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.”

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!

Yola.com was founded in 2005, in Cape Town, South Africa, getting its start as an affiliate business that needed a way for their customers to quickly and easily create affiliate websites and pages.

Later, they spun off the website creator tool as Synthasite and things took off from there. The company picked up the current Yola.com branding in 2009, a name that Chris Muller, Director of Business Development for Yola.com, says better represents what the company is all about.

“The name Yola comes from a hindi word that means ‘hatch’,” says Muller. “The Yola brand has helped us move beyond the basics of website building with the Synthasite name to establish us a place to build and grow your entire business online. We also loved that we were able to get a domain name that was short, phonetic, and would work around the globe.”

Yola’s focus is what the company calls ‘micro-businesses’–small companies with one to five employees–and the company’s goal is to help them get online, and establish a web presence.

“Micro-businesses don’t have either the budget or the time to manage a large website but they do need to get their brand out online and maintain a web presence,” says Muller. “That’s where Yola comes in.”

Domains were a focus from the start

Yola has adopted a ‘freemium model’ whereby users can create a free site on a subdomain. Paying customers can buy a premium package that allows them to buy and use their own domain name, along with more advanced features like premium themes and additional storage.

“Domains were the first product that we charged for on our website,” says Muller. “From the start, we realized there was a revenue opportunity there.”

“It’s fundamental to a small business’ needs. If I own Chris’s Coffee Shop, I need to own ChrissCoffeeShop.com. In addition to the Twitter account and everything else that I have to do, I need that domain,” he says.

Muller says that offering domains fits in with Yola’s approach to providing a “one-stop shop” for their customers when it comes to their online presence.

“If they’re coming to us for their web presence, and they’re coming to us to build the website and everything else that’s on it,” he says, “then I think it’s logical to let them manage everything, including the domain name, from one place.”

ccTLDs and Name Suggest to help customers find the perfect domain

Yola’s userbase is global–50% of their users are outside of the U.S.–and because of this, they recently added ccTLDs to the mix of domain offerings.

“We just added .co.uk, .eu and .ca domains based on a combination of where our traffic comes from, and what our customers have been requesting,” says Muller. “It’s been great. We simply added them to a drop-down and their sales have taken off without any marketing push. It’s an important step towards localization.”

Yola sees the domain name as a critical part of offering localized service to their customers. Muller notes that “having a localized domain name is almost as important, or even more important, than having a localized website.”

Yola also makes use of the name suggestion tool that is a part of the OpenSRS API. They offer up relevant alternative domain suggestions to users during the initial search and help their users find the perfect domain name for their business.

Muller says they realized that SMBs are building a brand around a domain, and that helping the customer find the right domain goes a long way in ensuring that customer is successful and remains a customer for the long term. He says Yola makes extensive use of the name suggestions and that they’ve found that the OpenSRS tool to be “very effective for us and very helpful.”

Managing a move

Yola came to OpenSRS after starting out with another domain name registrar.

“We chose OpenSRS because of their robust APIs and the flexibility that their platform offered around messaging and options such as a variety of ccTLDs that we could offer down the road.”

Fortunately, the experience that OpenSRS has in managing transitions onto the OpenSRS platform from other Registrars meant the move went very smoothly.

“It worked out really well. Working with Steve Barnes (Business Development Manager at OpenSRS) saved us lots of days and the transition went really well,” Muller recalls. “It was fantastic, as smooth as we could expect.”

Poised for growth

As for the future, Muller says Yola is intent on continuing to help small business manage and grow their online presence. On the services side, Yola is partnering with Logoworks by HP to offer professional design services, Wpromote to offer search engine marketing, and TRUSTe for management of privacy policies.

On the domain side, Muller says “We’ve done a lot of work over the past few months with domains, like adding ccTLDs, adding transfers, changing the way we do availability checks. We’re really excited.”

Adding the ability for customers to transfer domains to Yola and OpenSRS from other Registrars or webhosts was no brainer, according to Muller. “Allowing customers to transfer domains that they already own to Yola helps us become a one-stop shop for small businesses online.”

Looking at the product roadmap, Chris says Yola is going to keep adding value to their premium bundles and expand their resources for small businesses. One of the ways they’re going to do this is by including domains and related functionality in the core offerings. He also said they’ll continue to expand the ccTLD offerings and continue to refine their domain suggestion tool to help customers find the perfect domain name on which to build their business.

