OPENSRS: 2011

jueves, 22 de diciembre de 2011

More than 100 new ccTLDs Added

Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:31 AM PST

Today we enabled a huge number of new ccTLDs available through OpenSRS.

A few months back we announced that we acquired the German registrar EPAG. The reason for the acquisition was that we wanted to significantly bolster our lineup of country-code top-level domains. Today’s release is the first round of new ccTLDs that we’ll add as a result.

In total, there are over 100 new ccTLDs in the first round (including both second and third level domains). From a geographic perspective, we’ve now offer ccTLDs for nearly 80 countries.

Some of the more popular new extensions:

Poland: .pl
New Zealand: .nz
Isle of Man: .im
South Africa: .za
Malaysia: .my
Peru: .pe
Tonga: .to
Israel: .il
Korea: .kr

Full List with Pricing

You can view the full list of the TLDs we offer along with pricing here. We’ve organized things by continent to make it easier to display them all.

If you don’t see a country that you were hoping would be on the list, sit tight — we’re still working on integrating everything that EPAG offers into OpenSRS and we’ll have even more ccTLDs to add to the list in 2012.

More Information

ccTLDs sometimes have residency and other requirements. To help you out with that, we’ve created a handy TLD Reference Chart that gives you all that information in a single document. We’ll be updating it as we add more ccTLDs or as requirements change.

These new ccTLDs are available in the Domain Manager of OpenSRS Control Panel, as well as via the Reseller Web Interface (RWI). By default, searches won’t include the laundry list of all the new ccTLDs, but you can enable those that are of interest to you in the settings area of the RWI. Check out the FAQ for help with doing that.

Documentation including the API docs has been updated to get you started and we’ve started compiling a list of frequently asked questions that we will continue to update as we get feedback from resellers.

martes, 20 de diciembre de 2011

Holiday Hours from December 24 – January 3, 2011

Posted: 20 Dec 2011 07:02 AM PST

Happy Holidays from the OpenSRS team!

Most of our offices will be closed from the afternoon of December 23, 2011 through to January 2, 2012. We’ll be back in the offices on January 3 all ready to serve you in the new year. As always our dedicated team of Technical Support reps continues to be available 24/7 to assist you.
Here are the specific hours by department:

Department	Dates and Hours
Technical Support	Regular hours
Payments	Closed Dec. 24 – Jan. 2 inclusive
Compliance	Closed Dec. 24 – Jan. 2 inclusive
ccTLD Special Processing	Closed Dec. 24 – Jan. 2 inclusive

Please note: during this closure, there will be no orders or requests processed for the following Service Bureau ccTLDs: .at, .fr, .ch, .li, .dk and .mx.

Happy Holidays to you, your colleagues and your families during this holiday season and the new year!

martes, 13 de diciembre de 2011

.PRO Domains Now Available

Posted: 13 Dec 2011 05:00 AM PST

Today we added .PRO domains to the list of gTLDs available through OpenSRS.

To celebrate the launch, we’re also offering a .PRO launch promotion providing substantial savings off the usual registration fee. From now until February 15, 2012, .PRO domains will be available with a registry cost of $1.99/domain year for new registrations (the regular registry cost is $7.34/year). Resellers do need to sign up to take advantage of this promotion. Sign up here.

Remember that because .PRO is a gTLD, it’s priced using our ‘cost-plus’ pricing model so you’ll need to add your OpenSRS Management fee and the ICANN fee to determine the full cost for .PRO domains.

What is .PRO?

.PRO is an exclusive top-level domain reserved for use exclusively by licensed business and service professionals and entities internationally. All applicants meeting the following qualifications may register a .PRO domain name:

Provides professional services
Admitted to or licensed by a government certification body or jurisdictional licensing entity recognized by a governmental body that regularly verifies the accuracy of its data
In good standing with the licensing authority

You should be aware that registrants of .PRO domains may be asked to provide information related to their professional eligibility.

Documentation and Marketing Help

OpenSRS offers second-level .PRO domains. They can be provisioned and managed through the Domain Manager in OpenSRS Control Panel and via the OpenSRS API. Consult the documentation for more information.

