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.

What follows is the text of an open letter from our CEO, Elliot Noss.

Hello,

With great pride I note that January marks the 10th anniversary of the first domain name registered through OpenSRS.

Back in the spring and summer of 1999, we started planning for a different way to sell domain names. We had two businesses at the time, the Tucows.com software libraries and a large Toronto ISP, Internet Direct.

We knew that domain names should be simple and inexpensive to sell, and were made much too difficult and expensive by the monopoly provider. We were confident that we could fix that.

We also knew something more important. With competition coming, the companies planning to launch were simply copying the monopoly and maybe dropping the price a little. Domain names would likely be offered from $35/year!

And we recognized that registrars didn’t sell domain names, service providers did.

We took those beliefs and poured them into a service offering that launched in January of 2000. It was an immediate success.

Now ten years later, and we still have our very first customer still happily and actively selling domains through OpenSRS. The first domain we sold is still managed by OpenSRS. And we’ve grown every single year.

So much is different now than it was then. The meaning of “service provider” has changed. In 2000, what we today know as web hosts were really just evolving out of the loam, forced into existence by telcos and cablecos killing dialup ISPs through regulation. Now the whole concept of the web host is morphing into something different, and, in many ways there may be a re-integration of “ISPs” and “web hosts”.

So much is the same as it was then. People still need a personal relationship to help them get the most out of the Internet. Too many people still don’t have one. There is still a huge gap between what people CAN do on the Internet and what they are ABLE to do.

Most importantly, we still view service providers as the greatest distribution channel in the Internet economy. We care deeply about our relationships with them and embrace the ones that care deeply about their relationships with their customers. So many of you are still around TEN YEARS LATER! You should be proud. I know I am.

Thanks to all our customers, employees and partners. We hope and expect that the next ten years will be even better!

Sincerely,

Elliot Noss
CEO Tucows Inc.

It’s been a great ten years for OpenSRS, and a great ten years for the Internet as a whole. We’d love to hear from you as well! What’s your memories of the early days? How did you come to be an OpenSRS partner, and how did you come to realize success in your business? Comments are open; share your memories.

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

Change management is all about ensuring the stability of our services. In the last year, we made significant improvements to our Change Management processes.

In part one of the series, A.J. Mirani, Manager, Technical Operations, talked about how we analyze changes and manage risk. Creating categories for changes and risk is only part of a solid change management process. In part two, A.J. provides more context to the life-cycle of a change request:

You might also be interested in A.J’s introduction to the Technical Operations team that we posted a few months back.

Stay tuned for more videos about the Technical teams at OpenSRS. Also, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to hear more about, let us know.

We’re accountable to you to provide stable, reliable services. To meet that goal our Technical teams have made significant improvements to our Change Management processes.

In our last video, A.J. Mirani, Manager of Technical Operations, provided us with a brief overview of the Technical Operations team. He joins again with two videos explaining the OpenSRS/Tucows Change Management processes.

In this first part, A.J. talks about how we analyze changes and manage risk using our version of ITIL/ITSM: (5 minute video)

Next week, we’ll post part 2 of our conversation on Change Management.

Here at OpenSRS we take Halloween very seriously. Each year, Tucows HQ in Toronto becomes a place filled with wacky costumes wandering the halls. It’s a sight that’s sure to put a scare in each of us!

“Best Decorated Service Guy” Competition

This year we’re holding a “Best Decorated Service Guy” competition as part of the fun. We’d love for you to take part–if you have one of our Service Guy action figures, you too can join in the scary fun! This Friday, October 30th, 2009, dress him up, and then take a picture and send it to halloween@opensrs.com or post it on Twitter or Flickr. Be sure to tag it #serviceguy so we can find it. We’ll post all entries right here on our blog!

Fear not if you don’t have a Service Guy. We would still love to see what you are doing at your company to celebrate Halloween–send those pictures our way too!

There’s prizes!

A special prize will go to the person or company with “Best Decorated Service Guy” as well as the company or group with the most spirited photo.

In the meantime, I’m off to track down some eye of newt and toe of frog for my witches brew.

The domains business in Europe is booming! Did you know that OpenSRS has nearly 2,500 Resellers in a total of 40 European countries? The European market is one of the fastest-growing areas we service, and we want to make sure our European Resellers know we’re there for you.

OpenSRS in Europe

Over the nine months, our Newcastle, UK office has grown from just one person to more than five! Marco Zuilani, Luigi Lagonigro, and Ben Reuss have been traveling and meeting customers all over Europe.

Parallels EMEA Partner Roadshow

In the next couple of weeks, we may be near you for the Parallels EMEA Roadshow. Plan to attend a Roadshow event in a city near you – it’ll be well worth it and the event is free.

Meet our EMEA team:

Marco Zuliani, Sales Director

Marco was born in Germany to Italian parents. Since his father was a foreign service officer, he grew up all over the world, including stops in Canada and Australia. After taking higher education in the US, he spent seven years with Intel selling enterprise software in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Marco happily joined OpenSRS in 2008 and is the force behind further building our European base.

Married, with one son and one daughter, Marco likes to spend time with his family and with his two Labrador retrievers. His other hobbies include rugby, squash, tennis, surfing (yes, in England!), and messing with his cars and motorcycles.

Luigi Lagonigro, Account Manager

Luigi is originally from the province of Puglia in the southeast of Italy. After college Luigi moved to the UK to work in technical support for Intel. With more IT education, he developed his technical career with various roles across companies in Germany, Switzerland and Holland. Luigi joined OpenSRS in 2008.

