Dedicated hosting provider The Planet has expanded its partner offerings to include a new affiliate program.

The Houston-based company has refined its partner offerings over the course of the past year, introducing a formalized partner program and a Microsoft Small Business Server hosting program.

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Now the company is responding to those resellers and others who have the right contacts but aren't interested in becoming a full hosting reseller.

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"We learned there's a whole community and constituency out there that are talking to people who need hosting but aren't interested in the burden of being a reseller," said Urvish Vashi, director of product management for the company, which has 48,000 servers under management and six data centers, and hosts 3.1 million Web sites.

"That gave rise to an opportunity to offer incentives to that same constituency to send us business and give them money once we close the deal," he said.

The program pays 65 percent of the first month's revenue for every deal referred. Deal sizes start at $69 for contracting for the smallest available hosted server to thousands of dollars for multiple hosted high-end servers.

In addition, the company is offering two affiliate contests during February. The Planet will pay an additional $1,000 to the affiliate member who generates the largest volume of referrals and another $250 to the member who refers the month’s largest single transaction.

Affiliates have access to marketing material online via the company's new affiliate portal. Partners can monitor their sales via the portal. The program, announced Jan. 23, has already signed on about 100 affiliates, and Vashi said the company is looking for a total of about 1,000.