Masterhost is one of the largest Russian webhosts and an OpenSRS Reseller. We are fortunate to have Alexander Ovchinnikov, COO, join us to talk about Masterhost and the Russian Internet industry.

1.The services you provide are diverse from hosting to domains. Tell us more about what you offer your customers.

Masterhost has been successfully operating since 1999, which means this winter we are celebrating our 10th anniversary. The services we offer include: virtual hosting on unix and windows, including the provisioning of Virtual Private Servers (VPS), offering dedicated servers in Russian and European data centers, and the registration of domain names. We are also accredited Registrar for the TLDs .ru, .su, .?? (IDN). We’re especially proud to be the 2008 winner of the 2008 RUnet Prize award in the category of “Technology and Innovation”. RUnet award was established in 2004 and is a national award in the field of high technology and the Internet, to encourage outstanding achievements and companies – leaders in the field of information technology and electronic communications.

Masterhost is the leading company in Russia confirmed by an independent market hosting statistics on placement of domain names on the servers hosting provider. By the number of supported active sites, Masterhost is among the third largest hosting providers in Eastern and Central Europe (Netcraft, 2007) with more than 150, 000 domains.

Our VIP clients (approximately 55,000 in total) include the largest and very-well known Russian businesses including TV channels, news agencies, popular portals, Russian MSN Weather, AD networks, entertainment web-sizes, newspapers, telco web-sites, travel web-sites. We aspire to be an innovative knowledge company by providing free hosting projects in the field of education and educational programs for the non-profit educational web project. This project is in collaboration with Microsoft.

2. The Russian market is growing. Can you tell us more about RUnet (Russian Internet) and your locations (Moscow and St-Petersburg).

RUnet is a description for Russia’s national Internet presence. The .RU domain is among the top 20 country-code top-level domains with one of the highest rates of growth over the past five years. (approximately 2,494 835 registered .RU domains). Masterhost has more than 150 000 .RU domains, which is about 11.5% of the total market share.

It’s estimated that the number of RUnet Internet users will increase by approximately 34% in 2009. This is determined by factors such as interest and demand of the population to gain access to the web. There is an active development of the Russian market with various service providers and services (Internet service, broadband, and hosting providers). Internet access is mainly concentrated in Moscow (68%) and St. Petersburg (10%). The remaining 22% is in other regions including major cities such as Novosibirsk, Krasnodar, Ekaterinburg, etc. Masterhost is actively promoting its services these regions.

3. How did Masterhost grow as an Internet business? ??

The company was formed in 1999. In the early days of its existence, the company’s management had a primary goal of not expanding too fast, but rather to accumulate the work experience and build a solid team of professionals. The company’s management made every effort to ensure the proper level of service was built to provide the required level of quality. Masterhost employees over 150 highly skilled specialists who focus on quick and effective solutions to any problems faced by our customers. Their approach to work is crucial to our success. All of this allows our company to be an absolute leader in Russia’s market hosting.??

4. How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed??

For our clients, we carry out all necessary procedures for the registration of domain names in the most popular domain zones in Russia and the world. We have been working with OpenSRS since 2005. To date, through your company, we register or renew in the order of 250 domains per month in such areas as: .com, .net, .org, .info , .mobi, .eu, .co.uk, .org.uk, .biz , .cc, .tv , .me and .name.?

?5. What do you think about the growth of new ccTLDs?

Unique domain names are a scarce resource in the 21st century yet required for virtually any business. Many ccTLDs are now open for international business. ccTLDs don’t really increase without major geopolitical changes. There are other options.

Jordon Gross, Managing Director of Ultraspeed/Hostroute took a few minutes to answer some questions for our “Meet the Resellers” series

How did you personally get into the Internet business?

I originally got into it in 1997 running a few websites of my own, then I started reselling hosting space. It’s all continued from there, really.

Tell us how long Ultraspeed and Hostroute have been doing business and about all the services you offer to your customers.

