FatCow To Launch Partner Program

VARs interested only in signing up online vs. forming a committed partnership need not apply, said Jackie Fewell, CEO of the Albuquerque-based hosting company. "We hand-hold the customer, and we will have the same approach with resellers," Fewell said. "So if they're looking for a program that is going to have a mass sign-up online, they're better off signing up with someone else."

FatCow plans to add resellers based on its growth. As the company approaches the 20,000 domain-hosting account mark, it intends to sign 250 to 300 partners, FatCow executives said. Channel partners must have a minimum of 10 accounts.

FatCow has two SMB offerings: the bare-bones Mini Moo package and a $99-per-year package. Partner discounts start at 10 percent and rise based on sales.

Mini Moo includes domain-name registration, an e-mail account and a "coming soon" page. The initial fee for the service is waived once customers register their domain names.

Most customers sign up for the $99 package, which includes 100 Mbytes of disk space, 100 e-mail accounts, 5 Gbytes of monthly transfer, FrontPage extensions, a shopping cart, a control panel, computer-generated image (CGI) and personal home page (PHP) capabilities, and MySQL. As customers grow their businesses, they can add disk space and bandwidth for a fee.

"What is really going to appeal to resellers is that they can get more profits out of their existing client bases," said Maverick Granger, director of channel sales and marketing at FatCow. "They get a discount and mark it up to sell monthly or yearly."

Altamont Design and Multimedia, a New York-based Web design shop, opted for FatCow's $99 package and has moved about a dozen customers to the service, said owner Wes McWhorter.

"My forte is design, not hosting or servers. So I went with FatCow because they walked me through the deal, the setup and the program," McWhorter said. "What's also good about the service is that I get one central control panel to do all my work in one place."

Unlike other Web hosting providers, FatCow doesn't plan to enter the Web design space, Granger said.