Hi.  We made a really exciting hire to the OpenSRS team last week.  Here was the email introducing him internally…

Some of you might be wondering about the guy with the goatee asking all the questions.  I probably should have sent this out sooner…

That’s Ben!  Ben is the newest member of our marketing team.  His job will be to energize and expand the OpenSRS community.  Energize means fostering lively, productive conversations about our services, our resellers’ services, our industry and the Internet.  It means generating a steady flow of feedback we can use to improve and news about the things we are doing to improve.  Expand means to growing the circle of people in that conversation beyond our current resellers to potential resellers and anyone else who might have an interest in our services.

And he’s the right guy to do it.  First, he has helped build, sell and manage the sort of services we offer and our resellers offer.  Ben has been a part of the webhost, e-mail, broadband access and VoIP service provider community for more than 15 years.  He was the co-founder of HIP Communications, a national Voice over IP service provider. He’s also held senior positions with wholesale webhost InQuent Technologies (now part of Network Solutions) and a number of Ontario-based Internet service providers and CLECs.  Second, he is naturally engaging.  Check out his blog at www.benlucier.ca.  Talk to him.  He is curious, empathetic, intelligent, creative and entertaining.  Finally, Ben is an OpenSRS sort of guy.  Throughout his career, he has always focused on customer service and relationships.

We’re really excited about the role and the guy.  (We’re also working on a job title that befits the role and the guy.)  Please welcome Ben and take the time to teach him something.

So Ben is here for you, our reseller community.  Please welcome him and please engage him.  Tell him what you’d like to hear from us, suggest ways for us to hear more from you, give the poor guy a title.  He is tweeting @opensrsben.  His email is blucier@tucows.com.

Effective Tuesday, February 9th, 2010, we’re implementing a new “soft-suspension” process for all users of OpenSRS Email Service. This new process is intended to mitigate the potential effects of spam sent by users of OpenSRS Email Service and to ensure good deliverability and reliable service for all users.

Full information about the change has been sent to all OpenSRS Email Service Resellers. Full details are available in the Resource Center – direct link.

What follows is the text of an open letter from our CEO, Elliot Noss.

Hello,

With great pride I note that January marks the 10th anniversary of the first domain name registered through OpenSRS.

Back in the spring and summer of 1999, we started planning for a different way to sell domain names. We had two businesses at the time, the Tucows.com software libraries and a large Toronto ISP, Internet Direct.

We knew that domain names should be simple and inexpensive to sell, and were made much too difficult and expensive by the monopoly provider. We were confident that we could fix that.

We also knew something more important. With competition coming, the companies planning to launch were simply copying the monopoly and maybe dropping the price a little. Domain names would likely be offered from $35/year!

And we recognized that registrars didn’t sell domain names, service providers did.

We took those beliefs and poured them into a service offering that launched in January of 2000. It was an immediate success.

Now ten years later, and we still have our very first customer still happily and actively selling domains through OpenSRS. The first domain we sold is still managed by OpenSRS. And we’ve grown every single year.

So much is different now than it was then. The meaning of “service provider” has changed. In 2000, what we today know as web hosts were really just evolving out of the loam, forced into existence by telcos and cablecos killing dialup ISPs through regulation. Now the whole concept of the web host is morphing into something different, and, in many ways there may be a re-integration of “ISPs” and “web hosts”.

So much is the same as it was then. People still need a personal relationship to help them get the most out of the Internet. Too many people still don’t have one. There is still a huge gap between what people CAN do on the Internet and what they are ABLE to do.

Most importantly, we still view service providers as the greatest distribution channel in the Internet economy. We care deeply about our relationships with them and embrace the ones that care deeply about their relationships with their customers. So many of you are still around TEN YEARS LATER! You should be proud. I know I am.

Thanks to all our customers, employees and partners. We hope and expect that the next ten years will be even better!

Sincerely,

Elliot Noss
CEO Tucows Inc.

It’s been a great ten years for OpenSRS, and a great ten years for the Internet as a whole. We’d love to hear from you as well! What’s your memories of the early days? How did you come to be an OpenSRS partner, and how did you come to realize success in your business? Comments are open; share your memories.

We’re big fans of WordPress here at OpenSRS, and for good reason–it offers an open source, stable and highly extensible base on which to build websites and it comes complete with an active, passionate community of users and developers.

With that in mind, we thought it would only make sense to sponsor WordCamp Toronto. The event takes place on March 27th and 28th, 2010 right here in Toronto, and promises to presentations on best practices and how-tos along with WordPress success stories, music and more.

If you’re in the Toronto area and would like to attend WordCamp, registration is open. If you’re a WordPress expert, speaking slots are available as well.

For those not in Toronto, WordCamps are held around the world throughout the year, bringing together the WordPress community in places like Indonesia, Japan, Ireland, the US and Canada. You can see the full list of WordCamp events worldwide at the official WordCamp Central.