Ultraspeed has been in business for 11 years now, and Hostroute for about 8. Hostroute was purchased by Ultraspeed at the end of 2007. Ultraspeed specializes in offering Managed Hosting in the UK, and has pioneered a product known as Diskless Servers (No Hard Drives, 15 minute hardware replacement guarantee, low power consumption) that has been very popular. Hostroute offers virtual hosting and domain names, and is currently getting a major overhaul from the billing system to the website to the hosting products.

Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

We are located in London, England; in a particular area of London called Shoreditch. Somehow we got an office here three years ago, and the area has now become incredibly trendy and filled with media/arty types and too-cool-for-school restaurants and bars. Our techie crew sometimes borrows clothes from the vintage store downstairs just to not stand out like sore thumbs!

Any interesting stories from your company’s history?
Many interesting stories, most of which we can’t repeat publicly! One such time was at the end of the 90s in New Jersey, when we spent an entire 24 hour period moving servers in the back of a U-Haul van, fueled only by Dunkin Donuts.

Suffice to say it’s been a huge amount of fun (and hard work!) over the years.

How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

Hostroute has been an OpenSRS Reseller since it started really, OpenSRS have always been supportive to the growth of the business, we’re looking forward to putting a huge amount more business with them over the next few years.

What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

Not much, really. Tea at the Wolseley?

Thanks to Dr. Neil Clifton for the photo of the Shoreditch Fire Station licensed under the Creative Commons.

How long has REGdom been doing business and tell us about all the services you offer to your customers?

We started our business in early 1996 as one of the first .it maintainers, registering .it domains at the newly born .it registry (NIC). At first, we were more focused on web hosting as a classic Internet service provider (ISP); however while growing, we acquired our own data center which allowed us to start a new area of activity offering hosting solutions to other companies. This allowed us to develop partnerships and create new product offerings.

In late 2001, we became more aware of the need to split our products in different brands, managing them as different companies in the attempt to be more flexible and quickly follow the changes of the market. Our products lineup now varies from hosting/housing to fax-to-mail services. As REGdom – the brand focused on domain registrations – we’re developing a completely new platform to allow our partners maintain their domains in an easier way.

Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

Our company took part at the first round-table discussing the rules for .it domain registrations when the Italian Registration Authority was founded. It’s interesting to see how this market has grown and how many key players are still here while others are gone. I think that paying attention to the past is a great way to learn and to lead a new path for the future.

We are proud of our contribution to the .it registrar agreement and also were involved in the technical procedure tests. Being a small actor in the progress of the Internet is one of the factors that makes this job so exciting.

Giovanni Losi, Product Manager
REGdom

How did you personally get into the Internet business?

Well, like a lot of people in this sector, it all started as a hobby. I have loved technology and computers since I was a child, so I think I was one of the first to be passionate about the Internet when it became a reality in Italy in the middle of the 90s. After working for a company selling computers and related services I jumped on the new economy ship and started working as a systems administrator for an ISP. I immediately fell in love with this new world and its opportunities. Year by year, I became more interested in how the Internet works and what lies behind everything. In 2008, after some months splitting myself in two different positions, I fully crossed the line to become a REGdom Product Manager.

Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

Our headquarters is in Brescia, a city in northern Italy pretty close to Milan. It gives almost the same advantages as working in the more famous city: affordable technology, low prices for bandwidth, without considering that all the biggest ISPs and the MIX (Milan Internet eXchange) are in this area. Apart from that Brescia is more liveable than Milan: less traffic, less air pollution, a smaller city centre. It’s less chaotic. We’re just 20 minutes driving time from the Garda Lake, a vacation spot where relaxing with many activities, from sunbathing to water sports.

How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

We signed the contract in 2003 but we started doing business seriously with OpenSRS a couple of years later. At the beginning we used to register domains with many other registrars because we would have loved to try different reseller services. When business started growing we realized we couldn’t afford to have as many web panels with the increase of TLDs. We needed a strong partner with a solid assistance to rely on, and our path led us to OpenSRS showing it as that kind of ideal partner. It gives us the opportunity to keep all our domains in a unique interface and the API support helped and is still helping us to grow and speed up our registration processes.

What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

It has been a good idea to create an European technical department, supplying us a better and faster support, more reliable with the same working hours.

Widening the tld’s choice range would be appreciated too, as our customers are mostly based in Europe and sometimes they want to register European ccTLDs. As we deep developed our systems to connect with your API we would like to fully take advantage of that and register even more domains (and TLDs) with OpenSRS.

Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

The squishy cows you sent us are wonderful! Everybody loves them in the office and I’m planning to bring one on holiday with me for some fancy photo shoot, please send us more gadgets when possible!

Having a direct OpenSRS contact who speaks our language is an additional thing that should not be under estimated. No other operator at an international level has offered this to us.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Nergis Sungur, marketing manager of DorukNet, Turkey’s first and largest Internet service provider.

Nergis Sungur, DorukNet

James McNally (JM): How long has DorukNet been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Nergis Sungur (NS): DorukNet was the first Internet service provider (ISP) in Turkey. Since 1993, DorukNet has functioned as a B2B company providing Internet access, shared hosting, co-location and dedicated hosting, local and long-distance telephony and value-added services to corporate foundations.
 
DorukNet has more than 30 POPs in all the major cities of Turkey and two POPs abroad – one in Frankfurt and the other in London. Within this infrastructure, each node is backed up in order to ensure an interruption-free service. DorukNet monitors its backbone and data centers by means of top-notch security equipment and skilled technical staff who are available to provide assistance 24/7.
 
Over the years, the quality of the service and the value offered to customers have earned the trust of many small-scale to worldwide well-known global companies, thereby making DorukNet a strong player in the Internet services market. Currently, DorukNet provides over 15,000 companies with data center services and over 500 companies with TDM, PCM, Frame Relay, ATM and G.SHDSL solutions. We use world-class technology and equipment from Juniper, Cisco, 3Com and Alcatel.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

NS: I began my career as a Marketing Specialist at the headquarters of Akbank which is one of the biggest and most respected banks in Turkey. I was responsible for the development and marketing activities of Internet banking, both web site and mobile banking. I also had the chance to work on different projects regarding kiosks, ATMs, call centers and self-service banking platforms. That is how I had the chance to get into the Internet and IT sector, which I find to be a lot of fun.

Ortakoy Mosque (1854), Istanbul, Turkey

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

NS: We are located in Istanbul, Turkey which is a great place to do business. Turkey is a big unsaturated market and there are currently 6 million broadband Internet subscribers and around 30 million Internet users in total. The population is young and technology-oriented. Also, we have laws requiring corporate entities to have a web site and this enhances the sector. As a city, Istanbul is the financial and commercial center of Turkey which makes the location very convenient for business.

JM: How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

NS: DorukNet has been an OpenSRS Reseller for the past 10 years. A partnership should be based on and can flourish in an environment where mutual trust exists. OpenSRS takes our business relationship seriously and provides that environment. We are aware of the fact that OpenSRS does business with its partners on a win-win basis, and we believe that we can always rely on OpenSRS which brings comfort and frees us to focus on our core business.

JM: What can we do to make our relationship with your company stronger?

NS: I think OpenSRS is taking serious steps and on the right track to enhance the relationship with its partners by assigning account managers and its new organizational structure.  I would suggest some general meetings to be held among your Resellers which would be a great platform to exchange some ideas and for fruitful discussions. (Editor’s Note: Our new forum is a perfect platform for our Resellers to exchange ideas.)

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

NS: I would highly recommend that you further develop your Reseller interfaces. They could be more user-friendly and also some useful reporting tools could be implemented. (Editor’s Note: This is a top priority for us this year, and you should be seeing some welcome changes very soon.)

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Special thanks to Flickr user Vyacheslav Argenberg for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features John McKown, president of Delaware.net, an innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider located in the American state of Delaware. They recently moved their entire domain registration business to our hosted Storefront platform.

James McNally (JM): How long has Delaware.net been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

John McKown (JMcK): We’ve been in business since 1997. I would call us a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. We have a development team here that builds websites, and we have our own software that we run both in our own data center and also on the Amazon cloud. It’s a platform that consists of four main suites: a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management system (CRM) for sales and project management online, an ecommerce system and an email newsletter system. We’re especially seeing lots of growth with the CMS suite. In this economy, what we’re seeing is that folks are losing their web designers and they want to be able to manage their own websites. They’re moving their sites to us just so they can manage them better.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

JMcK: We started as an access provider, and I remember meeting Elliot (Noss) way back then, when Tucows started as a download site, even before it became a registrar. We had conversations about the future of services and where things were headed, and my take on things was that I did not want to be a commodity service. I didn’t want to sell the wire, I wanted to sell what goes through the wire. It was only about a year and a half after being in that business that we decided that we had to get away as quickly as possible from that.

