Posts by OpenSRS Team

Located in the heart of the “silicon roundabout”, Ultraspeed /Hostroute is a London-based web host that wears their customer promise on their ‘web-sleeve’.

Jordon Gross, Managing Director of Ultraspeed/Hostroute took a few minutes to answer some questions for our “Meet the Resellers” series

How did you personally get into the Internet business?

I originally got into it in 1997 running a few websites of my own, then I started reselling hosting space. It’s all continued from there, really.

Tell us how long Ultraspeed and Hostroute have been doing business and about all the services you offer to your customers.

Ultraspeed has been in business for 11 years now, and Hostroute for about 8. Hostroute was purchased by Ultraspeed at the end of 2007. Ultraspeed specializes in offering Managed Hosting in the UK, and has pioneered a product known as Diskless Servers (No Hard Drives, 15 minute hardware replacement guarantee, low power consumption) that has been very popular. Hostroute offers virtual hosting and domain names, and is currently getting a major overhaul from the billing system to the website to the hosting products.

Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

We are located in London, England; in a particular area of London called Shoreditch. Somehow we got an office here three years ago, and the area has now become incredibly trendy and filled with media/arty types and too-cool-for-school restaurants and bars. Our techie crew sometimes borrows clothes from the vintage store downstairs just to not stand out like sore thumbs!

Any interesting stories from your company’s history?
Many interesting stories, most of which we can’t repeat publicly! One such time was at the end of the 90s in New Jersey, when we spent an entire 24 hour period moving servers in the back of a U-Haul van, fueled only by Dunkin Donuts.

Suffice to say it’s been a huge amount of fun (and hard work!) over the years.

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

Hostroute has been an OpenSRS Reseller since it started really, OpenSRS have always been supportive to the growth of the business, we’re looking forward to putting a huge amount more business with them over the next few years.

What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

Not much, really. Tea at the Wolseley?

Thanks to Dr. Neil Clifton for the photo of the Shoreditch Fire Station licensed under the Creative Commons.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Nergis Sungur, marketing manager of DorukNet, Turkey’s first and largest Internet service provider.

Nergis Sungur, DorukNet

James McNally (JM): How long has DorukNet been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Nergis Sungur (NS): DorukNet was the first Internet service provider (ISP) in Turkey. Since 1993, DorukNet has functioned as a B2B company providing Internet access, shared hosting, co-location and dedicated hosting, local and long-distance telephony and value-added services to corporate foundations.
 
DorukNet has more than 30 POPs in all the major cities of Turkey and two POPs abroad – one in Frankfurt and the other in London. Within this infrastructure, each node is backed up in order to ensure an interruption-free service. DorukNet monitors its backbone and data centers by means of top-notch security equipment and skilled technical staff who are available to provide assistance 24/7.
 
Over the years, the quality of the service and the value offered to customers have earned the trust of many small-scale to worldwide well-known global companies, thereby making DorukNet a strong player in the Internet services market. Currently, DorukNet provides over 15,000 companies with data center services and over 500 companies with TDM, PCM, Frame Relay, ATM and G.SHDSL solutions. We use world-class technology and equipment from Juniper, Cisco, 3Com and Alcatel.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

NS: I began my career as a Marketing Specialist at the headquarters of Akbank which is one of the biggest and most respected banks in Turkey. I was responsible for the development and marketing activities of Internet banking, both web site and mobile banking. I also had the chance to work on different projects regarding kiosks, ATMs, call centers and self-service banking platforms. That is how I had the chance to get into the Internet and IT sector, which I find to be a lot of fun.

Ortakoy Mosque (1854), Istanbul, Turkey

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

NS: We are located in Istanbul, Turkey which is a great place to do business. Turkey is a big unsaturated market and there are currently 6 million broadband Internet subscribers and around 30 million Internet users in total. The population is young and technology-oriented. Also, we have laws requiring corporate entities to have a web site and this enhances the sector. As a city, Istanbul is the financial and commercial center of Turkey which makes the location very convenient for business.

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

NS: DorukNet has been an OpenSRS Reseller for the past 10 years. A partnership should be based on and can flourish in an environment where mutual trust exists. OpenSRS takes our business relationship seriously and provides that environment. We are aware of the fact that OpenSRS does business with its partners on a win-win basis, and we believe that we can always rely on OpenSRS which brings comfort and frees us to focus on our core business.

JM: What can we do to make our relationship with your company stronger?

