Blog Articles
The Internet Infrastructure Coalition
If you’ve spent any time reading us or drinking with us, you have almost certainly heard a member of the Tucows herd singing the praises of the Open Internet and vowing to either enlighten or destroy its enemies. It’s sort of our thing. We are thrilled and humbled by what can be achieved when billions […]
The Channel Partners Conference & Expo
We are checking out a new industry show this year that we think could be relevant to a lot of you. The Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas at The Venetian & Sands Expo Feb. 27-March 1. It looks similar to the hosting conferences where we tend to meet many of you. Companies […]
Talking about Ting
In our recent webinar about selling Ting, ultramarathoner James Koole suggested that you should “host more of the conversation on your side than ours.” I want to share a piece of data to support that point, elaborate on it a bit and see if I can offer you some help. First the data. Looking at […]
Premium domains work
A few months ago, we expanded our premium (secondary market) domain offering. We encouraged you to help your customers find the perfect domain by including premium domains in your search results using the OpenSRS API. We recognized this would require some front-end work. We recognized many of you still thought of a domain name as […]
A plea from marketing
Almost every time I meet with an OpenSRS reseller, they end up saying, “Hey, it would be great if you had something to help me deal with (particular marketing challenge).” And I end up saying, “We do have that! #@!!%! We posted it on the blog five times and emailed you like thirty.” And they say, “OK, […]
The elephant in the room
You work in an intense competitive environment. Customers are always comparing your services and your prices to others’. When you mess up, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to get defectors. When a competitor messes up, there’s a good chance you’re going to benefit. So what do you do when a competitor messes up […]
Are you ready for some .CO?
Update: We’re offering a .CO price promotion! The wholesale cost for new one-year .CO domains will be USD $13.00 beginning on Sunday, February 6 and continuing through until Saturday, February 12, 2011. Full details on the terms of the promotion are available on the promo signup page. You must signup by Friday, February 4, 2011 […]
May I help you? and/or help yourself
Full service versus self-service A key strategic question in any service business is where to play along the spectrum from managed service (or full service) to self-service. This is particularly true with Web services, which can be either particularly sophisticated (necessitating full service) or particularly simple (enabling self-service). The answer, as always, will be driven by […]
No hassle renewals at Hover
Here’s another discovery we made at Hover that you can consider implementing. Renewals were our number one support issue, accounting for 36% of support tickets opened. A lot of those calls and emails came from customers (or friends, relatives, colleagues and assistants of customers) that could not sign in to their account. So, we developed […]
Tucows or not Tucows
Our new Tucows badge program has inspired some great discussions and debates (both internally and with our resellers!). I want to quickly contribute some more thoughts on evaluating whether this program makes sense for you. The big idea here is to let your customers and prospects know that a domain name registered with you is […]