We have some great news to help you wrap up 2009 and kick off 2010 with a bang: Starting December 1st, and continuing through the end of March, 2010, .ME domains are just $4.99 at OpenSRS! That’s 75% off the regular price.
Make sure you sign up
As with most OpenSRS promotions, you’ll need to signup to take advantage of the savings and you’ll receive the discount in the form of a rebate, deposited into your OpenSRS Reseller account in the following month. The promotional price applies to new one-year registrations or the first year of new, multi-year registrations only. Renewals, transfers and any domains sold through OpenSRS Storefront are not eligible.
Click here to sign up for the .ME promo and while you’re there, make sure you sign up for our other promotions underway right now including .TV, .INFO and .IN domain names.
Tucows President and CEO, Elliot Noss appeared on Business News Network’s (BNN) “After Hours” program here in Canada yesterday to followup on his comments made recently on the Tucows Inc. website.
In that post, which is definitely worth a few minutes of your time for a full read, Elliot called out Canadian broadband providers as lagging behind much of the rest of the world when it comes to providing affordable, fast, and reliable broadband Internet access:
“In my role at Tucows I have the pleasure of traveling all over the world and having customers who are service providers all over the world. We are always discussing access markets. I could bore you with story after story but very few countries have slower, more expensive access offering than us in Canada. A fantastic study done for the FCC by the Berkman Center for Internet Studies at Harvard is just the most recent to confirm the sad state of broadband in Canada.”
Looking to supercharge your SSL sales? Look no further.
One of the things we hear over and over again, is that it’s nearly impossible to sell SSL certificates in the face of companies like GoDaddy who seem to be more interested in moving as many units as possible, at the expense of the bottom line. But it’s simply not true–with the right information and techniques, you can effectively sell SSL by easily countering some common objections customers might have.
2010 is fast approaching and now is the time to start thinking about how to energize your SSL sales. And don’t forget that our GeoTrust $199 Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificate promo is coming to an end soon as well. End 2009 with a bang and kickstart your SSL sales activities heading into the new year.
Get the Sale!
Bob Angus, Product Marketing Manager, VeriSign, will present “Get the Sale! Overcoming four common objections when selling SSL.” Bob will address the four most common objections that you’ll face when selling SSL certificates, provide you with the information that you need to address each one head on, and help you make the sale.
He’ll cover everything from objections over price, to how to handle questions about technology from customers who may have bought into some common misconceptions about SSL. In short, Bob will arm you with information and tactics that you can use when selling SSL to even the most sceptical of customers.
This is a free event for OpenSRS Resellers.
Details:
REGISTRATION IS FREE What: Get the Sale! Overcoming four common objections when selling SSL When: Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 11:00 A.M. EST (16:00 UTC)
Regular visitors to the OpenSRS.com website may have noticed a new addition to the bottom of the page this week. We’re experimenting with using Google’s translation service on our site as a way to offer our information in different languages. This is really something of a beta test and we like your help and feedback.
We have quite a few people in the company who speak different languages and we’ve been exploring some ways to expand the level of support for our Resellers who speak something other than English.
For example, if you saw us at any of the Parallels EMEA Partner Roadshow eventsv around Europe this past summer, you might have noticed that we had marketing materials in a number of different languages including German, Spanish and French. You may also have noticed a number of blogposts in the Registries series that were translated over the past month or two.
Using Google’s translation service is a way to quickly offer other language versions of our website, including the blog.
What do you think?
We’d love to hear from you–what you think about the quality of the translation that Google is providing for the website? Is it understandable in other languages? Do you think it’s a useful tool?
Drop us a line in the comments here on the blog. If possible, include the language or languages you looked at so we can evaluate which ones the translations might work for and which ones are less than ideal.
Last week we rolled an update to OpenSRS Storefront that allows Resellers to edit the text on the home page and also to create a page for displaying and marketing any sales or promotions that Resellers may be running. Documentation has been updated to reflect the changes, but I thought I’d put together a quick tutorial showing how to do it. I’m trying something a bit different this time so instead of a video screencast, I’ve provided step by step instructions with screenshots. Let me know which one you think works better for you in the comments, if you wish.
