Carving out a niche, then staying focused has been the key to success for web host and OpenSRS Reseller, DiscountASP.NET. That singularly focused approach meshed perfectly with OpenSRS and its consistent commitment to the wholesale Internet services market.

The Pasadena, California based webhost started out in 2003 as a shared hosting provider with a twist, offering Windows-based hosting aimed squarely at the ASP.NET developer community.

The company’s developer customers have one-stop access to everything they need, including domain names, SSL certificates and a hosting platform that sports all the latest technologies from Microsoft. That complete package of services enables them to create websites and other web-based applications.

Takeshi Eto, VP Marketing and Business Development for DiscountASP.NET, says that strict focus on the Microsoft ASP.NET market has been critical in building a successful business in the long-term.

“If you try and do too many things, it’s hard to target marketing, and it’s hard to provide adequate support,” he says. “From the very beginning, we made sure that everything we did was about serving the needs of the .NET developer and we’ve been very successful in doing that.”

A Partner with a Similar Perspective

Eto says they looked for a similarly well-focused company when evaluating domain registration providers. Eto found, in OpenSRS, a company that built a reputation for providing the best wholesale domain registration platform and service.

That laser-focus on the specific needs of its wholesale customers was something that Eto could relate to. The fact that he found an API and platform that he liked was icing on the cake.

“We evaluated a lot of registration partners and we liked the APIs that OpenSRS had,” he says. “It made the integration and automation a lot easier.”

Savvy Customers = Tech Support Challenges

DiscountASP.NET’s customer base runs the gamut from hobby sites, to blogs, to businesses. According to Eto, those business customers make up the majority of the base.

“About 60% of our customers are doing some sort of business website with our service, whether it’s the .NET developer themselves, or an application or website that developer did for the business,” he says.

With a tech-savvy customer base like DiscountASP.NET has, providing tech support does offer some challenges. Eto says that overall, the number of support requests is lower than typically seen in mass-market hosting, but that doesn’t mean support is easy.

“The sophistication of the support tickets is very highly technical,” he says. “The challenge for us is to make sure our tech support staff is trained on all the new stuff.”

To ensure that his customers get the help they need, Eto has to look around a little more to find the right people to work in tech support.

“Trying to find talent to hire may take us longer,” he says. “But those that join our team are assured of a dynamic environment where they will always be learning and working on new technology. It’s fun and challenging.”

On Trust

DiscountASP.NET developed its own control panels and hosting platform using .NET technologies because they wanted to demonstrate to customers that they were the best option. “What better way to show that we’re .NET experts? Our control panel is .NET, our website is .NET — it all helps in the marketing message,” he says.

He also says the company works very hard to keep up with the latest developments from Microsoft and aims to be ahead of the needs of the customer.

That kind of commitment to keeping ahead of the game also means Eto needs to rely on, and trust his chosen vendors to do the same.

As far as OpenSRS is concerned, Eto says dealing with the company has been “great,” and that he’s always found OpenSRS to be “very responsive.”

Eto also says that he appreciates the regular interaction he has with OpenSRS people. “I see them all the time at different mixers and networking events and they’re always cool, fun to hang out with and good to do business with,” he says.

It’s definitely a relationship that is paying off and Eto sees a solid future for DiscountASP.NET.

You don’t usually put a significant part of your business into the hands of a third party unless you really trust them. That’s exactly what KPN, the largest telco in the Netherlands, did recently when it moved its .NL registration business to the OpenHRS platform on the same day as the NL Registry moved to a new back-end registration system.

KPN is the leading telecommunications and information and communications technology (ICT) service provider in The Netherlands, offering wireline and wireless telephony, internet and TV to consumers, and end-to-end telecommunications and ICT services to business customers.

With more than 33,000 full-time employees, millions of customers and $13.5 billion Euros in revenue in 2009, KPN is a huge player in the communications sector in Holland. That reach is beginning to spread through other countries in Europe and as far away as the USA. KPN boasts 2.5 million broadband Internet customers, representing about 43% of the market in the Netherlands as of 2009. The company controls about 50% of the Dutch mobile phone market and over half of the fixed phone line market.

OpenSRS Reseller since 1999

The company has been an OpenSRS reseller since 2000, starting with a move to OpenSRS from Network Solutions when the domain name industry was opened up to competition in 1999.

Joost Pisters, Senior Consultant, KPN, remembers the initial conversations about moving to OpenSRS. “I heard about this company, OpenSRS. I contacted one of the sales guys on the phone and he offered to fly out next week to have a talk,” he says.

“‘What? You’re actually going to come to see us? In person?’” he recalls asking, incredulously. Pisters says he knew then that OpenSRS was a company with a focus on customer service. “That showed me that OpenSRS had a totally different attitude towards resellers and towards the business,” he says.

KPN and OpenSRS enjoyed a ten-year relationship with KPN using the OpenSRS system to manage all of its domain registrations with the exception of .NL domains, for which KPN is an accredited registrar.

In-house or Out-source?

In the spring of 2010, the .NL Registry was requiring Registrars to move to a fully automated registry model with an Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) interface. The change would literally happen overnight and all registrars were required to rewrite their systems to comply with the changes on the registry side.

KPN had developed and maintained its own registrar platform since 1997 to handle its .NL business, but the switch to EPP at the Registry gave them a good reason to look at whether that was the best way to operate.