Look at our .PRO information page for more details including a marketing kit containing the .PRO logo and some banner ads for your use in marketing .PRO domains to your customers.

sábado, 10 de diciembre de 2011

Premium domains work.

Posted: 09 Dec 2011 02:54 PM PST

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 component of your hosting service, not a revenue stream. We also had our own doubts about whether people would pay a couple of thousand dollars for a domain name rather than settle for whatever-is-available.com. We had even greater doubts that they would just throw it into an online shopping cart and plunk down a credit card without any real human sales effort.

So we took our own advice and integrated premium domains in the Hover search results in early August.

The design approach was a bit different than anything else we had seen in the industry. Rather than break these domains out into some distinct section of results, we simply included them in one long list of available domains. That seems more consistent with the way we shop for products and services that will ultimately play the same role. “I can have this low-end brand for $15 or that deluxe model for $2,400.”

Check out the search results for sandwich.com (in a new tab, so you can get to the shocking results below!). A roll over the star explains that this is a premium domain. A click goes to a detailed page with a video.

The results are shocking. We have sold 29 premium domains in 4 months at an average price of $1,530.

(I also have to mention that just about anybody reading this post has a better base for premium domains than Hover does. About 20% of Hover customers claim to use their domains for business purposes.)

So to put that in the context of your own business, that is 1 premium domain sold for every 853 new available domains (“regular domains”) registered. Said differently, we have collected $1.79 in gross premium domains revenue for every new available domain registered. With your 10% commission, that would be an extra $.18 in margin for every new domain name you register.

For us, that starts to look like real money.

Plus, our customers are thrilled with their new domain names. And, not surprisingly, almost all of them are renewing these domains far into the future and buying additional services on them. Makes sense. These are heavily invested customers. (I am not claiming causality there, stats geeks. The premium domains do not make them more serious about their businesses. But they certainly get them even more excited about their businesses and make other expenses seem less steep by comparison!)

Finally, this has been mostly passive stuff so far. We have not yet begun to really sell these domains. We are just starting to have fun with database marketing. Imagine looking at every organization name among your base to see if any exact matches are available as premium domains. Imagine just looking at every domain name that has a hyphen in it (a classic compromise) and finding the exact same domain name without the hyphen available as a premium domain. As always, we would love to pull these sort of lists for you so you can reach out to these customers with a killer pitch. (By the way, you do not even need to implement the API to do this.) Please let us know if you are interested in these sorts of efforts.

So, in conclusion, once in a while, we are right. And when we are, I will always tell you about it.

Sell premium domains!

miércoles, 7 de diciembre de 2011

.XXX is Live

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 09:59 AM PST

In the end it was delayed a bit, but General Availability for .XXX happened today at noon EST and the .XXX domain is now fully online.

For any resellers who submitted pre-orders, you should see any successful orders in your account shortly. For those with Sunrise orders outstanding, you’ll see the first wave of successful applications in your account as well.

ICM Registry, which operates the .XXX domain says it will be a few more weeks before some remaining valid Sunrise applications are processed.

Marketing Resources

Our .XXX information page contains marketing help, advice on how to position .XXX domains and some additional information about how .XXX and the Sponsored Community works.

Congratulations to ICM Registry on a very successful launch.

martes, 6 de diciembre de 2011

goMobi v1.5 Now Available

Posted: 05 Dec 2011 11:42 AM PST

Over the weekend, our goMobi mobile website publishing service was updated to v1.5. This new version brings some significant new features and also some really nice enhancements and improvements to existing features.

Here’s a run-down of the most significant changes that came with this release:

New Features:

New design templates to provide more options to style goMobi sites.
Seven new icon sets to choose from.
Integrated shopping cart feature in the Products section including payment integration with PayPal and Google Checkout.
YouTube video embedding.
Reviews/Testimonials integration with social networks like Yelp.
Custom form feature to allow for the collection of customer feedback or questionnaires.
Redirection code generator built in to the Site Builder.

Enhancements:

Enhanced QR code flyer creator.
Improvements to the site templates including additional site colour options.
A new ‘Click to Call’ icon has been added to the site header.
Google Maps now displayed for all locations with improved directions feature on supported devices.
Better WYSIWYG editor including the ability to insert images, links and easily customize text
Additional time-zone support.