Luigi’s hobby is learning new languages. In addition to being fluent in Italian and English, Luigi speaks French and Spanish. He also plays tennis and football, and is an avid swimmer. Being Italian also means Luigi is a connoisseur of good food and fine wine, and he is always on the lookout for great places to eat and drink when he travels.

Ben Reuss, Business Development Manager

Ben is an enthusiastic member of our European team and is very focused on helping OpenSRS Resellers grow their business. After obtaining his education in journalism, Ben worked in a number of companies before joining us in early 2009. He is thriving in his role as Business Development Manager, turning a number of prospects into happy clients.

Being from north-east England, Ben is an avid Newcastle United Fan. His interests also range from traveling, hiking in the mountains and countryside, attending music festivals and writing film and music reviews.

We also have two EMEA Technical Support staff: Feisal Patel and Alastair Hardwick.

Meet Us at the Parallels EMEA Partner Roadshow

Marco, Luigi and Ben will be attending a number of the Parallels events in the coming weeks. They will be joined by LeQuan Truong and Mou Mukherjee of our Marketing team, Adam Eisner (Director, Domain Services), Liam Philley (Director, Email Services) and Dave Woroch, (Executive Vice President, Sales and Support).

Check here for more details about the events and if you attend one of the Roadshow events, be sure to stop by our booth to say hi!

(Ed note: If you are making a map, use the Google Charts API. Great stuff.)

In our last videos we talked about how Technical Support and our Network Operations Center (NOC) investigate your requests and conduct service monitoring. Once their work is confirmed, they hand off tickets to our Technical Operations team to investigate and work to resolution. Members of the OpenSRS Technical Operations team are the key owners for our incident, problem and change management processes. They also manage our software, servers and data centers. AJ Mirani, Manager of Technical Operations, and I will provide you with several videos all about his team and their work. The first video is an introduction to Technical Operations:

In the video, AJ discusses how important Open Source is to OpenSRS. What types of Open Source applications do you use in your day-to-day operations?

Next up: AJ and I will discuss how Change Management has helped OpenSRS improve and grow.

SysAdmins can be thought of as perhaps the medical doctors of the technical world – heroes in their own right. They are the silent protectors, the caped defenders of our electronic cities. Armed with nothing but their sharp wit and lightning fast fingers, they bring to life an otherwise lifeless world. They rush to the aid of ailing servers and networks. They build enormous arrays of redundant storage, take the pulse for an ocean of applications and keep a watchful eye on row upon row of blinking servers. Who are these masked crusaders and what do they seek, you ask? And more importantly, do they have any super-powers? Fear not, they do not swing from buildings or trees, nor do they fly through the sky or have super-human strength. No, they view their world through an electronic window; taking comfort only in maintaining order for all within their domain – ever vigilant.

At OpenSRS, we have a small army of Unix variety SysAdmin heroes. They work tirelessly day and night to ensure we maintain a detailed analysis for our diverse environments. Behind the scenes these heroes spend endless hours planning and executing preventative measures against our common foes: downtime and degradation. Working with developers and engineers to bring new products and services to life in a configuration that is the most resilient and scalable available. Pouring over millions upon millions of lines of logs each day, the tiny footprints in the sand left behind by each application, they ferret out problems before they surface. They build walls of fire to protect us from the ever-evolving number of viruses and exploits lurking in the ether. And they bring balance to the chaotic world of packets, TCP and UDP alike.

Their work, frequently so successful and seamlessly integrated, by design goes unnoticed. Their super-hero preemptive work is critical for the achievement of nerd nirvana (or nerdvana as we like to call it here.) In general though, we tend to recognize our SysAdmin heroes most when they bring incidents to resolution. Well, today is their day. So to all of the SysAdmins here at OpenSRS and out there; you know who you are: We salute you!

Some of Our SysAdmins demonstrating Whois Privacy (they are camera-shy)

Photo: Paul Tichonczuk, Senior Web Application Developer

In this Meet OpenSRS series we will talk to people from our Technical Support, NOC (Network Operations Center), Ops (Operations), Security and Development teams. We know you count on us to give you high levels of service, so that you can manage your businesses. Our goal is to give you an inside view into how we support and maintain your OpenSRS services.

In these three 5-minute videos, we talk with a few folks from our NOC and Support teams. We refer to our OpenSRS tailored ITIL/ITSM process for ticket handling which uses 4 basic types of tickets (Request, Incident, Change and Problem). In today’s videos we will focus on Request and Incident tickets. Requests are tickets that you submit to our Technical Support team via reseller.supportATopensrsDOTcom or calling us (Toll Free Phone: 1-800-371-6992 or Toll Free Phone (Intl): + 800-371-69922). These tickets are reviewed by Technical Support and can be handled using their expertise or escalated to the NOC for further investigation. If the NOC receives a ticket, it becomes an Incident ticket. They work with Technical Support and other teams to resolve issues. Incident tickets are also created by NOC for items identified by internal troubleshooting or monitoring. (We will talk about Problem and Change tickets later this month when we focus on Operations). All tickets are rated by the type of issue, the service or functionality affected and the number of users affected, so that we can address and report issues in a timely manner.

The first video features Kevin Rueckert, NOC and Support Manager. Kevin talks about his department and how they are working to fulfill the Reseller promise.

Next up is Frank Lemire, Technical Support Team Lead. Frank is very passionate about doing the right thing for Resellers.

Ben Zanin is a Senior NOC analyst. He provides insight into the types of tickets and how NOC responds to escalations and monitored issues.

Let us know if you have any questions about NOC and Technical Support. You can leave a comment or join us in the forum. In the next part of this series, we will talk with AJ Mirani all about Operations.