And on a related note, we’re continuing to work on OpenSRS Storefront and we’d love to hear your opinions on how we can make it better. Either drop us a comment right here in the blog, or drop by the forum and join in the discussion there.
Bringing more tools down to the Reseller level from the support or Professional Services level is something we’ve been focusing on for OpenSRS Email Service. You might remember that we recently made it easier to have deleted email and mailboxes restored without requiring customer support intervention.
Bulk Migrate End-user Mail from Other Email Services
Just last week we rolled out the ability to migrate user mail into OpenSRS Email Service mailboxes in bulk. This means Resellers are now able to create a bunch of new accounts on the service, and then move existing mail data from outside servers into those accounts in bulk. This simplifies and streamlines the process of moving users from other email services and servers onto OpenSRS Email and diminishes the need for support or Professional Services involvement on smaller mail migrations.
There’s more detail on page 43 in the Mail Administration Center (MAC) User’s Guide for those looking to start using this tool. If you want to get a sense for how the tool works, here’s a tutorial screencast that shows at a higher level just how it’s done.
What Do You Think?
We’d love to hear what you think of the tools that we’ve already brought down to the Reseller level, be it the ability to restore deleted mail or this new tool to migrate end-user mail over to OpenSRS Email Service mailboxes. I’ve started a forum thread if you want to comment and add your opinions or thoughts. As always, comments right here at the blog are always welcome.
You’ve taken part in the .INFO promotion that has run off and on over the past year, and you’ve sold all kinds of .INFO domains to your customers who set up killer .INFO websites. Now they can reap the reward and snag some of the over US$15,000 in prize money that Afilias, the .INFO Registry, is putting up for the best .INFO sites on the web.
Here’s the details, courtesy Afilias:
The .INFO Awards reward the best professionally created .INFO Web sites from around the world. .INFO Site owners are able to submit their .INFO site for consideration until 11:59 p.m. on October 23, 2009.
Sites will be judged in two parts. First a panel of judges will create a shortlist of final contenders based on select criteria. These criteria include: presentation of content, functionality of the website, design, usability, and originality.
The shortlist of the top ten best sites will then be published at www.info-award.info on November 2, 2009, at which point members of the public will be allowed to cast their vote for their favourite site. Public votes will be combined with judges scores to determine the final top three winners.
Prizes for the awards include: US$7,500 for the first place winner, US$5,000 for second place, and US$3,000 for third place. All winners will be announced in November and will be notified directly via e-mail.
For more details or to submit your .INFO site for the 2009 .INFO Awards, please see www.info-award.info.
Feel free to pass this on to your customers and encourage them to enter their .INFO sites for a chance to win.
We’re adding three new ccTLDs to OpenSRS on October 8th – .IN, .BZ and .WS – and while Resellers don’t need to sign any new contracts to be able to sell these new extensions, you do need to enable the new ccTLDs for lookups in the Reseller Web Interface (RWI).
We just wrapped up development on a complete rewrite our Managed DNS service and it will be going live on October 8th, 2009.
Our developer team undertook the task of rewriting the DNS ordering and management process inside the Reseller Web Interface (RWI) and away from the RWI2. While they were at it, they also added DNS to the OpenSRS XML API as opposed to the Tucows Provisioning Protocol API (TPP) where it current lives. The result of that rewrite was released to the Horizon Test Environment on October 1st, 2009 and includes a number of other changes that we think you’re going to like.
The current Managed DNS Service is Still Fully Available
One thing to note right away is that the current Managed DNS system isn’t going anywhere for now. If you are using Managed DNS, you’ll have lots of time to more over to the new DNS service and we’ll keep you well informed about any important dates and exactly how to move over to the new service. Right now, we’re looking at about a 6 month time frame where we’ll be running both systems in parallel.
