A couple of the domain promotions that were scheduled to come to an end at the end of March have been extended.

Here’s the details:

• .IN: the $1.99 promotion will continue, but effective April 1st, 2010, the promo price increases slightly to $2.99. The promo will be extended through June 30th, 2010.
• .ME: The promo will be extended through June 30th, 2010 under the same terms.

Already signed up? You’re all set

For Resellers who are already taking advantage of the promotions, there’s nothing you need to do. We’ll extend it for you automatically. Resellers not signed up can visit our domains promotions page and sign up for the individual promotions that are currently underway.

Today we announced significant improvements to the speed and quality of domain searches conducted using OpenSRS. With these enhancements, your existing integrations will work faster, as will searches using the Reseller Web Interface. But what I’m really excited about is the continued improvements we have made to our domain search over the past two years, which now allows you to offer an advanced domain searching system that will increase sales of both domains and other web hosting services.

A little bit of background

The methodology I refer to as “domain search 1.0” is unfortunately employed by most web hosting companies today. It is an old, archaic way of thinking about domain search. Common symptoms include:

• Forcing potential customers to enter ‘www.yourname.com’ search strings;
• Not allowing customers to register ccTLDs, or even gTLDs not named .com, .net or .org;
• The absence of suggestions for related search terms.

The most common objection I hear from web hosting companies is they don’t see any value in paying attention to domain name search, until I explain domain search 2.0.

Domain search 2.0

The domain search 2.0 approach treats domain names like the key component they are to the web hosting sales process. Virtually every web hosting company puts domain search front and centre on their website, but the technology used to power the search is often archaic. Domain search 2.0, on the other hand, treats the domain search box like a “magic box” – that is, an open, free-text box that will accept any input and spit out highly relevant domain names.

Our research shows this not only greatly enhances the end user experience, but can lead to a 10 to 15 percent lift in domain name sales if implemented properly. It also results in sales of more value-added services by attracting higher-margin customers.

How does it work?

The key to domain search 2.0 is our powerful NAME_SUGGEST call, which we’ve been iterating upon for more than two years. After our announcement today, it contains four key components:

• Domain name lookup: The “lookup” parameter will take any text and turn it into a domain name search, whether you enter “www.hockey.com”, “hockey league” or “hockey@league.com”.
• Domain name suggestions: The “suggestion” parameter will quickly return results of available names based on the original query using technology from DomainsBot, the industry leader in domain search technology. A new feature now allows you to also specify language if you choose to do so, enabling results to be returned in English, French, Spanish or Italian. Our research now shows that up to 15 percent of registrations using domain search 2.0 are from our domain name suggestions.
• Premium names: The “premium” parameter checks our premium names database of over one million names to see if any related names are for sale on the domain name aftermarket. As of today, suggested premium names are also displayed by DomainsBot, leading to a much better search experience.
• Personal names: A new “personal” parameter also allows you to now search for names associated with our personal names service as well.

We’ve also baked in a new “max_wait_time” parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that the NAME_SUGGEST command can run, and return as many results as can be found in that time period. This will allow you to build real-time, AJAX-enabled domain searches if you choose to do so.

Putting it all together

Have you thought about your domain search lately? We now have the speed, tools and data to equip your business with a high-powered search that will lead to more sales. There’s more information on our website.

Looking for some more techie information about the new API?

Look no further! Read this post and see some code examples. And to dig even deeper, the Developers/API Forum is the place to be.

This is a quick example on how to use new features of the NAME_SUGGEST API lookup. As mentioned in my previous blog post, we added a new feature to the API that allows you to specify amount of time that you’re willing to wait for results. You would do it something like this:

{
protocol => 'XCP',
action => 'name_suggest',
object => 'domain',
attributes => {
searchstring => 'food toronto',
services => [ 'lookup', 'suggestion', 'premium',
'personal_names' ],
tlds => [ '.com', '.info', 'net', 'ca', 'co.in', '.co.uk', '.es' ],
max_wait_time => "1",
}
};

This search will check a limited number of TLDs (as specified in the call), but it will check regular lookups, name suggestions and premium names for each. Behind the scenes, all these checks will happen in parallel, after hitting the local cache and registry zone files that act as a secondary cache.

The parameter max_wait_time is the new feature. In this case, it means you’re willing to wait one second for response (as measured in our system; the total time for a response will include the roundtrip for the data to travel the Internet). We will collect all results that we can in that one second time period and return the results. The response will look something like this:

{
'protocol' => 'XCP',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully',
'is_search_completed' => '0',
'search_key' => 'Ln0ahqiOQ7H3Vab7sURVIronOks',
'action' => 'REPLY',
'response_code' => '200',
'attributes' => {
'lookup' => {
'count' => '10',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully.',
'response_code' => '200',
'is_success' => '1',
'items' => [
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.com',
'status' => 'available'
},
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.info',
'status' => 'available'
},
... (response cut here for clarity)

Now, many of the results will be determined and returned in one second, but it’s likely not all of them can be looked up in that time frame. However, even after we return result set, we continue collecting the rest of the results in the background.