Developers, crisis communicators, emergency planners, GIS specialists, technology workers, project managers and helpers are uniting around the world to use their skills and Internet savvy to help the Haitian earthquake victims.

People watched the news, donated money and then asked: can I help?

As a Crisis/Technical Incident communicator for Tucows/OpenSRS, I write all the incident reports, maintenance windows and system status updates for Resellers. Using the Internet tools to quickly get messages to customers is important for our business. Every day I work with some of the best techs in the world to make that happen. Tucows is very passionate using the Internet as an agent for positive change. I joined the CrisisCommons movement because this is a chance to use “agile actions” to help others. The CrisisCommons mission is to use this groundwork to help now and for all future emergencies. This is the power of the Internet flexing its community spirit and heart.

CrisisCamp – Haiti

CrisisCommons was started in 2009. It is a grassroots organization that facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs in times of crisis. From this, associated CrisisCamps are created to organize people who want to volunteer their skills to help NGOs, Emergency teams and Non-profit Aid organizations. When there’s a crisis or a need for CrisisCommons to respond, they come together for action.

It has been a heady week since our first CrisisCamp Haiti conference call last week. CrisisCamps sprung up in 6 major US cities last Saturday. Since then the momentum has grown and this weekend 12 camps are planned: from Boston to London, the UK to Bogota, Columbia to Washington DC to Seattle. There are three basic types of CrisisCamp activities: development help, social media (wiki, blog, cataloging, mapping) and general helpers. People are donating their time and helping to tackle projects ranging from OpenStreetMap to Mobile Development to a Haiti Hospital Capacity Finder.

I’m organizing Toronto’s CrisisCamp Haiti. Our first kick-off meeting is Sunday, January 24th, 2010. If you live in Toronto and want to help, please join us. Over at Butterscotch, our sister company, Michael E. Callaghan is contributing screencasts for CrisisCamp.

Our friends and hosting company partners joined together to create Hosting For Haiti. They are working with the American Red Cross to provide support, which may include mobilizing relief workers, sending relief supplies, and providing financial resources for recovery. You guys rock!

Do you want to get involved?

If you want to help, you can sign up for your local CrisisCamp (eventbrite sign-up). You can also follow Crisiscamp on Twitter to hear about all the global action happening.

• Crisis Commons site
• There’s a daily CrisisCommons conference call.
• IRC channel (Random Hacks of Kindness)
• Simple things that anyone can do. All you need is a computer, Internet access and some passion.

If there is no CrisisCamp event planned in your city or country but you want to get involved, you can contact CrisisCommons. I am also available to get you get rolling: Heather AT opensrs.com. If you know someone who would like to lend a hand, please spread the word.

Other news on CrisisCamp – Haiti:

Noel Dickover’s interview with the BBC (co-founder of CrisisCamp) [audio file]
Radar O’Reilly
IT World Canada
Article about Techs in the Toronto community

We are proud to announce that OpenSRS is sponsoring the 2010 series of THE WHIR (The Web Hosting Industry Review) Web Hosting Industry Networking Events. This is our second year of involvement.

What is a WHIR Networking Event?

What a great opportunity to meet our Resellers, peers and new friends in a social setting! The WHIR created videos in each of the cities during the 2009 season. As you can see, the events provide a casual environment to enjoy some food and drinks, and network with other folks in the web hosting and domains industry. The WHIR did a fantastic job organizing these events and we are really looking forward to building on this success.

We’ll send you personal invitations for events in your area. If you are located or traveling to the these events, please join us. Representatives from our Sales and Product Management teams regularly attend. Feel free to contact us to arrange meetings.

Sign up now for the first WHIR event: Los Angeles – Thursday, January 21, 2010

You can RSVP for all these events in advance.

All events are listed on the OpenSRS’s event page. You can also follow @opensrs and @thewhir for promotions and details about all the events.

The OpenSRS team is getting geared up to exhibit at the Parallels Summit 2010 which takes place from Feb 22-24 in Miami, Florida. This is a premiere event in web hosting and an ideal conference to check out if you are a Parallels customer, interested in building better cloud services, or meeting with your industry peers.

The conference takes place at the beautiful Fountainebleau Miami Beach Resort. If you book soon, you can take advantage of the $279 hotel rate. Registration is free for our resellers.

If you are attending, we invite you to join Adam Eisner as he talks about “Act, Don’t React: An Insider’s Perspective On Key Emerging Hosting Trends.” Also stop by our booth to say hello, pick up some handy OpenSRS gear, and enter to win a Flip Video Recorder.

Learn more or register today

We are really excited about this conference and look forward to seeing some of you there.

One of our core values at Tucows and OpenSRS is that the Internet is the greatest agent for positive change the world has ever seen. And we strongly believe that open source tools are central to the continued growth and health of the Internet.

You may have heard that Oracle has acquired Sun, and along with it, MySQL, which is is a central building block in the suite of open source tools.

