Microsoft is offering a FREE Hands-on IIS7 Training session with their Hosting Roadshow.  Although we’ve been working with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 for over a year now, IIS7 represent a major change for web hosting providers world-wide and I had the opportunity to attend the training myself this week. This was without question one of the best IIS training sessions I’ve attended and I’ve been going to them since the earliest Windows 2000 training sessions.

I’d encourage anyone that manages their own dedicated server, vps server or even web developers to attend this training as there’s something there for everyone.

If you’re interested in learning more about the roadshow even click on the banner above.  This week we’ll start a weekly blog article about IIS7 and Windows Server 2008 and how it’s changing and just what to look forward to.

Applied Innovations is pleased to announced we have partnered with DotNetInvoice, makers of the ASP.NET billing and invoicing system, DotNetInvoice to offer dotnetinvoice hosting.

DotNetInvoice is a comprehensive ASP.NET based invoice and billing system that allows all types of organizations to offer online invoicing and real-time payment processing. Today DotNetInvoice is commonly used by webhosting companies, web design firms,  web developers and consultants of all types.

Professional ASP.NET Invoicing software features

DotNetInvoice includes a large number of features that can be found on their features page and some of the features that really stand out for us include:

• ASP.NET 2.0 Application Integration - DotNetInvoice uses the standard ASP.NET 2.0 membership and roles providers so it can easily be integrated with your existing ASP.NET 2.0 based web application for seemless integration.
  
• Automated Hands-Free Recurring Invoicing - DotNetInvoice supports the ability to setup recurring invoicing on any period of time you wish, days, months or years and then will automatically email your clients their invoice when it comes due.
  
• Support for PayPal Website Payments Pro, Paypal and Authorize.net - Real-time online payments for your invoices, no phone calls, no checks to deposit just setup the site, email your clients and let the payments get submitted and best of all since it’s online your clients can submit payments at anytime, night or day, that’s convenient for them.
  
• Globalization - Out of the box, DotNetInvoice supports the following countries and currencies: Australia (AUD), Canada (CAD), China (CNY), Great Britain (GBP), India (INR), Ireland (EUR), Japan (JPY), New Zealand (NZD), USA (USD).
  
• Graphical reporting - A pictures is worth a thousand words:
  

These are just a few of the features we found most useful in DotNetInvoice and we believe our hosting partners will enjoy. We recommend you visit the DotNetInvoice site and the DotNetInvoice Demo to experience all of the power of this great application.

Special Offering: $40 Off Coupon for DotNetInvoice

DotNetInvoice is compatible with all of our hosting plans but we recommend the VS-1 Small Business hosting plan since it includes 250MB of SQL database spac, full support for ASP.NET 2.0, the ability to run your own SSL certificate (which you’ll need if you’re taking credit card information over the Internet) and starts at just $22.50/month. 

In addition, DotNetInvoice is making a special offering to all Applied Innovations hosted customers and offering $40 off their normal price. Deploying DotNetInvoice will save you time and money and with $40 off you’re already ahead. To access this special offer and any of our other great offers, remember to log into your control panel and select the Marketplace icon.

How great would it be if you were looking for an ASP.NET hosting discount and someone told you “sign up for a year of web hosting at just $99.95 with our company and you’ll get a rebate check for $325!”.  CHA-CHING! Right? Dreaming you say? No you’re not dreaming.  It’s more than just a dream, it’s a reality and here’s how.

$175 in Free Search Engine Pay Per Clicks

AppliedI.net has been busy building relationships for our customers so that they can receive special offers and discounts unique to them.  One of the places we’ve seen a lot of interest in from our clients is that of search engine pay per click advertising. So we’ve been busy building a lot of relationships with search engine marketing companies. Today we have the following special offers:

• $75 free pay per click credits from Microsoft adCenter on MSN.com and Live.com.
• $50 free pay per click credits from Yahoo!
• $25 free pay per click from Miva.com
• and $25 free pay per click from enhance.com.

So that’s not too shabby of a deal. $175 in free pay per click credits, for nothing more than signing up for hosting and then activating an account with the different search engine companies. Oh and here’s a secret, we’re working on a new deal that could generate another $100 in credits!

