Our team has been busy preparing for the upcoming WebhostingDay (WHD) 2010 event held in Germany March 17-19th.

The WHD 2009 event had more than 2,000 visitors in attendance from 63 countries and we understand from the event organizers that WHD 2010 will break the ‘09 attendance records. As a result, we’ve pulled out all the stops to make sure everything goes smoothly and we put one of our best people on the job to help us pack: Taylor Biggin.

Word has it that before joining OpenSRS, Taylor was considering starting his own box company called Biggin’s Boxes. He had a catchy slogan “You bring it, I’ll box it!” and a nifty jingle with music he composed on an xylophone his parents gave him on his 4th birthday.

Everything in that last paragraph was a total fib. I’m sorry. But after watching my colleague so artistically box our precious cargo, I can only imagine this gentleman has missed his calling as a professional boxer.

Shortly after he was given this important task, Taylor realized the odd shape of the components would make it difficult to properly pack. No matter… Taylor had a box problem and he didn’t just think outside the box: he BUILT the box!

A couple of the finished boxes are pictured right, with the artist Mr. Biggin. I can’t be sure, but when the courier arrived to take his creatively packed shipment away, I think I watched Taylor shed a tear.

Earlier this week, the OpenSRS team (me included) descended upon Miami for the 5th annual Parallels Summit ‘10. We brought with us our own unique blend of excitable energy and enthusiasm.

We talked, we listened, we danced; but most of all, we connected. It was awesome.

There was a lot of great content at the conference and one of my favourites was the keynote delivered by Parallels’ CEO, Serguei Beloussov’s about his company’s vision for the Cloud. Nearly 1,100 service providers, telcos, VARs and ISVs listened intently as Serguei eloquently delivered a speech that described how hosting service companies’ services can be compared to those of a hotel operator.

Where hotels initially offered a ‘bed’ and a ‘roof’, they have innovated to become full-service companies that provided value-added services on top of their traditional offering. Higher margin services such as in-room dining, telephone, Internet, spa, and other entertainment, increase profits while allowing them to be competitive on their core “bed and a roof” pricing. It was a fitting analogy given the beautiful resort where the conference was held: the Fontainebleau Miami Beach Hotel & Resort.

Serguei delivered a convincing argument that small businesses are moving faster than ever to cloud services and hosting companies that offer software as a service (SaaS). A summary of Serguei’s keynote can be found on the Parallels blog and I highly recommend the read.

VeriSign Trusted Seal announcement

Also at the event, VeriSign announced a new service called the VeriSign Trusted Seal. The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) reported that in the 1st quarter of 2009, there were more new strains of malware than in the entire year for 2008. For businesses and brands on the web, this is a concerning number. The VeriSign Trusted Seal service, available to OpenSRS resellers later this year, performs daily scans of a website to ensure that any malware attacks are identified early. When malware is detected, VeriSign will automatically alert the website owner and provide assistance to eliminate the threat.

Other related news about Parallels Summit ‘10

• OpenSRS event photos
• Video and presentations from the Summit (Parallels)
• Using MacOS Server for Hosted Services (The WHIR)
• #ParallelsSummit (Twitter Search: #ParallelsSummit)
• Hosting and SaaS Blog (Parallels)

We have another webinar coming up in two weeks and this time, we’re aiming the presentation squarely at developers.

We recently made available a PHP API Toolkit that Claire Lam, our Manager of Implementation Services put together. This Toolkit is a PHP library that aims to make working with the OpenSRS easier. A Ruby version, put together by Keiji Suzuki, will be available very shortly.

Claire has been talking about the Toolkit in the Developer/API area of the OpenSRS Forums for the past month or two and based on feedback from developers that have tried out the code, we’re ready to make it a little more official. This webinar will serve as an introduction to the code and help explain how to use it, and why we’re releasing it.

By developers, for developers

This is going to be a developer webinar–if you don’t know code, you’ll probably won’t be interested. If you do like to dig in to API docs and write a few lines of code now and then, feel free to join us. And, by all means, pass this along to your in-house developers, or anyone else you think might be interested.

The PHP version of the API Toolkit is available for download today. A Ruby version is just about complete and we’ll be making it available very shortly as well. You can find those downloads and documentation for the API Toolkits here.

Webinar: Introducing the New OpenSRS API Toolkits
with Claire Lam, Manager of Implementation Services, OpenSRS
and Jonathan Clarke, Implementation Specialist, OpenSRS
on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 9:00 A.M. EST and 2:00 P.M. EST

Register Now

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.

Did you miss our SSL webinar last week? Then you’ll definitely want to read on.

We were really pleased to have Bob Angus, Product Marketing Manager at VeriSign join us via the web to present “Get the Sale: Overcoming Four Common Objections When Selling SSL”.

Bob provided some really good, practical tactics and strategies that will help you sell smarter and move more SSL units.

He covered everything from how to figure out whether the potential customer is ready to buy, to how to use some basic stats and resources to sell EV and other higher margin SSL products.

Based on the lively Q&A session that followed, it was clear that our Resellers are hungry to sell more and are looking for the tools that they can use to do just that. Bob’s presentation provided some of those tools and tactics, and attendees went away equiped with at least two or three things that they could put to immediate use to counter competitors and tackle those common questions buyers might have.

Archive Video is Available Now

We did record the entire session including an informative question and answer session. That video and the accompanying PDF of the presentation slides is available now.

→ View the archive

(if you registered for the event at GotoWebinar, you should already have received the link to the archived version via email).

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)

Image courtesy of The WHIR

Last month we attended the cPanel Conference and we are happy to announce our prize winner. Congrats to Lenny from Codero for winning our iPod shuffle. This year’s conference was the biggest cPanel conference yet with over 180 attendee registrations and with folks traveling in from all over the world. It was a fun and educational environment, and a must-attend event for cPanel users! Thanks to the organizers for a great conference and also to everyone that stopped by our booth to say hello.

With another successful WHIR networking event taking place last week in Seattle, that wraps up our OpenSRS events schedule for the year. However, we are already busy planning for next year. I wanted to tell you about about a couple of exciting conferences that are coming up in the new year.

Parallels Summit 2010 – February 22-24

I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with the Parallels Summit 2010 new venue – the iconic Fontainebleau Miami Beach Resort. The Parallels Summit gives you a chance to meet industry peers and get inspired to build better Cloud Services based businesses. The Parallels Summit has become the premier conference for industry leaders to discuss how to drive innovation, create differentiated service offerings, and build businesses that profit from the Cloud.

The conference is free for Parallels’ partners, customers, invited guests, and other industry professionals. If you register before November 13, 2009 you’ll be entered to win your choice of an iPod Touch or Microsoft Zune HD.

WebhostingDay 2010 – March 17-19

WebhostingDay is the largest web hosting event in Europe and possibly the world. Last year they had 2,000 attendees.  It takes place in Phantasialand, an amusement park near Cologne, Germany. It offers a great mix of concentrated industry knowledge, networking events, and fun!  Check out some of our WebhostingDay 2009 coverage. We will have free conference passes, and we’ll let you know how to register with them in the coming months.

We are really hoping that some of you are planning to attend these conferences not only because they are some of the best in our industry, but also because there is nothing better than connecting with our resellers, partners and industry peers face-to-face. As we get closer to these events, we will keep you posted. Follow us on  twitter for event updates.