NS: I think OpenSRS is taking serious steps and on the right track to enhance the relationship with its partners by assigning account managers and its new organizational structure.  I would suggest some general meetings to be held among your Resellers which would be a great platform to exchange some ideas and for fruitful discussions. (Editor’s Note: Our new forum is a perfect platform for our Resellers to exchange ideas.)

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

NS: I would highly recommend that you further develop your Reseller interfaces. They could be more user-friendly and also some useful reporting tools could be implemented. (Editor’s Note: This is a top priority for us this year, and you should be seeing some welcome changes very soon.)

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Special thanks to Flickr user Vyacheslav Argenberg for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

We’re pretty excited about the launch of our new Sub-resellers functionality, which has been in development for a while. I sat down with Adam Eisner, Director of Domain Services, to talk a little bit about what went into creating this new feature and why we think it’s worth a look.

James McNally (JM): Can you explain briefly what the Sub-resellers feature is all about?

Adam Eisner (AE): Sub-resellers lets a reseller operate their own reseller network beneath them. Our existing customers and new customers have been asking for this feature. Many hosting companies already have an established affiliate network and it’s important for them to be able to integrate that within their OpenSRS account.

JM: Can you talk a little bit about the way we went about implementing this feature?

AE: We took the time to gather as much information as possible about what resellers were looking for, and looked at what else was out there. We then set out to develop a solution that best fits our customers’ needs.

JM: After that consulting process, I’m sure our developers have come up with something pretty unique. Can you tell us about some of the features you think set the OpenSRS version of this feature apart?

AE: There are actually several things we’ve implemented in response to our resellers’ feedback that I’m pretty excited about.

1. There are multiple ways to integrate sub-resellers. Resellers can continue to use the RWI or their own API integration to administer their sub-resellers.
2. Management of pricing plans is much easier than what’s available elsewhere. Pricing is completely customizable for each sub-reseller, or the reseller can bulk-assign plans to groups of sub-resellers.
3. Branding is much more flexible. The parent reseller can brand their own control panels, making us completely invisible if they choose.

JM: Sounds pretty “Reseller-Friendly” to me. :)

Full details on the new Sub-resellers feature, including some helpful screencasts

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features John McKown, president of Delaware.net, an innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider located in the American state of Delaware. They recently moved their entire domain registration business to our hosted Storefront platform.

James McNally (JM): How long has Delaware.net been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

John McKown (JMcK): We’ve been in business since 1997. I would call us a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. We have a development team here that builds websites, and we have our own software that we run both in our own data center and also on the Amazon cloud. It’s a platform that consists of four main suites: a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management system (CRM) for sales and project management online, an ecommerce system and an email newsletter system. We’re especially seeing lots of growth with the CMS suite. In this economy, what we’re seeing is that folks are losing their web designers and they want to be able to manage their own websites. They’re moving their sites to us just so they can manage them better.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

JMcK: We started as an access provider, and I remember meeting Elliot (Noss) way back then, when Tucows started as a download site, even before it became a registrar. We had conversations about the future of services and where things were headed, and my take on things was that I did not want to be a commodity service. I didn’t want to sell the wire, I wanted to sell what goes through the wire. It was only about a year and a half after being in that business that we decided that we had to get away as quickly as possible from that.

Another lesson we learned is not to take on very large projects just out of ego. Today, every site we work on is making our products better. When folks would come to us with an application that someone else had built that was broken and ask us to fix it, we underestimated how much it would demoralize our programmers to ask them to fix someone else’s bad code. By creating our own SaaS platform, and continually adding new features to it which we roll out to customers at no charge, we instill much more pride in our team because we’re helping our clients make millions of dollars.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

JMcK: My family had a company and I build an ecommerce system for them, and then our ISP went out of business. We had 48 hours to find a new host, and I had made a spreadsheet of all the area hosting companies. We literally sat around a table and decided that we should just do it ourselves. And we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The company was first called EZ Online and our domain was ezol.com. We’d say to people, “We’re like America Online but it’s easier to do things.” Dialup back then was something like $35 a month.

As the price started to drop, it didn’t take long for us to know that selling the wire wasn’t adding value, that service was the value. I see the same thing happening to hosting as an industry. I think applications are the key. You’re not just using the web. You’re using a browser, you’re using Facebook, you’re using Twitter, you’re using Gmail, these are all applications. So that’s our focus now.