While MySQL holds that position in the world of open source software, it is not important to the Oracle acquisition of Sun. In fact, all of the most important reasons for Oracle doing the acquisition would still be in place if Sun had no role whatsoever with MySQL.

The “cost” to Oracle of freeing MySQL is very low. The benefit to the world is extremely high.

With that in mind, please consider lending your support to the campaign. We’ve added our support by signing the petition. The Save MySQL website has lots of information about why the community feels that MySQL is important, and what you can do to ensure it stays open and freely available to the entire Internet community.

Masterhost is one of the largest Russian webhosts and an OpenSRS Reseller. We are fortunate to have Alexander Ovchinnikov, COO, join us to talk about Masterhost and the Russian Internet industry.

1.The services you provide are diverse from hosting to domains. Tell us more about what you offer your customers.

Masterhost has been successfully operating since 1999, which means this winter we are celebrating our 10th anniversary. The services we offer include: virtual hosting on unix and windows, including the provisioning of Virtual Private Servers (VPS), offering dedicated servers in Russian and European data centers, and the registration of domain names. We are also accredited Registrar for the TLDs .ru, .su, .рф (IDN). We’re especially proud to be the 2008 winner of the 2008 RUnet Prize award in the category of “Technology and Innovation”. RUnet award was established in 2004 and is a national award in the field of high technology and the Internet, to encourage outstanding achievements and companies – leaders in the field of information technology and electronic communications.

Masterhost is the leading company in Russia confirmed by an independent market hosting statistics on placement of domain names on the servers hosting provider. By the number of supported active sites, Masterhost is among the third largest hosting providers in Eastern and Central Europe (Netcraft, 2007) with more than 150, 000 domains.

Our VIP clients (approximately 55,000 in total) include the largest and very-well known Russian businesses including TV channels, news agencies, popular portals, Russian MSN Weather, AD networks, entertainment web-sizes, newspapers, telco web-sites, travel web-sites. We aspire to be an innovative knowledge company by providing free hosting projects in the field of education and educational programs for the non-profit educational web project. This project is in collaboration with Microsoft.

2. The Russian market is growing. Can you tell us more about RUnet (Russian Internet) and your locations (Moscow and St-Petersburg).

RUnet is a description for Russia’s national Internet presence. The .RU domain is among the top 20 country-code top-level domains with one of the highest rates of growth over the past five years. (approximately 2,494 835 registered .RU domains). Masterhost has more than 150 000 .RU domains, which is about 11.5% of the total market share.

It’s estimated that the number of RUnet Internet users will increase by approximately 34% in 2009. This is determined by factors such as interest and demand of the population to gain access to the web. There is an active development of the Russian market with various service providers and services (Internet service, broadband, and hosting providers). Internet access is mainly concentrated in Moscow (68%) and St. Petersburg (10%). The remaining 22% is in other regions including major cities such as Novosibirsk, Krasnodar, Ekaterinburg, etc. Masterhost is actively promoting its services these regions.

3. How did Masterhost grow as an Internet business? 



The company was formed in 1999. In the early days of its existence, the company’s management had a primary goal of not expanding too fast, but rather to accumulate the work experience and build a solid team of professionals. The company’s management made every effort to ensure the proper level of service was built to provide the required level of quality. Masterhost employees over 150 highly skilled specialists who focus on quick and effective solutions to any problems faced by our customers. Their approach to work is crucial to our success. All of this allows our company to be an absolute leader in Russia’s market hosting.



4. How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?


For our clients, we carry out all necessary procedures for the registration of domain names in the most popular domain zones in Russia and the world. We have been working with OpenSRS since 2005. To date, through your company, we register or renew in the order of 250 domains per month in such areas as: .com, .net, .org, .info , .mobi, .eu, .co.uk, .org.uk, .biz , .cc, .tv , .me and .name.



5. What do you think about the growth of new ccTLDs?

Unique domain names are a scarce resource in the 21st century yet required for virtually any business. Many ccTLDs are now open for international business. ccTLDs don’t really increase without major geopolitical changes. There are other options.

We regret to inform you that CNNIC has announced an indefinite suspension of all .CN registrations from overseas Registrars, including our registration provider Neustar.

As a result of this action by CNNIC, we have no choice but to suspend new .CN registrations through OpenSRS. We are in the process of disabling new registrations and we expect to have suspended registrations by end of day today, Tuesday, January 5th, 2009 (EST).

Please note that renewals and transfers will continue to be supported. Availability checks for .CN domains via the API and Reseller Web Interface will continue to work, however, orders for new .CN domains will fail.

CNNIC says the suspension will allow them to implement a better methodology to verify registrant information from overseas registrations. You will remember that in mid-December, CNNIC put into place new requirements for supporting documentation required to be submitted with new registrations.

There is no timetable for the resumption of new registrations. We’ll keep you posted as new information becomes available.