Very carefully.
We're delighted to have people refer us to their friends. In fact, we absolutely depend upon it for growth because it lets us focus on building a better service. However, this situation does create a couple of occasional problems that border on heartbreaking for us, so we've created this FAQ entry to offer some guidelines. (Although there are other types of referrals than male friends, we're using the words 'friend' and 'him' here for the sake of simplicity.)
First, and most importantly, you absolutely, positively, must not ever create a membership for anyone other than yourself. Not only are memberships non-transferrable, but you have no legal authority to agree to our TACOS on behalf of a third party. Your friend needs to read, understand, and agree to our TACOS for himself. Those are the rules for using our service, and we don't want people on our system who don't know the rules. Therefore, your friend must complete the signup process for himself.
Second, please make sure that your friend is equipped to manage or maintain his site(s) without ongoing assistance from you. You are not allowed to access other people's memberships! We have gotten into several painful situations because someone "helped" their less tech-savvy friend by setting them up on our service, then disappeared for whatever reason, and the abandoned friend expected us to provide whatever assistance they were promised because no one ever explained the limited scope of support to them. We simply don't have the resources for that, and it invariably winds up with the friend hating us and blaming our "unhelpful support" for not keeping someone else's promises. Please, please, please don't put us in that position. It hurts.
Third, when telling your friend about our service, make sure your friend understands and is comfortable with the scope of our member support. People who are used to lingering on the phone while someone walks them step-by-step through their individual setup sometimes don't appreciate receiving an emailed link to our FAQ when they ask us a basic question. Remember that although you may not need that type of help, some of your friends might. For friends that do, the added cost of a service that provides the extra assistance they need is a very good investment.
What should you do to refer a friend to our service? There are four basic approaches you can choose from, depending on your needs (and those of your friend).
First, you can tell your friend about it and let him do everything himself. This is by far the easiest way to go, and is often the best if your friend is as smart and clever and inclined to do his own thing as you are. (You must be; you picked us!)
Second, you can tell your friend about it, get him to sign up, and then share a site using our adjunct access feature. With this option, he can either create an account and site of his own and make you adjunct, or you can create the site on your membership and make him adjunct. This is the best approach for people who are going to be collaborating on a site.
Third, set up your friend's site, domain, etc on your account and then have your friend create a membership of his own and, when everything is ready, transfer the whole deal to him with a couple of quick support requests. You can either create a second bandwidth account to contain the site and transfer the account between memberships, or your friend can create and fund his own account and you can transfer the relevant bits individually. This is the best approach when you're preparing the site as a gift or favor, but your friend is willing and able to maintain it over the long term.
Fourth, you can create a separate bandwidth account under your membership, use it to fund your friend's site, and manage it all yourself. With this approach, your friend never touches the site personally. This is the best approach for people reselling our service, and for use with friends who want websites of their own but still compulsively forward emails about stolen kidneys and Bill Gates paying email users. ;-)
Again, we are thrilled and grateful to receive all kinds of referrals. We're providing this information solely to help you make sure that any referrals you give work out well for everybody involved.