More Information

We’ve updated the goMobi marketing page with more information on the features and benefits of goMobi. If you are already selling goMobi, be sure to let your users know about this exciting update to the service. We also have a complete rundown of the updates and new features in PDF format with screenshots and more. Click here to download.

For those not yet offering goMobi mobile websites, this update makes an already powerful and feature-rich tool even better. At just $2.50/month goMobi is a very affordable way to get customers started on the mobile web.

martes, 29 de noviembre de 2011

Preorders for .XXX Now Available

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 07:27 AM PST

General Availability (GA) for .XXX is on December 6th and we’re now taking your .XXX GA pre-orders through OpenSRS. You can get more information on how our pre-order queue works at our .XXX launch information page.

logo for the .XXX domain extension On December 6th at 16:00 UTC the .XXX registry opens up registrations to anyone, just like any other domain extension. That said, there are a couple of things to note regarding .XXX domains. Because this is a sponsored TLD, there are some additional requirements to fulfill to get what the registry calls a resolving domain.

If your customers aren’t part of the Sponsored Community (that is those who provide adult services, or provide services to the adult services community), then they may wish to do a defensive registration. If they have an existing business or personal domain that they don’t want associated with .XXX, then they can register the .XXX version of the domain themselves and get an non-resolving domain.
For those in the Sponsored Community, registrations must be validated by the registry before they will resolve and point to a website. That’s a fairly easy process which is handled by the registry after the domain is registered. Basically the registrant certifies that they are a provider of adult services and gains membership into the Sponsored Community. That results in a .XXX domain that resolves to whatever website specified in the DNS.

Pricing

.XXX domains are priced at $80.18 through OpenSRS. That cost includes an $0.18 fee payable to ICANN for every registration.

Right now .XXX domains are only available through the Reseller Web Interface (RWI) and via the API and orders submitted will go into the pre-order queue. You’ll see the special form on the main page in the RWI (pictured here).

After 16:00 UTC on December 6th, you’ll be able to register .XXX domains like any other domain in the RWI. We’ll add .XXX registration and management to the Domain Manager in the OpenSRS Control Panel in the near future.

miércoles, 23 de noviembre de 2011

Trustwave MadLocks Game Update Available

Posted: 23 Nov 2011 06:01 AM PST

An updated version of the very fun, and quite popular MadLocks game from Trustwave is available beginning today. You can search for it in the iTunes App Store or use the handy link below to go right there in your browser.

MadLocks was originally introduced at HostingCon 2011 and very quickly became a must-have game for iOS device owners at the show. This new version incorporates a bunch of new levels including an OpenSRS level. You can see a screenshot at right for a sense of what the game levels are like. If you enjoy that game with the upset winged creatures and the pigs, then you’ll like MadLocks.

Trustwave SSL Available through OpenSRS

As mentioned, MadLocks was developed by Trustwave. OpenSRS offers a full range of Trustwave SSL products to resellers through our Trust Service. You can learn more about Trustwave SSL here.

Beware that this game can be addictive. Our American resellers might want to wait until Thanksgiving Day on Thursday before they fire it up on their iPhones, iPads and iPods.

Have fun!

domingo, 13 de noviembre de 2011

A Movember that would make Magnum P.I. proud

Posted: 12 Nov 2011 07:14 PM PST

November is Movember month, an annual fundraising event where participants grow moustaches to raise awareness and funds that will help to eventually bring an end to prostate cancer, the #1 cancer affecting men around the globe.

For the youngsters not familiar with Magnum P.I., the actor known as Tom Selleck has played a more recent role as Dr. Richard Burke aka Monica’s boyfriend on the TV show, Friends.

Before Movember provided the necessary cover, Tom Selleck was often to blame whenever a man fooled himself into believing he’d look good with a moustache… a credit formerly given to Burt Reynolds.

Dave Woroch, EVP Sales

This Movember, our very own Dave Woroch is putting his best whiskers forward for the cause and with some coaxing he even let us snap a few photos for this post. We think he bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Tom Skerritt aka “Viper”, in the 1986 hit, Top Gun. But don’t tell him that.

