Tuned Hosting Review: Domains and web hosting
There is no information on the Tuned Hosting website indicating who owns or runs the business.
The Tuned Hosting website domain (“tunedhosting.com”) was registered on the 20th of April 2015, with Rick Weston listed as the owner. An address in the US state of Oregon is also provided.
In 2013 Rick Weston (right) appeared on BehindMLM via comments on our My Fun Life review (comment #3 onwards).
My Fun Life, a recruitment-driven travel opportunity, was in decline for most of 2015. In March, 2016, CEO Dan Edwards announced the My Fun Life affiliate database had been sold to WorldVentures.
Prior to My Fun Life, Weston was an affiliate with North American Power.
North American Power was a recruitment-orientated utility MLM. The company terminated its MLM operations in 2015.
Weston also owns WP-MLM, a WordPress plugin that promises to ‘change how you MLM recruit online forever‘.
Read on for a full review of the Tuned Hosting MLM opportunity.
The Tuned Hosting Product Line
Tuned Hosting sell monthly domain and web hosting services.
Advertised services on the Tuned Hosting website include:
- domain registration and transfer ($10.53)
- shared hosting ($3 to $12 a month)
- VPS hosting ($29 to $89 a month)
- cloud hosting ($49 to $59 a month)
- dedicated hosting ($169 to $369 a month)
Tuned Hosting provide no indication of whether they offer their domain and hosting services directly or through a third-party.
The Tuned Hosting website domain was itself purchased through eNom. The Tuned Hosting website is hosted with Enzu. It assumed Tuned Hosting are reselling the services of one or both of these companies.
The Tuned Hosting Compensation Plan
Tuned Hosting pay affiliates to sell the company’s domain and hosting services to retail customers and recruited affiliates.
Direct commissions, which includes retail orders, pay out a 20% commission each month on hosting.
The Tuned Hosting compensation plan makes no mention of commissions paid out on the sale of domains.
Residual commissions in Tuned Hosting are paid out via a unilevel compensation structure.
A unilevel compensation structure places an affiliate at the top of a unilevel team, with every personally recruited affiliate placed directly under them (level 1):
If any level 1 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 2 of the original affiliate’s unilevel team.
If any level 2 affiliates recruit new affiliates, they are placed on level 3 and so on and so forth down a theoretical infinite number of levels.
Tuned Hosting cap payable unilevel levels at ten, with commissions paid out as a percentage of sales volume generated within the unilevel team.
- level 1 (personally recruited affiliates) – 5%
- level 2 – 2%
- levels 3 to 5 – 1%
- level 6 – 2%
- level 7 – 3%
- level 8 – 5%
- level 9 – 7%
- level 10 – 10%
Affiliates must qualify to earn on all ten unilevel levels, via the following qualification criteria:
- sell and maintain three hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 3
- sell and maintain four hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 4
- sell and maintain five hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 5
- sell and maintain six hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 6
- sell and maintain seven hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 7
- sell and maintain eight hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 8
- sell and maintain nine hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 9
- sell and maintain ten hosting services = commissions on levels 1 to 10
After initially qualifying to earn on levels 8 to 10, an affiliate must qualify to earn on these levels each month by selling at least one new hosting package.
Joining Tuned Hosting
Affiliate membership with Tuned Hosting is free.
Conclusion
Tuned Hosting don’t effectively differentiate their affiliates from retail customers, with affiliate membership being free (sending in an application).
This raises the potential problem of the majority of Tuned Hosting customers being affiliates, which happens at the expense of retail activity.
If the Tuned Hosting MLM opportunity is pitched to drive domain and hosting service sales, the income opportunity itself is effectively being sold.
The only way to verify it isn’t, is by demonstrating healthy retail sales activity, which brings us back to square 1.
As a potential Tuned Hosting affiliate, you can suss this out by asking your prospective upline how many retail customers they currently have active. That is, retail customers who are paying a monthly fee for Tuned Hosting services.
Compare this with how many affiliates they’ve recruited and you should have an idea of how strong (or not) retail focus is within the business.
Given the otherwise legitimate nature of Tuned Hosting’s products I am tempted to give Rick Weston the benefit of the doubt, however his MLM history leaves much to be desired.
On the product side of things, one issue you might run into when trying to market Tuned Hosting to retail customers is the highly competitive nature of the niche. Hosting packages are aggressively advertised online and even someone new to the concept should be able to price compare with relative ease.
Do this yourself first and be prepared to explain any discrepancies either way.
Good luck!
There is GAJILLION competitors in webhosting. This guy is basically an affiliate reselling someone else’s stuff, and tack’ed on a MLM plan.
FWIW, here’s the actual affiliate plan from Enzu
NOLINK://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1568381
Thanks for posting a review about our program.