$150 PCI Compliance Scan from ScanAlert

Now I said, $325 so where’s the other $150? Well, It’s here at AppliedI.net thanks to scanalert.com. Thanks to our partnership we’re able to provide a Free year of PCI compliance scanning (needed for all e-commerce based websites and a generally good idea for any website in my opinion that keeps any type of personal information) that’s normally $149.  But this is the gift that keeps on giving because each year you can renew for just $19.

Great $325 in offers. Is that all you have?

Nope! It just doesn’t end there we have all kinds of great offers in our marketplace and are adding new offerings almost weekly. In fact we have 3 in the works that should be released within the next couple weeks. The marketplace has become a favorite spot for our hosting customers (second only to this blog naturally which BTW, you should subscribe to.) and we have yet even more surprises in the works to launch that should be equally exciting.

Recently we also announced that we’d do free installs of aspdotnetstorefront for our customers looking to adopt aspdotnetstorefront as their e-commerce platform, that’s a $50 discount right now.

So how do I get to this marketplace?

It’s in your control panel. Shared hosting customers and resellers will find it as an icon tagged “Marketplace” when they first log into their control panel. Dedicated hosting and VPS hosting customers will find it within the billing portal for their accounts.

So how does this translate into free hosting?

Well think about it. You’re going to sign up for hosting, our VS-1 would be $269 a year (including a free domain, 4GB of diskspace and 250MB of SQL2005 database space, support for asp.net, silverlight, xaml, php, etc). If you’re hosting aspdotnetstorefront we’ll do the install for you so that’s $50 right there you just saved making your year of hosting only $219 now.  Then you sign up for the free PCI scanning courtesy of scanalert.com and your one year of ASP.NET hosting with full 24/7 technical support has dropped to just $69 as you just got $150 product for free.  Then you sign up for the MSN pay-per-click program and pocket $75 in free pay per click ads that you were going to buy anyway and you just made $6 and have a full year windows webhosting with a Microsoft Gold Certified Hosting Partner.  Next you sign up for the Yahoo, the Miva and the Enhance programs and pocket another $100.  Now you have $106 in your pocket that you just saved that you would have spent on online marketing anyway AND you have 12 months of professional ASP.net 2.0 AJAX ready hosting with full support for the .NET Framework 3.0 and the ability to run PHP5 (and PHP4 if you need it) as well as MySQL5 and MySQL4.  Oh and did I mention you have $106 in your pocket you would have spent on advertising?

Now my example said sign up for $99 a year plan like our asp.net hosting discount promotion and you’d get $325 in free offers so that translate into one year of reliable, professional webhosting and $226 of extra discounts and offers outside of the $99 you spent. So it’s not _A_ free rebate offer but rather a combination of several special offerings but when it’s all said and done, no matter what windows hosting account you sign up for, it’s a great deal!

As a hosting provider that offers a full range of services tailored to the growing online business, we’re often asked for advice.  One of the most common questions is “Where can I learn more about programming in ASP.NET?” and our response is “LearnItFirst.com“. 

A special offer

LearnItFirst.com brings to the online training industry what Applied Innovations has brought to asp.net hosting, an affordable, accessible, full featured premium solution without a premium price. 

Because of the great feedback we’ve received from our customers, we’ve partnered with LearnItFirst.com who is now a preferred training partner of Applied Innovations. To celebrate this partnership, LearnItFirst.com is offering a 15% discount to all AppliedI.net e-business partners on top of their already affordable subscriptions.

About LearnItFirst.com

LearnItFirst.com, host of the LearnItFirst.com Video Training Network, is offering Applied Innovations customers a great deal: 15% off of any first-time subscription purchase. In case you haven?t heard of LearnItFirst.com, they are the folks behind sites like LearnSqlServer.com (a SQL Server 2005 video tutorial site), LearnCSharp.com (for ASP.NET with C#), LearnVisualBasic.NET (for ASP.NET with VB) and LearnReportingServices.com (along with 10 other tutorial sites).

With a LearnItFirst.com subscription, you can choose your subscription from over 1300 training videos (200 hours) on topics like SQL Server 2005, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Basic .NET, Exchange 2007, SharePoint, and much more. These are classroom-quality video tutorials: the tutorials are recorded by expert instructors who are also subject matter experts, and, since the videos are standard .AVI files, you can play the videos offline and on any device (such as an iPod).

Where to find this offer

You can access the LearnItFirst.com discount codes in the control panel marketplace along with several other great offers.