If you have no plans to grow an upper lip follicle forest of your own, why not take a moment and support Viper in his efforts? Visit his Movember fundraising page and make a pledge and learn more: http://mobro.co/ViperDave

Are you participating in Movember?

We want to know! Just leave a comment below with a link to your Movember profile, or send us a tweet to @OpenSRS. As the end of November approaches, we’ll pledge $50 to a few of our favourite ‘staches.

From the Movember website:

Since its humble beginnings in Melbourne Australia, Movember has grown to become a truly global movement inspiring more than 1.1 Million Mo Bros and Mo Sistas to participate, with formal campaigns in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and Ireland. In addition, Movember is aware of Mo Bros and Mo Sistas supporting the campaign and men's health cause across the globe, from Russia to Dubai, Hong Kong to Antarctica, Rio de Janeiro to Mumbai, and everywhere in between.

No matter the country or city, Movember will continue to work to change established habits and attitudes men have about their health, to educate men about the health risks they face, getting them to act on that knowledge thereby increasing the chances of early detection, diagnosis and effective treatment.

In 2010, nearly 119,000 Canadian Mo Bros and Mo Sistas got on board, raising $22.3 million CAD.

Via the moustache, Movember aims to fulfill its vision of having an everlasting impact on the face of men's health by continuing to spark conversation and spread awareness of men's health each year.

martes, 8 de noviembre de 2011

.XXX Landrush Starts Today

Posted: 08 Nov 2011 05:14 AM PST

Today the Landrush phase of the .XXX domain extension launch begins.

Landrush is a limited-time opportunity for those who didn’t qualify for Sunrise A, but want to secure a valued .XXX domain name and avoid the first come, first served risks associated with General Availability.

The Landrush period runs for 18 days, starting on November 8, 2011. During this time, only applicants who are members of the adult Sponsored Community can apply for .XXX domain names. Apart from being a member of the adult Sponsored Community, there are no trademark or pre-ownership rights requirements during this phase of the launch.

There is no first come, first served ranking during Landrush. Once Landrush ends, any .XXX domain names with a single applicant will be automatically allocated. Those .XXX domain names with more than one applicant will proceed to a closed mini-auction between the competing parties only.

For Members of the Sponsored Community

Landrush is designed specifically for members of the adult Sponsored Community who wish to secure premium .XXX domain names. It guarantees members the chance to purchase premium .XXX domain names or be involved in a closed auction to bid for .XXX domain names.

OpenSRS is fully supporting the Landrush phase, along with all other phases of the launch of the .XXX domain extension. We’ll begin accepting Landrush orders via the Reseller Web Interface or the OpenSRS API as soon as the registry opens.

More information about .XXX can be found on our .XXX Launch information page.

The launch continues with General Availability for .XXX on December 6, 2011.

miércoles, 2 de noviembre de 2011

Take Advantage of .ME’s Momentum

Posted: 02 Nov 2011 06:47 AM PDT

.ME is on a roll lately. More and more .ME domains are being registered and used around the Internet, including some very high profile and very visible sites.

There are now more than 550,000 .ME domains registered, and hundreds of .ME domains are found on the Alexa Top 100,000 Sites list. With stats like that, it’s clear that even the most casual of web surfers will run into a .ME domain in their travels around the net.

How .ME Domains are Being Used

The .ME domain extension is a TLD with some obvious and compelling use cases. Here’s just a few examples in different verticals:

.ME for vanity shorteners: WordPress.com has WP.ME for blog posts, Time Magazine is using TI.ME, and Facebook is using FB.ME (and there are many more examples).
Personal profile services: .ME is an obvious choice for a site that provides a personal landing page. You might have seen About.ME, and Flavors.ME which both offer customized personal homepages at .ME domains. Users of either service can also purchase their own .ME domain for an even more personalized experience.
New web services: There are more .ME domains available than in other extensions, so .ME is getting a lot of love with new web services. You might have seen formspring.ME, join.ME, connect.ME and jetpack.ME among others.
Blogs and personal websites: .ME has always been a great choice for a personal site. More and more high profile bloggers and celebrities are choosing .ME domains. Omis.ME, Zee.ME, thecranberries.me and dannybrown.ME are some great examples.

