About Ning

Ning for Businesses

Are you a company looking for a private label social network? We may have a great option for you.

Getting Started

To start using Ning for your business, the first thing to do is create a free full social network on Ning. With your new social network on Ning, you can:

• Be up and running with your own social network in minutes, not months.
• Add your own logo, branding, and visual design.
• Choose the features you want on your new social network in a few quick steps.
• Feature content from your members on your network's Main page.
• Name multiple network administrators.
• Integrate your new social network into an existing website easily with branded widgets and links.
• Control your content and concept.

Ning's Premium Services

Once you have set up your network, you can enhance it with even more great features perfect for businesses:

Additional Information for Businesses

Ning is a platform. We host your new social network and don't offer a version to run on your own servers. This is a good thing as it means we can continually offer you new features and updates for your network without any work on your part.

Scalability

Your social network on Ning will scale to meet the demand that your network generates. A lot of thought, effort, iteration, and real world experience has gone into enabling your social network on Ning to scale successfully without you ever having to think about it:

• The Best Technology for the Job – We've got Java in the back and PHP in the front.
• Abstracted Content Store – No need to worry about scaling SQL databases.
• Horizontal Scalability – We have maintained the environment to sustain levels significantly higher than our average level of traffic, and constantly increase capacity as the average grows to maintain this goal. Additionally, we continually analyze the performance and systems and optimize them to squeeze more of our existing systems.
• Built-in, Transparent Akamai Edge Distribution – For large media files (videos, photos, etc) we support transparent serving through Akamai, to provide the best experience possible no matter where you are in the world.
• Proven – Our traffic has grown tenfold in the last six months, while performance and uptime have increased. As you think about partners for creating social networks, it's probably not a bad idea to ask yourself what kind of volume that company handles across the networks on it. You want a platform that can handle scale.

The Ning ID & Registration on Your Network

When your members register for your social network, they create an account on Ning. They can use their NingID to sign in to your network as well as other social networks on the Ning Platform.

You control any data your members provide you on your social network and can message them directly from your network, but we keep the email address they provide at registration private. However, we do offer the option to make any of your member profile questions private so that the answers to these questions only go to you and your Network Administrators.

We'd encourage you to take a look at our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to understand the relationships between you, your members, and Ning further.

At this time, we can't integrate your registration system into your social network on Ning. We'd love to consider these opportunities, but we can't.

Your Network's Data

You can back up and store all the data and code from your social network off Ning. This can be done via a number of different mechanisms that you can read more about at the Ning Help Center.

If you wanted to move your network at some point in the future, this ability to back up and restore your network and members makes it possible. You would need to recreate the underlying services provided by the Ning Platform, but it's uniquely possible on Ning to move your network at any point.

This focus on scalability, flexibility, and control combined with very competitive pricing makes Ning unique among your options for creating a social network for your business.

We really appreciate your interest in Ning and hope we can be a great partner!