Yes, we are reselling Enzu, however I’d like to point out that many companies in hosting resell other providers services, such as Hostgator who sells Softlayer and Data Ace and finally after a decade they setup their own DC, as many other major brands do… few if any actually own their data centers, especially in the beginning.
There is no fee to become an affiliate, we require no product purchase either… we are focused primarily on developing retail sales and providing a vehicle for those who want and desire to make a change in their life via our compensation plan marketing our services.. not for going out and getting recruiting signup fees.
Also, in our affiliate program we are distributing site traffic to our active affiliates, giving out traffic which turned into sales and or new affiliate signups via our marketing systems, something we have never seen done before, not saying we are for sure the first to do this… but it looks that way. 😉
We are using WP Leads Press to build out our sales organization, WPLP is what WP-MLM was redesigned into, I’ve been developing recruiting software for about 8 years or so now… now using for building a company directly rather than just recruiting for a single team.
So, no fee to join, no requirement to purchase products and we provide traffic to those who are actively sending traffic themselves to our offers… a win win all the way around.
As for retail sales vs affiliate sales, we have about a 50/50 mix currently of affiliates/customers vs just customers at this time. Our compensation plan is driven by retail sales, with monthly requirements for new retail sales… which will likely be increased over time as we grow.
There is absolutely no income to be make ‘recruiting’ into our program, only when sales of hosting are made are commissions generated.
We do not even consider our program to be MLM, more of an Affiliate /MLM hybrid, a ‘Super Affiliate’ program and hopefully your next review will be a positive one about the benefits of our program and the nature of our business model.
See you in a few months for that one!
~Rick
Just wanted to point out, when I purchased the tunedhosting.com domain, I actually purchased via namecheap.com, who is an eNom reseller, just like Tuned Hosting is.
Reselling other companies products or services, wrapping them in your own bundle of services, i.e. such as how we provide completely setup servers, not just standard installations for our VPS and Dedicated packages, is very common.
Does the fact Namecheap is a reseller of eNom somehow make them a poor company to do business with? Does the fact that Hostgator uses Ace Data and CyrusOne data centers and previously/currently Softlayer make them a bad host?
Being a reseller of Enzu products does not make Tuned Hosting a poor company, it is common business practice to utilize existing data centers, it is sound business practice too, keeping costs lower from not needing to invest in data center infrastructure until it makes sense to do so.
True, there are a GAJILLION hosting companies out there, we just strive to do somethings differently than the rest, more features such as backups, high speed configurations even on our shared hosting, which Enzu does not offer BTW, pre-configured VPS and Dedicated packages, tuned for performance… not just cookie cutter roll outs of distribution packages, we set things up so our clients don’t have to.
I welcome your comments, good or bad and we will continue to improve on our offerings and how we market to get the word out about our services.
~Rick
Not as long as you keep up that retail customer ratio (or better). Good work.
It is. MLM compensation plan = MLM opportunity.
I wanted to be more accurate about out customer versus affiliate ratio, looks like our numbers are more like 60/40 with approximately 60% of our customers just being customers only, not affiliates, this is not taking into account affiliates who are not currently active in our program, our numbers are much higher for our customer to affiliate ratio.
We just launched our affiliate program, the 10 level portion, last month and are now just starting to roll out marketing materials etc for our affiliates to use, so we really should be looking at even a higher ratio of customers to affiliates moving forward as they will now have more tools to easily market our services with.
Creating retail sales is the primary focus of our compensation plan and will continue to be so, in a meeting with our new CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, we discussed that in detail as it is of high concern and we do not desire to have any issues in this regard.
This is why we do not have a product purchase requirement to earn as an affiliate, no sign up fee, no monthly fee… no cost of any kind to earn in our compensation model, you can only make money and you can do so with ZERO out of pocket.
BTW, I’d like to point out, our products are all competitively priced for the level of service we provide, meaning we don’t mark up our hosting to make the compensation plan work… as most MLM companies tend to do, we made our compensation plan work within standard industry pricing… In fact our pricing in most cases is better than our direct competition, not by just a little… by significant amounts of up to 50% or more!
Less for more, perhaps a first in MLM history? 🙂
The reason why? Your host has been ripping you off for years and you didn’t even know it… that is how.
Tuned Hosting is happy to fill the void and provide top quality hosting at a price anyone can afford and any affiliate can feel proud to represent.
Yes, I do realize we are considered a MLM program because of the multiple levels of pay, we just view our program as being a hybrid of the two, with the parts most people dislike about MLM being removed, i.e. monthly auto-ships, product purchase requirements, sign up fees, etc. 🙂
Anyway, back to the ‘grind’, currently finishing up programming on our internal marketing/traffic distribution system for our affiliates so we can start handing out traffic/sales/affiliates to our active affiliates.
~Rick