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

Here’s the full schedule of 2010 WHIR Events

Location	Date
Los Angeles, CA	January 21, 2010
Houston, TX	February 18, 2010
New York, NY	March 25, 2010
Chicago, IL	April 22, 2010
Toronto, ON	May 20, 2010
Boston, MA	June 17, 2010
Denver, CO	August 26, 2010
Phoenix, AZ	September 23, 2010
Washington, DC	October 21, 2010
Vancouver, BC	November 4 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)

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.

I’m back from Seoul, which played host last week to ICANN’s 36th International Meeting. As far as ICANN meetings go, this one was extremely busy, well-attended and led to several significant decisions on a policy level.

The decision which garnered the most international attention was ICANN’s approval of a “fast track” process for certain Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). This will allow certain ccTLDs to introduce internationalized versions of their extension in native language scripts. Historically, IDNs have only been available “before the dot”, while the actual extension had to remain in Latin characters. IDN ccTLDs, however, will allow the extension “after the dot” to be entered in native language scripts as well. With the approval of the fast track process, ICANN will now begin accepting IDN ccTLD applications. Stay tuned for more developments on this new process in the coming months.

For those interested in the approval of new Top Level Domain names, the Seoul conference had both positive and negative developments. On the plus side, coming away from the conference, it is very clear everyone is committed to new TLDs. However, it is also now clear that the original time-line, which would have seen the first applications submitted in the first quarter of 2010, is now obsolete. Instead, there are no longer any clear time-lines for the approval of new extensions. On a positive note, ICANN did approve a motion to explore allowing those interested in operating a new TLD to submit an “expression of interest”. These submissions would be accompanied by a deposit, and would theoretically allow ICANN to gauge how many serious bids currently exist and help them garner additional support.

The next ICANN conference takes place February 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya. By that time, we should have some additional clarity on just how long the new TLD process is going to take. But will we see dates and time-lines before then? If we do, you can be sure we’ll discuss them in this space.

Earlier this month OpenSRS sponsored and participated in Parallels’ EMEA roadshow, which traveled to seven European countries in order to connect with web hosting companies in each region.

Each stop was attended by several members of the OpenSRS team, including staff from both our EMEA office (based in Newcastle, UK) and our Canadian headquarters (based in Toronto, Canada). I attended three of the stops – Cologne, Paris and Madrid – and had the opportunity to give a presentation on the impact of hosting market developments in 2009 at each.

The presentation focused on a wide variety of topics, but among the points I tried to emphasize to the European hosting community were:

• The growth and success of ccTLDs are on the rise. Over the past several years, gTLD market share has dropped while ccTLD market share has increased. Many market-focused web hosting companies have adopted a good range of ccTLDs (including .EU, .CA, .UK, .ME and .DE) and are promoting them aggressively.
• Web hosting companies are getting in front of their brands. According to Mitch Keeler’s count over at The Web Hosting Show (www.webhostingshow.com) , almost 100 web hosting companies are on Twitter, engaging customers, prospects and promoting their brands. Virtually every popular web host is active on Twitter, operates a blog and is very transparent when it comes to how they operate (we’re there too: follow @OpenSRS on Twitter).
• There’s opportunity to be found in leveraging the growth of the ‘personal web’. Whether it’s end users using a domain to tie together their Facebook, Twitter and Flickr pages, or using a domain name and email address to brand oneself (think of the .ME or .NAME extensions, or our own Personal Names service), consumers are quickly finding many personal uses for domain names. Hosting companies that leverage this trend will have an excellent opportunity to introduce a new revenue stream before the competition figures it out.

In talking to attendees at each stop, it was obvious that the hosting companies which attended found it to be worthwhile and informative. If Parallels hosts a similar tour next year, I highly recommend attending. It’s a unique opportunity to connect with other hosts in your area, meet Parallels staff, learn more about the product and check out some potential vendors as well.

The OpenSRS team attended HostingCon 2009 last month in Washington DC. Since then we’ve been a little busy preparing for the Parallels EMEA Roadshow which is now in full-swing. However, we wanted to take a few moments to thank everyone that we met this year. We hope some of you had a chance to drop by our booth and pick up some old fashioned stick-candy, and maybe even one of our spiffy new “Service Guy’” toys which we debuted at HostingCon 2009.

This year we had a group of fourteen OpenSRS folks attending and we were able to meet many resellers, prospects, partners, and industry leaders. We also launched our brand new sub-resellers program. Adam Eisner, our Director of Domain Services, presented “20 Ways to Outsmart Your Competitors.” Did you miss it? No problem. You can download Adam’s slides from our HostingCon follow-up page.

Announcing the winner of the Dell Adamo laptop!

As well, we are very pleased to announce the winner of our booth give-away! Congratulations to Eduardo from Hosting Panama the lucky winner of a really cool Dell Adamo laptop!

See you in Austin, Texas for HostingCon 2010 (or maybe sooner)

A special thanks to the team at iNet Interative for putting on a very well-organized and well-attended show. We look forward to seeing everyone next year in Austin for HostingCon 2010.  In the meantime we hope to see you again at one of our upcoming events:

• Parallels EMEA Roadshow – next stop in Paris on September 14
• WHIR Networking, Miami – September 24
• Cpanel Conference, Houston – October 5-7
• WHIR Networking, Washington DC – October 22