The long and short of it is this: if you aren’t offering .ME domains to your customers, then you aren’t providing them with a great option that will help them find their perfect domain name. Without that perfect domain name, they won’t be looking for additional services like hosting, SSL and email.

On Sale Now!

More information and marketing help to get you started is available here. And remember that we have a great $7.99 promotion on .ME domains that runs through the end of the year.

sábado, 29 de octubre de 2011

.XXX Sunrise Extended

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 11:23 AM PDT

logo for the .XXX domain extension Word has leaked out today that the Sunrise A/B phase of the launch of the .XXX domain extension has been unofficially extended beyond today’s original deadline.

ICM Registry notified OpenSRS and other registrars of this extension earlier this week but asked that we not officially announce the extension. Instead, they suggested that we should simply continue to accept applications until the new closing date of Monday, October 31, 2011.

Now that some other registrars are announcing the extension, we do want to assure you that OpenSRS is also accepting Sunrise applications until Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 16:00 UTC.

While we’re on the subject of .XXX, the Landrush phase of the launch begins on November 8th, 2011. Landrush allows members of the Sponsored Community to apply to secure domains prior to the General Availability phase which happens in early December. More information is available on our .XXX launch Information page.

If you have any questions about the launch of .XXX, don’t hesitate to contact Reseller Support.

martes, 25 de octubre de 2011

Meet our Reseller: Fastline

Posted: 25 Oct 2011 05:56 AM PDT

Thanks to David Lie, CEO of Fastline for taking part in our latest Meet our Resellers feature. Fastline is based in Haugesund, Norway and offers hosting and other Internet services to clients located primarily in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

David and I talked about the business climate in Norway which, like many other countries, is quite competitive. Fastline is doing well, despite the challenges, by offering great technology alongside excellent customer support — a common theme amongst our most successful resellers.

You can read more about Fastline here.

Fastline is representative of the thousands of OpenSRS Resellers in over one hundred countries around the world who look to OpenSRS to provide reliable domain registrations, trust products, email and other services with support and technology they can depend on. Thanks again to David for telling us about his business.

viernes, 7 de octubre de 2011

Even More Choice in SSL with Comodo SSL Domain Validated Certificates

Posted: 06 Oct 2011 10:50 AM PDT

We’ve just added two great new Comodo SSL products to the already extensive lineup of SSL and trust products available through your OpenSRS Reseller account.

These two new Comodo SSL Digital Certificates — Comodo SSL and Comodo SSL Wildcard — are exclusive to OpenSRS at launch.

Both new products are available today through the Trust Manager tab in OpenSRS Control Panel and via the OpenSRS API. Full pricing and product details for these and the rest of the Comodo SSL product line is available on our website.

Powerful, Affordable Protection

Comodo SSL provides powerful, cost-effective security to e-commerce sites. Comodo SSL provides all the same features as the rest of the Comodo SSL line, including 256-bit encryption along with the widely recognized Comodo site seal.
Comodo SSL Wildcard adds wildcard support allowing purchasers to protect unlimited sub-domains with a single SSL certificate.

More Choice

These two new SSL products from Comodo further expand the OpenSRS Trust Service product line-up. With even more choice in brands and products across a range of price points, our Resellers have the ability to satisfy the varied security needs of their customers, from individuals to small businesses and right up to the largest enterprise customers.

miércoles, 5 de octubre de 2011

A Winner in our Trustwave SSL Incentive Program

Posted: 05 Oct 2011 05:51 AM PDT

We have a grand prize winner to announce in our Trustwave SSL Incentive Program.

Congratulations to Jeff Layton of Tech One Computer Solutions in Pennsylvania, USA. Jeff sold a Trustwave SSL certificate during the promotional period and was the lucky winner of an Apple iPad 2 when we did the drawing earlier this week.

Like many OpenSRS Resellers, Jeff runs a computer and web consulting business in his part of the world, providing services to small businesses in his community.