The Old State House, Dover, Delaware

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

JMcK: We’re in Dover, Delaware which is the capital of the state. The reason we’re here is because we’re close to state government, which was a huge part of our company when we started. The ironic thing today is that our clients come from all over the country. Municipalities are a huge vertical for us, we’re building a lot of city websites right now. We’ve got one in Arizona, one in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut. We have struggled with our name, we had an identity crisis with our name for quite a long time and then we realized that it didn’t matter. What matters to people is that we can solve their problem. We learned that if you’re in the service business, you’re in the problem-solving business. We also learned that your portfolio will do your marketing for you.

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

JMcK: Since the very beginning. In fact, we actually made up t-shirts when Tucows came into existence. When everyone was on Network Solutions and that was the only option, they became private and began to poach the database. They were marketing to our clients and that really concerned us. OpenSRS was a bright light in the registrar world to us because they respect the sales channel. The difference in cost is a non-issue for me. It’s someone I can trust and can do business with. We made a t-shirt with the Network Solutions logo that said “Not Worth Delusions”. The silver lining to that experience is that now we’re looking at reselling some of our applications and OpenSRS has been an example to me that we need to nurture and protect our own sales channel. I think Tucows is a model for that.

JM: I understand that you recently migrated your domains into our hosted Storefront. Can you give me a bit of background on that??

JMcK: Firstly, we’re programmers and we could code a lot of things ourselves, but there’s a point when you have to ask yourselves, “Do we want to build or do we want to buy?” With that product, you could get us to market instantly with an interface that better serves our client.

The second reason we moved to it is that we see domain registration as just a cost of doing business for our clients. It’s not necessarily a primary revenue source for us. The most important thing is to get the domain registered, get the domain renewed quickly, and to give the clients self-service tools. The interface works perfectly for those purposes.

JM: How was the experience of migrating and how has using Storefront compared to your previous method of working with the RWI??

JMcK: It was very easy. We simply linked to it and pushed customers to it. They don’t have a problem with that. We were concerend that giving them a self-service option might be construed as a hassle and that hasn’t happened. It’s been very painless, and one of the benefits that we’ve uncovered is that we’re able to not incur interest fees on our credit cards by running the transactions ourselves. And to be honest with you, I think that a lot of service providers that do use credit cards are now finding that the credit card companies are jacking up the rates and so that eats into the domain profit and maybe they don’t want to put all their domain stuff on the credit card in case it’s ever in jeopardy. This solves that problem because the money is going right from the client right to you and we’re not in the middle. There are fewer potential points of failure in the transaction, in my opinion.

JM: What can we do to make our relationship with your company stronger?

JMcK: Communicate more. Communication is what it’s all about. Some people don’t want to be bothered, but that’s not us. We want to bothered, we want to know what’s going on, we want to know what’s available. It was us enquiring that got us to the (hosted Storefront) interface, I didn’t even know that was an option. We were digging. We would have done it sooner had we known about it sooner.

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

JMcK: One thing you might do is to create some simple marketing or help materials to help end users understand how the domain name process works. You could even make this available through the Storefront interface. Something to explain the role of each link in the domain registration chain, from registries to registrars to resellers to end users. Or even the difference between domain hosting and registration. I don’t think we realize how little the general public knows about how DNS works or how registrars work or how we fit into all that.

Special thanks to Flickr user Mike Mahaffie for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

As Community Specialist here at OpenSRS, it’s my job to create and curate spaces for you to talk to us and to each other. The blog has been one such space, but we felt that we needed another place where everyone could make a contribution.

So back in November of 2008, we quietly launched a new forum for our resellers. Over the past few months, we learned quite a bit about what both we and you wanted in a forum. With all that in mind, we relaunched our forum toward the end of June, using a more robust forum software package. We’ve also kept the relaunch pretty quiet, but we’re confident now that the new forum is ready to show off.

There are categories for each of our major services (Domains, Email, SSL, Storefront) as well as dedicated categories for the API and for New Resellers’ questions. OpenSRS people from all departments are active participants. Like any community, we expect it will grow and change with your contributions, and we’re eager to have as many resellers as possible join us there.

Registration takes only a few minutes. Come and join us at http://forum.opensrs.com/, and then why not introduce yourself?

Thanks to Flickr user Havovubu for making his photo available under a Creative Commons license.

Monday, August 3rd, 2009 is a Civic Holiday in most parts of Canada.