Another lesson we learned is not to take on very large projects just out of ego. Today, every site we work on is making our products better. When folks would come to us with an application that someone else had built that was broken and ask us to fix it, we underestimated how much it would demoralize our programmers to ask them to fix someone else’s bad code. By creating our own SaaS platform, and continually adding new features to it which we roll out to customers at no charge, we instill much more pride in our team because we’re helping our clients make millions of dollars.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

JMcK: My family had a company and I build an ecommerce system for them, and then our ISP went out of business. We had 48 hours to find a new host, and I had made a spreadsheet of all the area hosting companies. We literally sat around a table and decided that we should just do it ourselves. And we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The company was first called EZ Online and our domain was ezol.com. We’d say to people, “We’re like America Online but it’s easier to do things.” Dialup back then was something like $35 a month.

As the price started to drop, it didn’t take long for us to know that selling the wire wasn’t adding value, that service was the value. I see the same thing happening to hosting as an industry. I think applications are the key. You’re not just using the web. You’re using a browser, you’re using Facebook, you’re using Twitter, you’re using Gmail, these are all applications. So that’s our focus now.

The Old State House, Dover, Delaware

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

JMcK: We’re in Dover, Delaware which is the capital of the state. The reason we’re here is because we’re close to state government, which was a huge part of our company when we started. The ironic thing today is that our clients come from all over the country. Municipalities are a huge vertical for us, we’re building a lot of city websites right now. We’ve got one in Arizona, one in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut. We have struggled with our name, we had an identity crisis with our name for quite a long time and then we realized that it didn’t matter. What matters to people is that we can solve their problem. We learned that if you’re in the service business, you’re in the problem-solving business. We also learned that your portfolio will do your marketing for you.

JM: How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed??

JMcK: Since the very beginning. In fact, we actually made up t-shirts when Tucows came into existence. When everyone was on Network Solutions and that was the only option, they became private and began to poach the database. They were marketing to our clients and that really concerned us. OpenSRS was a bright light in the registrar world to us because they respect the sales channel. The difference in cost is a non-issue for me. It’s someone I can trust and can do business with. We made a t-shirt with the Network Solutions logo that said “Not Worth Delusions”. The silver lining to that experience is that now we’re looking at reselling some of our applications and OpenSRS has been an example to me that we need to nurture and protect our own sales channel. I think Tucows is a model for that.

JM: I understand that you recently migrated your domains into our hosted Storefront. Can you give me a bit of background on that??

JMcK: Firstly, we’re programmers and we could code a lot of things ourselves, but there’s a point when you have to ask yourselves, “Do we want to build or do we want to buy?” With that product, you could get us to market instantly with an interface that better serves our client.

The second reason we moved to it is that we see domain registration as just a cost of doing business for our clients. It’s not necessarily a primary revenue source for us. The most important thing is to get the domain registered, get the domain renewed quickly, and to give the clients self-service tools. The interface works perfectly for those purposes.

JM: How was the experience of migrating and how has using Storefront compared to your previous method of working with the RWI??

JMcK: It was very easy. We simply linked to it and pushed customers to it. They don’t have a problem with that. We were concerend that giving them a self-service option might be construed as a hassle and that hasn’t happened. It’s been very painless, and one of the benefits that we’ve uncovered is that we’re able to not incur interest fees on our credit cards by running the transactions ourselves. And to be honest with you, I think that a lot of service providers that do use credit cards are now finding that the credit card companies are jacking up the rates and so that eats into the domain profit and maybe they don’t want to put all their domain stuff on the credit card in case it’s ever in jeopardy. This solves that problem because the money is going right from the client right to you and we’re not in the middle. There are fewer potential points of failure in the transaction, in my opinion.

JM: What can we do to make our relationship with your company stronger?

JMcK: Communicate more. Communication is what it’s all about. Some people don’t want to be bothered, but that’s not us. We want to bothered, we want to know what’s going on, we want to know what’s available. It was us enquiring that got us to the (hosted Storefront) interface, I didn’t even know that was an option. We were digging. We would have done it sooner had we known about it sooner.