Congratulations to Jeff, and thanks to all of you who participated. Thanks also to Trustwave for providing the prize.

martes, 4 de octubre de 2011

Holiday Hours for Canadian Thanksgiving, October 10 plus 1 more

Holiday Hours for Canadian Thanksgiving, October 10

Posted: 04 Oct 2011 05:11 AM PDT

Shopping for pumpkins in Ottawa (courtesy Wikipedia)

Monday, October 10th, 2011 is Canadian Thanksgiving, which means that our headquarters in Toronto will be operating on holiday hours.

Typical Canadians – Always Trying to Be Different

For trivia buffs, there’s a really good reason why Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October while Americans wait until November (and no, it’s not because we’ll be snowed in – har, har). A quick check of the Book of Knowledge (aka Wikipedia) reveals the following:

“By the end of the 19th Century, Thanksgiving Day was normally celebrated on November 6. However, when World War I ended, the Armistice Day holiday was usually held during the same week. To prevent the two holidays from clashing with one another, in 1957 the Canadian Parliament proclaimed Thanksgiving to be observed on its present date on the second Monday of October.”

So there you have it – we’re just trying to avoid conflict in our usual Canadian way.

Holiday Hours

Now on to the official business: Our Technical Support team continues to be available 24/7 to assist you. Please note that during this closure, there will be:

No orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: .at, .fr, .ch, .li, .dk, .com.mx
No special processing for .ca (registrant transfers, conflicting and municipal registrations) or .eu/.be (redemptions).

Here are the hours by department:

Department	Dates and Hours
Technical Support	Regular hours
Payments	Email support: payments@opensrs.org
Compliance	Closed October 10th (Monday)
Service Bureau	Closed October 10th (Monday)

Our normal hours will resume on Tuesday, October 11. Have a safe and enjoyable holiday!

OpenSRS WHMCS Module Now Available

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 08:55 AM PDT

We’re happy to announce a new officially supported module that integrates OpenSRS into the popular hosting control panel WHMCS. This module is developed by OpenSRS for use by our Resellers.

This first public release of the WHMCS Plugin for OpenSRS includes:

Improved support for ccTLDs
Name Suggestion Tool lookups
Full DNS Management (using the OpenSRS DNS Service)
EPP Lookup support
Domain renewal support
Nameserver registration
Improved Administration Interface
Whois Privacy support including the ability enable and disable WHOIS Privacy
Tech contact locking
Registrant username and password bypass
Increased security
Better authentication error handling/messaging

Available for Download Now

Download the current release (v4.5) in .ZIP format: WHMCS OpenSRS Module v4.5 (574KB).

We’ll continue to refine and improve the plugin and we’d love to hear your feedback on how things work so far. The best place for that is in the OpenSRS Forums, specifically in the Developers/API area. We have an active thread going and we encourage you to try the module out and provide any feedback you might have.

Other 3rd Party Tools

This new WHMCS plugin gives our Resellers more ways to integrate with OpenSRS. We are also working on official plugins for Parallels including PBA, PBAS and Parallels Plesk as we announced at HostingCon 2011.

For a full listing of third-party hosting panels and billing systems that feature OpenSRS support, visit our our 3rd Party Plugins page.

jueves, 22 de diciembre de 2011

Full List with Pricing

More Information

martes, 20 de diciembre de 2011

martes, 13 de diciembre de 2011

What is .PRO?

Documentation and Marketing Help

sábado, 10 de diciembre de 2011

miércoles, 7 de diciembre de 2011

Marketing Resources

martes, 6 de diciembre de 2011

New Features:

Enhancements:

More Information

martes, 29 de noviembre de 2011

Pricing

miércoles, 23 de noviembre de 2011

Trustwave SSL Available through OpenSRS

domingo, 13 de noviembre de 2011

Are you participating in Movember?

From the Movember website:

martes, 8 de noviembre de 2011

For Members of the Sponsored Community

miércoles, 2 de noviembre de 2011

How .ME Domains are Being Used

On Sale Now!

sábado, 29 de octubre de 2011

martes, 25 de octubre de 2011

viernes, 7 de octubre de 2011

Powerful, Affordable Protection

More Choice

miércoles, 5 de octubre de 2011

martes, 4 de octubre de 2011

Typical Canadians – Always Trying to Be Different

Holiday Hours

Here are the hours by department:

Available for Download Now

Other 3rd Party Tools

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