If you’re building an AJAX interface, here is a neat trick you can use: Look at the parameter we returned called search_key, and you can reuse it:

{
protocol => 'XCP',
action => 'name_suggest',
object => 'domain',
attributes => {
'search_key' => 'Ln0ahqiOQ7H3Vab7sURVIronOks',
max_wait_time => "2",
}
};

In the call below you’re now using the search key parameter, and retrieving results that have already been collected for you. And you are also specifying that you’re willing to wait another two seconds. If you introduced some sleep() on your end before sending the second API call, you can drop this time too. At this point you will receive back something like:

{
'protocol' => 'XCP',
'request_response_time' => '0.002',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully',
'is_search_completed' => '1',
'action' => 'REPLY',
'response_code' => '200',
'attributes' => {
'lookup' => {
'count' => '10',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully.',
'response_code' => '200',
'is_success' => '1',
'items' => [
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.com',
'status' => 'available'
},
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.info',
'status' => 'available'
},
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.co.in',
'status' => 'available'
},
... (response cut here for clarity)

As you can see, another important addition is the new response parameter is_search_completed = 1. This value indicates that you have received the full result set, and that there is nothing outstanding. As long as there are still results to be obtained, is_search_completed will be 0, as in the first example…

Hope this helps. You can always visit the Developers/API section of the OpenSRS Forums to learn more about coding to the OpenSRS API.

I wanted to talk today about a few improvements we’ve done to our check-availability API functionality, also referred to as domain lookups.

In summary, we’ve made a number of improvements that will make check availability much faster, whether you’re using RWI or the NAME_SUGGEST API. If you’re integrating with our API now or in the future, NAME_SUGGEST is the call to use to take advantage of all the advanced features and speed improvements.

Warning: Geek Content Ahead

And, now, for geeks in the audience, here are a few more details…

Historically, lookups have been done sequentially in OpenSRS. Whether you were using the RWI or API, your choice was to request lookups one by one, or give us a number of TLDs, and we would check them one by one. In a Worst case scenario, you could wait as long as 60 seconds for lookup of all TLDs, name suggestions and premium names to be returned.

Well, that has all changed now. We’ve completely re-engineered the OpenSRS system for doing availability checks, and we’ve put a big honking internal lookup service in place that does number of pretty neat things:

1. All that work that used to happen in sequence, is now happening in parallel behind the scenes.
2. There is a new cache in place that stores previous lookups for a short period of time to enable very fast repeat searches.
3. We pre-load and regularly update zone files from the most popular of registries, and make this information available to the system as secondary cache.
4. Not only are all TLDs checked in parallel, but all related services are parallelized, including name suggestions and premium names lookups.

With the new system, we can handle over 8,000 concurrent requests, and have several hundred concurrent processes running at any given point. And this is just a beginning, as system is very scalable!

Working with our partners

To give you a sense of the painstaking engineering that went into this piece of the system, we worked hard with our name suggest partner on optimizing their API. By implementing our suggestions, they’ve cut average size of their API response from 177KB down to 0.6KB. Yes, there’s no typo there–that is less than 0.5% of initial size!

Additionally, we trimmed milliseconds wherever we could. The round-trip for name suggest call
has dropped from 1.1s to 0.5s, indicating that majority of this is processing time for name-suggestion engine spin.

What’s the payoff?

So what is the net result of all this? If you were to do lookup before for all gTLDs, ccTLDs, name suggestions and premium names, it would have taken about 60 seconds before. Today, with the new API system, you can expect back a complete set of results in around four or five seconds!

Basically, lookup nowadays will take as much time as slowest TLD. If you’re not selling all TLDs (and for reference .es and .in are some of the slowest we’ve seen), your response is likely to be even better that that. To get most often requested gTLDs, your experience will be around one or two seconds most of the time.

Max wait and search keys

And if you’re an API integrator, it gets better. When sending an API command, you can now specify the maximum amount of time you are willing to wait for results! We’ll time ourselves, and give you all the results we’ve been able to collect by that ‘deadline’. You can use this to make a really snappy interface at the expense of maybe not getting few results here and there.

I’ll follow up this post with another that will show you how to do it in the coming days.

As well, should you be building Ajax interface, you can make it both snappy and complete. Just send us two or three calls! With the first one give us one second, and get back the the fast gTLDs, and suggestions. Then redo the same query a few seconds later to pick up rest of the results. And maybe add one more call five seconds later, just in case…although the API will tell you if result set is complete, so you might not even need that last call.

In reality, there are number of strategies you can use with this feature, but I hope you see the potential. It’s powerful, but not complex, and it will enable you to build that snappy page, with a feel-good customer experience where things are just flying.

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.

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:

1. It transitions DNS into the OpenSRS API and out of the TPP API.
2. 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.

Are you an Internet Service Provider that is allowing your competitors to establish business relationships with your customers? Do you have a strategy to grow your business and react to the changing needs of your customers?

In challenging times like these, it’s critical that you understand and recognize any opportunity to strengthen your existing customer relationships.

