IBBoard

Since May 2006, IBBoard.co.uk and all other websites that I own and run (including Skins @ Hive World Terra, WarFoundry and my wife's Perfect Imagination beta reading service) have all been hosted with a company called A Small Orange. The following is a brief description of the hosting and the discount vouchers that let you save on a web hosting package with A Small Orange.

Hosting at A Small Orange

While my time at A Small Orange hasn't been entirely perfect, I've run websites for long enough to know that no shared host is entirely perfect. While the host can't guarantee a perfectly smooth server - you're always at the potential mercy of other customers and their rogue scripts - where A Small Orange excel is tech support.

Where as my previous host, Micfo, were left me with a terrible experience, if there is even a slight problem on the ASO servers then I know I can contact the Tech Support and get a quick, accurate and complete response. Even a minor enquiry is normally responded to quickly and it's rare that I've waited over an hour for a response. Micfo, on the other hand, removed a half-hour response guarantee to "improve" their tech support, which just resulted in the same canned response and two hour waits or longer.

A Small Orange discounts

As well as offering great hosting, A Small Orange offer a great referral scheme. As well as allowing me to use a number of referral links, they also let all customers generate discount codes. These codes act as vouchers or coupons that provide one of two hosting discounts, and customers can create as many as they want to give to new customers. As an example, using 15%saving will save you 15% on your order (the best discount when you're spending $35 or above - e.g. a year of a Medium shared hosting plan or higher, or a VPS account) while $5saving will save you $5 on your order (the better discount for the Tiny or Small packages where the discount is worth one or two months, effectively getting an entirely free trial month).

The best part is that the vouchers work on VPS accounts as well, so you can also get make a 15% saving with a discount voucher on the more expensive packages.

Once you've signed up at ASO you can create your own referral account to generate discount codes to offer to people for ASO hosting. As well as providing a discount to the recipient, you get a credit equivalent to one month of whichever package they purchase (or one-twelfth of their yearly amount if they buy a year and get two months free). That means referring VPS servers through discount codes can save them a lot of money and it can gain you a nice credit that could cover a year or more of hosting fees!