in full control of which of Aplus.Net's services they want to make available to their subscribers.

And Denny says Aplus.Net is constantly reviewing the specifics of the reseller offering in response to client requests. "We do listen to the concerns and to the input of people on the reseller program," he says. "We exchange e-mails with them quite often, and we really are receptive to their concerns."

It's the total solution that Aplus.Net offers, Denny says, that really makes the company stand out. "We might not have the best price point for domain names," he says. "We are honestly unable to match some of the prices for webhosting that you'll find at 1&1, or some of the prices you'll find on Go Daddy for domain names. But our advantage is that we are a bundled package… the more you get with us, the better the deal you're going to get as far as web design, dedicated servers, whatever you need."

And for the company's ISP partners, Denny says, the quality of the offering itself is a key differentiator. "Any affiliate or reseller program is only as good as what's being sold," he says. "With Aplus.Net, what you get is an award-winning variety of products… the level of quality separates Aplus.Net from the thousands of other webhosting providers who can only offer a fraction of the products and services that we do."

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