Many ISPs overlook the opportunities that offering web hosting and domain name services provide. As a result, they open the door for competitors who tap into their customer base and realize the potential that they should be realizing for themselves.

If you would like to learn more about how to tap into the potential within your own customer base, we invite you to an exclusive, free webinar with Adam Eisner, Product Manager, Domains for OpenSRS. This webinar is presented by the Federation of Internet Solution Providers of the Americas (FISPA) and OpenSRS.

During this presentation, Adam will explain how to:

• Integrate web hosting into your service offering
• Leverage related hosting and domain-based services to add revenue and strengthen your customer relationships
• Better understand the changing business landscape facing Internet Service Providers

Details:

REGISTRATION IS FREE
What: Web Hosting Solutions that Work for ISPs
When: Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 2:00pm EDT

We’ll see you there!

General availability of .TEL domains went live yesterday and response so far has been overwhelming! The registry has done a great job promoting .TEL and has created this very entertaining video aimed at consumers. It illustrates just one way in which a .TEL domain might be useful for an individual. In a further savvy move by the registry, they are developing an iPhone application that will allow a user to access .TEL domains and edit information directly from an iPhone.

If, as a Reseller, you’re still a little unclear about the opportunities .TEL offers, have a look at Telnic’s page with videos of several media appearances, including CNN, Bloomberg Business News, CNBC and the BBC.

These are early days, and as with all new TLDs, there is no time like the present to encourage customers to obtain their desired domain name.

P.S. Here’s a link to the unbranded video if you’d like to use it on your own site.

Since late last year, we’ve been talking about .TEL, the newest Global Top-level Domain (gTLD). Over the past few months, .TEL has gone from the Sunrise period to Landrush. During those times, trademark holders and then anyone who wished to register .TEL domains at a premium price could apply to own .TEL domains.

Now, we’re just a couple of days away from General Availability (GA) when the floodgates will be opened and everyone will be able to register their .TEL domain for the usual yearly registration fee of $8/domain year, plus the ICANN Fee of $0.20 and your OpenSRS Management Fee.

General Availability for .TEL begins officially on March 24th, 2009 at 15:00 GMT/UTC and as with the other two launch events, domains will be awarded on a first come, first served basis. .TEL Registrations will be available via the RWI and API at that time. Please note that there is a 15-hour blackout period between the closing of Landrush at 23:59 UTC/GMT on March 23rd, 2009 and the opening of the Registry for GA.

Resellers using OpenSRS Storefront may also want to sell .TEL domains and .TEL will be available in Storefront, although it will be disabled by default. You’ll need to enable it within the Storefront Manager.

Keep in mind that as Resellers, you are responsible for supporting your customers for .TEL domains and TelHosting. If you have any questions about how TelHosting works, Telnic provides quite a bit of information about the platform at their website. We suggest that you make yourself aware of how the platform and the
technology work.

A great way to learn about .TEL is to register your own .TEL domain and try it out. This can also provide a showcase for your customers that will demonstrate the benefits of .TEL and what it offers.

You may also wish to view the archive of the webinar that we held along with Telnic representatives a few months back. And, as usual, more information on .TEL can be found in our documentation.

You should be telling your customers about .TEL and explaining how it works. Here’s some reasons why everyone should purchase .TEL domains:

1. They are easy to use. You don’t need any web-design skills, or pay for hosting. Everything is saved within the innovative .TEL system.
2. They help people get found online. You can easily publish your contact information including social network profiles, email addresses and even your exact location. And you can protect any or all of that information using the privacy features built into .TEL.
3. They help grow your business. .TEL is accessible from the web, via any browser, and even through the iPhone, BlackBerry or other mobile internet devices like mobile phones.
4. They will boost your search ranking. .Tel listings are optimized for search engines like Google and Yahoo Search.
5. They can be used with your existing website. instead of a contact page, link to your .TEL domain and take advantage of the real-time changes and easy updates that .TEL provides.

The launch of .TEL has been interesting to watch, and now as GA approaches, we’re seeing lots of momentum around this new gTLD. Make sure you are a part of it.

Landrush for the new .TEL gTLD opened just a few minutes ago and already the news is spreading around the world about this interesting new domain extension. OpenSRS is now live and connected to the Registry for Landrush orders and all pre-orders in our system have been processed.

There has been a ton of media coverage around the launch of .TEL. Here’s a sampling:

• The Times Online – New .tel domain names set to create the world’s virtual phone book
• The Telegraph – The public will get the chance to be part of the world’s largest phone book
• Metro – Millions of new internet addresses go up for sale today under .tel
• GoMoNews – Telnic opens .tel mobile Internet domain to all
• TreeHugger – .tel Domain Could Mean Global Online Phone Book
• L’Atelier (in French) – Les PME n’ont plus besoin de site Web pour être visibles en ligne

The CEO of Telnic, appeared live on the American business news network CNBC this morning as well (view online). And .TEL received worldwide media coverage on BBC television and other radio and television stations throughout the day.

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding .TEL right now. As Landrush proceeds, expect more and with General Availability less than two months away, now is the time to start educating your customers about the value of .TEL domains.