The company decided to move everything over to the OpenHRS Registrar solution that OpenSRS provides. OpenHRS is built on the same technology that powers the OpenSRS domain management platform and is used by registrars around the world looking for a powerful, managed solution that integrates with leading domain registries.

Pisters says KPN makes a point of looking at off-the-shelf solutions when ever it can, and consolidating operational processes between .NL and the rest of its domain registration interfaces made good business sense.

“We already had an interface with OpenSRS, so why not use it for our .NL domains?” says Pisters. Because the two platforms are essentially the same, integrations with OpenSRS work seamlessly with OpenHRS, offering Resellers an easy upgrade path if they ever decide to become an accredited registrar.

A successful switch

In the weeks and months before the big switchover, OpenSRS worked very closely with KPN to ensure that both companies were ready. “The team did a fantastic job, quite literally working day and night in the weeks leading up to the switch. They had a tremendous job to do and everything was successful,” says Pisters of the work done to get everything ready.

On the big day, KPN was registering .NL domains through OpenHRS an hour after the registry came back online after moving to its new EPP implementation.

“It worked great. You guys had time issues as well, but that is to be expected. Even if you are an agile, fast-moving company like OpenSRS is, it’s still a big undertaking,” says Pisters.

It’s a matter of trust

Both Pisters and KPN realized that there are risks taken on with a project like this one, but Pisters says he always felt confident that OpenSRS would pull it off.

“It’s a huge trust thing. Giving .NL to you guys [OpenSRS] in such a short period of time was risky. It’s always risky to do something like that, but if I was confident with anybody, it’s with OpenSRS,” he says.

For KPN and Pisters, it came down to the long-term relationship that KPN had with OpenSRS.

“Based on everything that we’ve done together over the last ten years, I had complete confidence in you guys delivering what you had promised us,” says Pisters. “That’s exactly what you guys did.”

Founded in 2000, emerion WebHosting has grown to become a leading hosting and Internet service provider to small businesses and individuals in Europe. Founder and CEO Bernd Hilmar oversees the company’s operations from its base in Vienna, Austria.

As with thousands of other OpenSRS Resellers, emerion has been a customer since the beginning. Hilmar says that there were a couple of reasons they chose OpenSRS to power their domain registrations.

He notes that the fact that OpenSRS was one of the first Registrars to offer an API was very important. “We found OpenSRS [in 2000] and we were very impressed about the API because it allowed us to automate our domain registrations,” he says.

On Choosing a Registrar Partner

Of course, price was also a key consideration, but Hilmar says it shouldn’t be the top concern for those looking for a registrar partner. “Price is an important reason in this market, but it’s not the only reason to select a registrar,” he says. “It’s important for everything to work well day-to-day in this business.”

Hilmar says communication is also something to think about. He notes that he enjoys the level of communication that OpenSRS provides both through email messages that keep him informed of what’s new and also through regular contact with his account manager, Luigi Lagonigro, who works out of the OpenSRS office in the UK.

From a service availability standpoint, Hilmar says he likes the way OpenSRS keeps him informed of what’s going on. “[OpenSRS] has a status page so we can see by ourselves when something happens, and when it will be resolved,” he says. This allows emerion to more quickly react to, and minimize, any potential impacts on its customer base when service interruptions take place.

This focus on good communication is a philosophy that the company embraces for its own interactions with customers.

Emerion Embraces Social Media

Hilmar says the company is using both Facebook and Twitter to network with current and potential customers. With its Facebook page, emerion has attracted well over 1,500 fans already.

They use social media primarily to keep their customers informed. “We update the community with hosting news and provide them with an inside view of the inner workings of their hosting provider,” he says. But he cautions that too much information can have a negative effect, adding that “people can get angry about it” if you communicate too much.

As for the future, Hilmar says they’re just getting started in the social media space. “There are many ways to use social media. We will do more in future because we believe in the dynamic of the social interactivity,” he says.

A Beneficial Mix of Both Business and Personal Accounts

Emerion’s customer base ranges from personal shared hosting accounts to businesses with more advanced needs. He says having both types of customers allows them to better tailor their systems and provide better service to everyone.

“Honestly, we need both,” he says. “It’s interesting to work with the private customers because it’s an advantage to make the service easy to use for them and to improve the usability.”

But on the business customer side, Hilmar says the customers are often more demanding. “The business customer has more and special needs,” he says. “They want specific things and we improve our service with that needs and try to implement it as standard.”

Emerion welcomes both because they find the mix to be beneficial. “We try to cover both directions because at the end they both fit together very good,” he says. From his experience, servicing both types of customers helps improve the offering overall.

Emerion’s Custom Cloud Solution

Emerion has deployed a custom, clustered server system, which is a cloud,
and offers burstable resources for customers. It provides this in conjunction with a hosting control panel it developed in-house for an end-to-end system.

Hilmar says they decided to opt for a custom solution because it allows them to better serve their customers. “We wrote the software for our hosting control panel all by ourselves and it works together with our own system. Nothing else fit the specific needs of our customers,” he says.

He adds that it allows for more flexibility in providing an easy to use service. “With out own system we are more independent to do interfaces for our customers. It allows us to make it easier for our customers.”

That focus on “ease of use” and a commitment to providing a high level of customer service will no doubt serve the company well as it continues to grow.

Special thanks goes to Heather Leson who did a ton of work on this profile and also to our European office for facilitating a face-to-face interview with Bernd Hilmar at WebhostingDay last week. And of course, special thanks goes to Bernd for taking the time to meet with us and answer all of our many questions. We appreciate it!