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

JMcK: One thing you might do is to create some simple marketing or help materials to help end users understand how the domain name process works. You could even make this available through the Storefront interface. Something to explain the role of each link in the domain registration chain, from registries to registrars to resellers to end users. Or even the difference between domain hosting and registration. I don’t think we realize how little the general public knows about how DNS works or how registrars work or how we fit into all that.

Special thanks to Flickr user Mike Mahaffie for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Darko Bijelic, Chief DNS Administrator at PLUS Hosting, Croatia’s leading hosting company. PLUS are a brand-new Reseller and we recently helped them manage the migration of thousands of domain names into their OpenSRS account.

Darko Bijelic, PLUS Hosting

James McNally (JM): How long has PLUS Hosting been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Darko Bijelic (DB): PLUS Hosting primarily provides web hosting and related services, including domain registration, dedicated and VPS server rentals, colocation, audio/video streaming, SSL certificates…basically everything that web hosting companies usually offer.

PLUS Hosting was founded at the beginning of 2001 by Adriano Plisko. At the time, there were only a few companies in Croatia offering hosting-related services, so Adriano, already a proven business visionary and entrepreneur at just 28 years of age, decided to start a web hosting business. It is very interesting how our company grew from a small provider with none of our own servers into the largest hosting provider in the country with more than 50 of our own servers.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

DB: In 2001, hardware and cable-pair were extremely expensive for a startup hosting company, so PLUS Hosting was reselling hosting space originally bought from FastHosts in the UK. After the initial boost, the company decided to rent dedicated servers from Burst.net in the US. However, due to some unfortunate things that happened to Burst.net, we soon decided to switch to dedicated servers from ThePlanet, who are today probably the world’s biggest provider of hosting servers.

We used ThePlanet’s equipment for a few years, until we got a deal with Optima, one of the largest local ISPs, who partnered with us, and provided us with acceptably-priced high-speed Internet access. From then until now, we have used our own servers located in a facility in Zagreb (Croatia’s capital city) and we migrated all our clients from ThePlanet’s servers to our own servers there. Now we have more than 50 servers under our own direct administration.

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

DB: I am 29 years old and have worked in the domain and DNS business for more than 8 years now. I have worked with PLUS Hosting almost from the begining: I joined at the end of 2001. Although the company always had a need for Linux/Windows administrators, I always had an affinity for domains and DNS, so I have stuck to that. I have always liked seeing what kind of domains people register, and what they do with them. I also liked to compete with domainers around the world, waiting for domains to “drop” and registering them before somebody else. That was before companies like Snapnames and Pool.com even existed. DNS is the basic backbone of the Internet, and without it, the Internet wouldn’t exist as it does today. And you always see and find something new in the DNS world, which is why I like my job so much.

The story of how I got here where I am is pretty interesting also. I was at college and was participating in some marketing projects (I actually graduated with a degree in marketing, not something more technical) for my Faculty of Economics, and one day my marketing professor said it would be nice to have a web page. I saw an ad that a local company was offering free web hosting for projects. So I went there and met Adriano. A few months later, he called me and asked me if I would be interested in working with him. I agreed and here we are now.

Roman Amphitheater, Pula, Croatia

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

DB: PLUS Hosting is located in Pula, Croatia. It is a nice city of about 60,000 people, with a famous Roman Arena. It is located on the Istrian peninsula, so we have the Adriatic Sea all around us. It’s assumed that for business, it is always better to be in a larger city, because of infrastructure, potential employees, etc., but at PLUS, we’ve never thought of it as a disadvantage being located in a smaller town. We have our facilities and servers in the large city of Zagreb, but we administer everything remotely. If we’re ever needed on-site, we can be there in less than three hours.

I understand many of your readers might not have even heard of Croatia, or don’t know where it is. Maybe all they know is that a war took place here 15 years ago. Many people abroad wonder if we even have electricity, but actually Croatia is a pretty modern country. Some things could be better, but hey…come and see for yourself! By the way, Elton John had a concert yesterday right here in the Roman Arena, 50 meters from our offices!

JM: I understand you’re a brand-new OpenSRS Reseller. What made you decide to switch and how has your experience been so far?