What’s new, and what’s improved
The new DNS system addresses a couple of issues surrounding the current Managed DNS service that we’ve long sought to eliminate.
First off, DNS is moving from the RWI2 and the TPP API and into the RWI and OpenSRS API. That accomplishes a couple of other things at the same time:
It transitions DNS into the OpenSRS API and out of the TPP API.
It eliminates the whole ordering process in the RWI2 that tended to confuse and confound some Resellers.
The net result is that DNS services are much easier to order, configure and manage. Provisioning DNS along with a new domain order is as easy as adding a command to the API call to add DNS to the domain, configured with a default template. Adding DNS to a new domain order via the RWI is as simple as ticking a check box during the domain order process which adds DNS to the domain, again, fully configured with a template or your choice.
Additionally, there is now support for IPv6 AAAA records in the new Managed DNS Service.
For the end-user facing Manage Web Interface (MWI) there are some changes as well. We’ve added the ability for end-users to manage their own zone records and set domain forwarding (including domain masking, if desired).
Still Free!
As with the current Managed DNS Service, DNS is included free with your OpenSRS Reseller account.
Add .IN, .BZ and .WS to the list of ccTLDs you can sell through OpenSRS beginning October 8th, 2009. The addition of these new extensions brings the total number of ccTLDs that OpenSRS offers to 22.
Here’s what’s being added:
.IN (India) – India’s population of over 1.2 billion people represents a huge and increasingly connected market for domains and Internet services. That said, there are no residency requirements for .IN domains and anyone can register one. In addition to second level domains (e.g. example.in), you can also register the following third level domains: co.in, net.in, org.in, firm.in, gen.in, and ind.in. To start things off with a bang, we’re rolling out a .IN promotion at the same time. From launch through to the end of October, .IN domains are just $2.99! Find out more and sign up.
.WS (Western Samoa/WebSite) – While Western Samoa might not seem like the largest of markets for domain names, the fact that the ccTLD .WS can represent the word WebSite has made .ws domains a fairly popular alternative to other extensions for personal and small business websites. There are no residency requirements for .WS domains.
.BZ (Belize) – .BZ domains are promoted as an alternative domain extension for businesses. There are no residency requirements for .BZ domains.
.NL (Netherlands) – Effective October 2, 2009, the residency requirements for .NL domain registrations have been effectively removed as the Registry is now providing a local presence for those registrants who don’t have one. Simply submit any non-resident .NL domain registrations as normal, with the correct contact information and we’ll be sure to add the local presence upon submission to the registry.
ccTLDs Growing Strong
The latest VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief was released in September and it highlighted something that we’ve been saying for a while now – Country-Code Top-level domains (ccTLDs) are hot, and getting hotter.
While growth in Generic Top-level domains (gTLDs) has slowed somewhat of late, ccTLDs continue to show impressive growth of 14% year-over-year. With a total of 74.4 million registrations, ccTLDs now represent over 40% of the total domain registrations worldwide.
Taking a look at the top ten TLDs in terms of number of registrations shows half are ccTLDs. In fact, .CN and .DE both out-rank .NET and .ORG!
The numbers add up to this: ccTLDs represent a significant sales opportunity to Resellers. Ignore this trend and you will miss out on a real area with strong growth potential.
We’re continuing to look at ccTLDs and we’re committed to adding more ccTLD options for our Resellers in the future.
We have some great news to help you wrap up 2009 and kick off 2010 with a bang: Starting December 1st, and continuing through the end of March, 2010, .ME domains are just $4.99 at OpenSRS! That’s 75% off the regular price.
Bob Angus, Product Marketing Manager, VeriSign, will present “Get the Sale! Overcoming four common objections when selling SSL.” Bob will address the four most common objections that you’ll face when selling SSL certificates, provide you with the information that you need to address each one head on, and help you make the sale.
We have quite a few people in the company who speak different languages and we’ve been exploring some ways to expand the level of support for our Resellers who speak something other than English.