As a result of the holiday, Tucows headquarters in Toronto will be operating with reduced staffing:

• OpenSRS Technical Support will operate as usual, with regular hours.
• Compliance, Payments, Service Bureau and Special Processing departments will all be closed Monday.

We’ll be back to our regular hours on Tuesday.

With just a few weeks to go until HostingCon 2009, I sat down with Director of Domain Services Adam Eisner to see if I could get him to reveal some nuggets from his presentation “20 Ways to Outsmart Your Competitors.”

Web hosting is a competitive business, and these are challenging times, but Adam has talked to hundreds of hosting companies over the years and has seen what separates the winners from the also-rans. According to him, so many companies do the same things, and it’s the ones who do things just a little bit differently who are having the most success. In this brand-new presentation, he’ll share some ways that web hosts can gain a competitive edge.

Though he was reluctant, I convinced him to reveal one of his 20 tips.

Simple, but effective. If you’re coming to HostingCon, make sure you plan to attend Adam’s presentation. It takes place on Tuesday August 11th, from 12:45-1:45pm in the Marketing and Sales track. We’re hoping to make it available later to those not able to attend.

As well, don’t forget to stop by the OpenSRS booth (#440) in the Exhibits Hall. We’ll have some fun giveaways, as well as a draw for a Dell Adamo laptop, valued at over $2,000.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has issued a warning about a new phishing attack targeting holders of .CA domain names. If you receive an email with the subject line “Online Refund Form” asking for personal information, including Canadian Social Insurance Numbers, be aware that these are NOT coming from CIRA (listed in the From: field) or the Canada Revenue Agency, as they claim. Do not reply to them.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Darko Bijelic, Chief DNS Administrator at PLUS Hosting, Croatia’s leading hosting company. PLUS are a brand-new Reseller and we recently helped them manage the migration of thousands of domain names into their OpenSRS account.

Darko Bijelic, PLUS Hosting

James McNally (JM): How long has PLUS Hosting been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Darko Bijelic (DB): PLUS Hosting primarily provides web hosting and related services, including domain registration, dedicated and VPS server rentals, colocation, audio/video streaming, SSL certificates…basically everything that web hosting companies usually offer.

PLUS Hosting was founded at the beginning of 2001 by Adriano Plisko. At the time, there were only a few companies in Croatia offering hosting-related services, so Adriano, already a proven business visionary and entrepreneur at just 28 years of age, decided to start a web hosting business. It is very interesting how our company grew from a small provider with none of our own servers into the largest hosting provider in the country with more than 50 of our own servers.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

DB: In 2001, hardware and cable-pair were extremely expensive for a startup hosting company, so PLUS Hosting was reselling hosting space originally bought from FastHosts in the UK. After the initial boost, the company decided to rent dedicated servers from Burst.net in the US. However, due to some unfortunate things that happened to Burst.net, we soon decided to switch to dedicated servers from ThePlanet, who are today probably the world’s biggest provider of hosting servers.

We used ThePlanet’s equipment for a few years, until we got a deal with Optima, one of the largest local ISPs, who partnered with us, and provided us with acceptably-priced high-speed Internet access. From then until now, we have used our own servers located in a facility in Zagreb (Croatia’s capital city) and we migrated all our clients from ThePlanet’s servers to our own servers there. Now we have more than 50 servers under our own direct administration.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

DB: I am 29 years old and have worked in the domain and DNS business for more than 8 years now. I have worked with PLUS Hosting almost from the begining: I joined at the end of 2001. Although the company always had a need for Linux/Windows administrators, I always had an affinity for domains and DNS, so I have stuck to that. I have always liked seeing what kind of domains people register, and what they do with them. I also liked to compete with domainers around the world, waiting for domains to “drop” and registering them before somebody else. That was before companies like Snapnames and Pool.com even existed. DNS is the basic backbone of the Internet, and without it, the Internet wouldn’t exist as it does today. And you always see and find something new in the DNS world, which is why I like my job so much.

The story of how I got here where I am is pretty interesting also. I was at college and was participating in some marketing projects (I actually graduated with a degree in marketing, not something more technical) for my Faculty of Economics, and one day my marketing professor said it would be nice to have a web page. I saw an ad that a local company was offering free web hosting for projects. So I went there and met Adriano. A few months later, he called me and asked me if I would be interested in working with him. I agreed and here we are now. :)

Roman Amphitheater, Pula, Croatia

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

DB: PLUS Hosting is located in Pula, Croatia. It is a nice city of about 60,000 people, with a famous Roman Arena. It is located on the Istrian peninsula, so we have the Adriatic Sea all around us. :) It’s assumed that for business, it is always better to be in a larger city, because of infrastructure, potential employees, etc., but at PLUS, we’ve never thought of it as a disadvantage being located in a smaller town. We have our facilities and servers in the large city of Zagreb, but we administer everything remotely. If we’re ever needed on-site, we can be there in less than three hours.