DB: Yes, we are brand-new OpenSRS resellers. Being part of OpenSRS is something new for us and we are still adapting to it. We are still implementing the API on our system, transferring our domains to OpenSRS, and if I may say, we still have a lot of work to do. I am very grateful for all the help we’ve received from OpenSRS staff, especially from Claire Lam and Ben Reuss. I am amazed how they notice everything I ask for or want.

The story of how we decided to switch to OpenSRS is pretty straightforward. Our former registrar (I wouldn’t like to mention its name) got in legal trouble for alleged cybersquatting. Although they were our partners for years, and we never had any problems with them, we realized that we needed a reliable company to take care of our domains. So we decided to change providers for domain registration. At almost the exact time we started searching for a new provider, Ben Reuss and Marco Zuliani from OpenSRS called me and offered me great terms. I already knew that OpenSRS was one of the world’s biggest reseller-friendly registrars, but with such great prices (and free WHOIS privacy which makes me happy the most), I just couldn’t refuse. So our search for a new partner was over pretty fast. And I am happy we decided to join OpenSRS.

JM: What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

DB: Since we are still a new reseller, I don’t have any particular suggestions. Everything is perfect. I am just happy our domains are secure, and don’t need anything else

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Special thanks to Flickr user Boris Licina for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Amy Armitage, Director of Business Development at Lunarpages.

Amy Armitage, Lunarpages

James McNally (JM): How long has Lunarpages been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Amy Armitage (AA): Lunarpages Web Hosting launched in 1998 providing free Linux web hosting. In 2001, we began charging for our services, providing a personal web hosting plan and domain name registrations via OpenSRS. As we saw growth and a demand for more services, we launched Business hosting, then Dedicated, VPS, Windows, and even a website-builder and hosting plan all in one, Quicksite.

We host the biggest and the best in the industry, utilizing the knowledge that has made us one of the largest web hosts in the world. We tailor each web hosting solution to fit the unique needs of our diverse clientele, ensuring that webmasters at every level can build, design, and launch their businesses and projects with our help every step of the way. We really try to cater to every customer.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

AA: I think our beginnings are very interesting. Lunarpages started in the recreation room of our CEO’s house, and our first two servers were housed in a wardrobe! The wardrobe was actually built by our CEO’s son, so he often jokes that he “built” our first data center.

After a few months of providing low-resource free hosting, the demand for bigger and better plans grew, and we started charging for our services and gathering staff to support our customers. And of course we eventually had to move to a new data center!

Today we have servers in three data centers and we employ more than 100 staff and remote contractors from all over the world. And we made the Inc. 5000 list in 2008!

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

AA: I was looking to learn how to build a web site, so I signed up for free hosting with Lunarpages. As a customer, I lurked in their forums for a few weeks before posting my questions. As time went by, I started helping other new webmasters with their questions based on what I had learned myself. The Lunarpages founders asked me to administrate their forums, I recruited customers as moderators, and when we finally started charging for the service, they employed me to work in the support department. From there, I then employed my moderators and built out our support team.

After running their remote support division for a few years from Australia, they asked me to relocate to California to head up Business Development and I’ve been living here for four years now!

Tomorrowland, Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, California

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

AA: We are located in Anaheim, California. I think the fact that we can utilize the bigger local data centers and facilities is one of the principal advantages to doing business here. Having the technical resources and large scale partners close to us (and a central location) makes it easier to provide lower cost and higher level services. Plus being in a big city makes it much easier to find qualified system admins, network engineers, and support staff.

JM: Are you sure that proximity to Tomorrowland had nothing to do with it?

AA: Well…we did base choosing our central office location on its mileage from Disneyland…and yes, we do take our lunch breaks to ride Space Mountain…and maybe sometimes our CEO comes in late because he was taking pictures with Mickey Mouse…but we think that’s pretty normal.

JM: How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

AA: We have been partnered with OpenSRS since the beginning actually, so almost 10 years now! OpenSRS is such a fantastic partner for us. They are knowledgeable, professional, and offer a full arsenal of services to help grow our business.

They offer us a high level of communication and support and many ideas to increase revenue and opportunities for our clients.

JM: What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

AA: Bring us more t-shirts, cows, and yo-yos

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Special thanks to Flickr user Joe Penniston for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.