GeoTrust is the SSL Brand of Choice for the Top Million Sites Online

By James Koole on August 24th, 2010
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A recent survey of SSL certificate use by Netcraft, referenced against the top million sites online (as tallied by Alexa), revealed that GeoTrust SSL certificates continue to be the most widely used choice of the one million top websites on the Internet.

The comparison looked at the Alexa 1 Million and counted publically facing SSL certificates. They found over 35,000 GeoTrust SSL certificates amongst the 165,000 total certificates found. GeoTrust led all certificate authorities, with the nearest competitor alomost 10,000 certificates behind.

GeoTrust points to the data as proof that more users look to GeoTrust as the low-cost SSL certificate provider of choice to secure and encrypt data transmitted over the Internet.

With increasing competition in the low-end of the SSL market, GeoTrust continues to provide cost-effective solutions for a variety of different requirements. From QuickSSL, through True BusinessID with or without Extended Validation, there is a GeoTrust-branded certificate to satisfy any buyer.

If you have an OpenSRS Reseller account, then you are also automatically able to sell SSL certificates from GeoTrust (and also thawte and VeriSign). For more information visit our GeoTrust SSL information page.

Posted in Industry News, OpenSRS Services | Tags: ,

The OpenSRS Quarterly for 2010-Q2 is Now Available

By Ben Lucier on August 23rd, 2010
Posted in Reseller Resources »
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After the positive feedback we received from our first quarter report, we’re excited to announce that our OpenSRS Quarterly for 2010-Q2 is now available for download.

Have you found yourself wondering how your own own performance indicators measure up against other OpenSRS resellers? Key performance metrics like renewal rates by quarter, new registrations and transfers in and out have long been providing valuable insight to service providers like yours.

With over 10,000 domain name, email and SSL resellers in over 100 countries, from small Web designers to giant Web hosts and Internet Service Providers, OpenSRS has a unique perspective into industry data and trends.

The OpenSRS Quarterly report is meant to provide you, our reseller, with data you can use to benchmark your own performance and make informed decisions. We’ve analyzed the data across our entire base to provide you with valuable insight. You’ll even find fun facts like the ratio of domains that contain the word ‘rules’ versus ‘sucks’ and the conclusion to the age old battle of cats versus dogs.

We expect this report to be just the beginning of a conversation within your organization, with your team and maybe even with other OpenSRS resellers about best practices and how we can work together to help you succeed.

If you’re an OpenSRS reseller, click here to request this report electronically.

Happy Selling!

Posted in Reseller Resources |

.ORG Surpasses 8.5 Million Domains

By James Koole on August 23rd, 2010
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The latest edition of the bi-annual .org domain name report, “The Dashboard,” is now available.

Public Internet Registry (PIR), the operator of the .org domain extension released the report, which showed 7.6% growth in the .org domain in the first half of 2010. That’s twice the growth compared to 2009 and signals continued strength in the .org extension.

Some other figures of interest:

  • The growth of .org in the first half of 2010 outpaced both .com and .net over the same period.
  • New creates for .org showed 16.5% growth, on par with both .com and .net.
  • 77.1% of organizations renewed their .org domains for one to three years, an increase of 4% over 2009.
  • North America and the European Union continued to represent the regions with the most .org registrations. China showed growth of 4% in the first half of 2010.

With over 8.5 million .org domains registered, .org is the third largest generic top-level domain (gTLD), behind .com and .net.

You can always download the latest version of the “The Dashboard” from PIR’s website at http://pir.org/news/dashboard

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Tucows or Not Tucows

By Michael Goldstein on August 20th, 2010
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Our new Tucows badge program has inspired some great discussions and debates (both internally and with our resellers!). I want to quickly contribute some more thoughts on evaluating whether this program makes sense for you.

The big idea here is to let your customers and prospects know that a domain name registered with you is better than a domain name registered elsewhere, that it comes with more honest, generous policies.

You do have two perfectly good ways to do this.

You can use our name and our promise. You benefit from some Tucows brand recognition and favorability. You potentially (depending on how big you are) align yourself with a larger entity, which brings some reassurances of stability and security. You leave it up to us to develop and maintain content about the differences in domain name management and to fight some battles with registrar competitors for you. You might even be able to blame a few customer issues on us if they come up.

The risk here is that your customers say, “Wait, you’re not managing our domain name? There are multiple parties involved? I’m not sure that’s so comforting to me.”

The second approach is you can imitate what we’ve done in the Tucows Promise but keep the focus on yourself. In fact, you can probably offer a longer list of benefits than we did since we were limited to policies that would be universal to all our resellers. You keep things simple and highlight a more intimate relationship, the one you have with your customers.

There are a couple of risks here too. Your customers could say, “I know a little something about domain names and the key players in the domain name world and you’re not one of them.” Or they could say, “Hey, I see that Tucows is listed as my registrar. Why are you trying to pretend you’re managing this domain name yourself?”

In the end, the benefits of differentiating your domain name offering are great and the risks with either approach are pretty minimal. Above all, we encourage you to attack the notion that it does not matter who manages your domain name. If our program is useful to you, great. If it helps you simply craft your own messaging, that’s great too.

Please keep the feedback coming.

Posted in General |

Four Million .nl Domains

By James Koole on August 20th, 2010
Posted in OpenSRS Services » Tags: ,
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This week the total number of .nl domain names in existence hit the four million mark for the first time, according to SIDN, the .nl Registry.

That puts .nl in fourth place in terms of ccTLDs for total registrations behind .de, .uk and .cn. Curiously, .nl actually leads all ccTLDs when you look at total registrations compared to the population of the country. In the case of .nl, there is one .nl domain for every four people in the Netherlands.

If you aren’t selling .nl domains, perhaps some of the stats around .nl domains will get you thinking about it:

  • Since the .nl domain was created, a total of about 5.1 million unique domain names have been registered. Of these, roughly 1.1 million are no longer registered leaving just over 4 million .nl domains.
  • Within the Netherlands, .nl has a 72% share of the domain name market. Next comes .com with 14%, then .eu with 8%.
  • Over the last twelve months, the .nl domain has grown by almost 13%.
  • The use of domain names to create personalized e-mail addresses increased by 25%.
  • In the Netherlands, 38 people in every 100 have broadband internet access – more than anywhere else in the world.
  • The average .nl domain name is 13 characters long, but the most common length is 11 characters.

OpenSRS is .nl accredited and we recently rewrote our connection to the .nl registry to take advantage of the new EPP interface.

For resellers who are .nl accredited themselves, you may not know that our OpenSRS Registrar Service platform offers a hosted solution to manage .nl domains using your existing accreditation. Of course, OpenSRS Domain Service offers an easy way to manage .nl domains for those who aren’t accredited.

.nl domains are priced at $8USD/domain year and anyone can register a .nl domain, regardless of where they live.

Posted in OpenSRS Services | Tags: ,

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