I understand many of your readers might not have even heard of Croatia, or don’t know where it is. Maybe all they know is that a war took place here 15 years ago. Many people abroad wonder if we even have electricity, but actually Croatia is a pretty modern country. Some things could be better, but hey…come and see for yourself! By the way, Elton John had a concert yesterday right here in the Roman Arena, 50 meters from our offices!

JM: I understand you’re a brand-new OpenSRS Reseller. What made you decide to switch and how has your experience been so far?

DB: Yes, we are brand-new OpenSRS resellers. Being part of OpenSRS is something new for us and we are still adapting to it. We are still implementing the API on our system, transferring our domains to OpenSRS, and if I may say, we still have a lot of work to do. I am very grateful for all the help we’ve received from OpenSRS staff, especially from Claire Lam and Ben Reuss. I am amazed how they notice everything I ask for or want.

The story of how we decided to switch to OpenSRS is pretty straightforward. Our former registrar (I wouldn’t like to mention its name) got in legal trouble for alleged cybersquatting. Although they were our partners for years, and we never had any problems with them, we realized that we needed a reliable company to take care of our domains. So we decided to change providers for domain registration. At almost the exact time we started searching for a new provider, Ben Reuss and Marco Zuliani from OpenSRS called me and offered me great terms. I already knew that OpenSRS was one of the world’s biggest reseller-friendly registrars, but with such great prices (and free WHOIS privacy which makes me happy the most), I just couldn’t refuse. So our search for a new partner was over pretty fast. And I am happy we decided to join OpenSRS.

JM: What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

DB: Since we are still a new reseller, I don’t have any particular suggestions. Everything is perfect. I am just happy our domains are secure, and don’t need anything else :)

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Special thanks to Flickr user Boris Licina for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

Here are the scheduled windows for the coming week:

OpenSRS Blogware:
OpenSRS Blogware has a scheduled maintenance window on Wednesday July 15, 2009.

Date: Wednesday July 15, 2009
Time: 02:00 – 02:30 UTC
Duration: 30 minutes
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact:
We are using this 30 minute window for Blogware to reconfigure our firewall infrastructure. This is a proactive measure in an effort to segregate and isolate critical services on our network to increase overall resiliency during attacks, abuse or hardware failure. The actual downtime we’re anticipating will be about 5 minutes within the window.

During that time blogs, the blog control panel and your Administration Panel will be unavailable. All other OpenSRS services are unaffected.

.ME
There is a 4-hour scheduled .ME registry maintenance on Saturday, July 18, 2009.

Date: Saturday, July 18, 2009
Time: 15:00 – 19:00 UTC
Your local time: Start to End
Service Impact:
Domain provisioning and Whois will be unavailable. Customers who have enabled provisioning queuing will have their orders queued until this complete. Domains will continue to resolve.

OpenSRS Services:
There is a 4-hour maintenance window scheduled for Sunday July 19, 2009.

Date: Sunday July 19, 2009
Time: 03:00 – 07:00 UTC
Duration: 4 hours
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact: We will use this time to upgrade our core routers to accommodate 10 Gigabit cards. To minimize the impact on your services, traffic will be routed through secondary routers. This action should limit the actual down time to approximately 15 minutes within the 4 hour window.

The following OpenSRS Services will be briefly affected:

• OpenSRS Provisioning and Management (includes: ordering, renewals, transfers, deletion and management of domain names.)
• Storefront (includes ordering, renewals, deletion and management of domain names.)
• Provisioning of Digital Certificates (SSL) and Managed DNS
• Website Builder
• Blogware
• Email Cluster A: Email connectivity via Webmail, IMAP and POP, inbound/outbound mailflow and provisioning via the Mail Administration Center (MAC) will be unavailable during that time. For OpenSRS Email Service Cluster A we will also be upgrading hardware used by the provisioning system. This hardware upgrade will occur in parallel to our network maintenance so there should not be any additional outage to the provisioning system within the window.

All domains will continue to resolve.