Holiday Hours for Good Friday, April 6th, 2012

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Holiday Hours for Good Friday, April 6th, 2012 Posted: 30 Mar 2012 12:22 PM PDT Our Toronto office will be closed on Friday, April 6, 2012, for Good Friday. While most OpenSRS staff will be off that day, Reseller Support will continue to be available 24/7 to assist you. Here are the hours by department: Department Dates and Hours Technical Support Regular hours Payments Email support: payments@opensrs.org Compliance Closed Apr. 6 Service Bureau Closed Apr. 6 Please note that during this closure, there will be no orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: (.at, .ch, .li, .dk, .com.mx).

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Change is Coming, Are You Informed?

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Change is Coming, Are You Informed? Posted: 27 Mar 2012 12:49 PM PDT Last week at WHD.global, Thorsten Einig, our Managing Director for Europe, gave a presentation titled, ”Change Means Opportunity – Key Domain Trends for Hosters in 2012″. In the session, Thorsten mapped out some of the trends and changes coming to the domain industry in 2012, and provided some key insights and ideas for hosting companies looking to take advantage. 2012 is going to be a year of big change in our industry. The introduction of new generic Top-level Domains will have major impacts on everyone across the Internet, including hosters. Make sure you are well informed about what’s going on, and armed with a plan so you’ll be able to find the opportunity in a time of change. Below you’ll find Thorsten’s slides from the session. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away in the comments – we’re happy to share our knowledge and insights gleaned from 15 years at the forefront of the domains industry.

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WHD.global Session Notes – “Hosting after Megaupload.com: Risks, Opportunities and Chances”

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WHD.global Session Notes – “Hosting after Megaupload.com: Risks, Opportunities and Chances” Posted: 21 Mar 2012 08:26 AM PDT Many of us OpenSRSers are in Rust, Germany this week for the WHD.global show. To give you a flavour of what this conference is all about, I’ve attended a few sessions and will provide some notes here. Today I took in a very interesting session at WHD.global talking about the recent Megaupload case and the impacts on hosting companies. The presenter was David Snead, an American attorney specializing in Internet business law and advice. David took some time to explain the Megaupload case, and the indictment, specifically around what Megaupload is alleged to have done. You can read a very good article about the case from the New York Times, so I won’t go into details here. David summarized the key learnings for hosting companies as it pertains to being the hosting providers for businesses like Megaupload.com. It’s very important, obviously, for hosters to ensure they are properly protected from any legal implications that might come as a result of being the provider to a company like Megaupload.com. There are a number of key points for hosters: Understand jurisdiction: David points out that governments often try to extend jurisdiction outside traditional borders. In the case of Megaupload, the servers were in the USA, data travelled through other countries and employees of the company were found in seven different countries. Boot bad users: David suggests that hosters not be shy about firing bad customers. Once the hoster is aware that a customer is doing something that is outside of what the law allows (or even close), it’s important that the hoster act to remove that customer, or potentially face legal issues themselves. Have Terms of Service that work: the basis of being able to ensure customers are not participating in illegal activities is to have an effective and functional terms of service that is enforceable. Understand culture and how that plays into enforcement: David suggests that it is critical to understand the cultural customs and laws outside of the hoster’s own country and in any areas where the hosting company might reach. That means they need to be aware of things like gambling customs in certain countries and US states, anti-government and free-speech issues in some places, and of course intellectual property and copyright issues in many countries. As you can see, there is a lot to consider here for hosters. The most important thing is that hosting companies make themselves aware of the current situation as it pertains to legal issues, and also that they seek out legal help and advice when required.

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Exciting New Developments in ccTLDs

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Exciting New Developments in ccTLDs Posted: 16 Mar 2012 01:45 AM PDT It's been a busy few months for ccTLDs at OpenSRS. With so much happening, we thought it would be a good time to provide an update on all the good news. .FR domains: fully automated and available to EU residents One of the fastest-growing ccTLDs in our offering over the past several months has been .FR, the ccTLD for France. As a result, we have just wrapped up a major overhaul of our integration that will make the extension much easier to sell. A number of improvements are now live, including: Full provisioning automation: Fulfillment time for .FR orders no longer takes several business days. Instead, names are registered immediately. Automated data collection: When placing an order, it is no longer necessary to provide relevant additional information in the order notes. Instead, these are now all added via the order form directly. Expanded registrant eligibility: now any person or company based in the .European Union can register a .FR name, making it a viable extension for any person or business in Europe. These, along with some additional changes to .FR, are now live both in the test and live environments. Please be sure to consult our documentation for additional information. Now live: dozens of new extensions that are easy to integrate Late last year we announced the availability of many new ccTLDs via our acquisition of EPAG Domainservices GmbH. Since the announcement, we've been hard at work iterating on our offering and adding new features, including: More automated ccTLDs, more information We've refactored many of the extensions we rolled out last year to no longer be asynchronous. Instead, the vast majority of our extensions now return immediate responses, instead of having to regularly check an order's status. You can find out which extensions are fully automated using our new, handy ccTLD guide. Even more extensions: .TW, .AG, .CO.IM Taiwan, Antigua and Barbuda, and .CO.IM (a new addition to the several extensions we offer for the Isle of Man) are all new to OpenSRS this month. Like the other dozens of extensions we've introduced thus far, there are no additional data requirements. Positioning a litany of ccTLDs With the massive expansion of our ccTLD portfolio beginning late last year, we've now introduced 113 new second and third-level extensions – all from the same interface and API. We realize all these extensions aren't for everyone, so here's a look at how we recommend you approach them both internally and to your customers. New European markets The introduction of our new ccTLDs led to a number of new, popular European extensions. We recommend taking a look at .PL (Poland), .PT (Portugal), and .UA (Ukraine) at the very least. The Americas One of the regions we get asked to expand upon most these days is Central and South America. We're pleased to now carry several popular extensions from the region, including .PE (Peru), .PR (Puerto Rico), and .UY (Uruguay). "Specialty" extensions Historically, we've categorized extensions like .CO, .ME and .TV as "specialty" extensions – ones that have purposes beyond only serving their regional markets because of their unique branding and usage abilities. We've now added several names which we believe fit into this category, as they have great potential as unique extensions and do not have any additional residency or data requirements: .IM (Isle of Man), .SO (Somalia), .LA (Laos), .AM (Armenia), .FM (Micronesia). Other new regions Several other regions and extensions also feature prominently in our list of ccTLDs, including .JP (Japan), .MY (Malaysia), .IL (Israel), .ZA (South Africa) and .NU (Niue). All of these have already proven popular among OpenSRS resellers and are worth checking out. You can see a full list of all our new extensions by geographic region here. Although there have been a lot of developments regarding ccTLDs recently, we believe this is only the tip of the iceberg! Keep an eye on this blog throughout the year as we continue to add more extensions to OpenSRS.

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Facebook: a friend or foe to hosters?

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Facebook: a friend or foe to hosters? Posted: 06 Mar 2012 05:27 AM PST Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of guest posts by Phil Shih, founder of Structure Research. There is little doubt that Facebook has at least in some way become a competitive threat to hosting companies. People use Facebook as both a publishing and communication medium and it has become central to their daily lives. Even just a few years ago people may have chosen to publish a blog or personal website. Or they may have signed up for an account on Flickr and shared their photos there. In some cases – like Flickr – they would have used a free service. But in many cases they would have spent money on a domain name and some Web hosting. Fast-forward to 2012 and its clear more people are opting to use Facebook as a replacement for hosting a Web site. The larger consumer market, as a result, has become much more difficult to target. But individuals are not the only demographic using Facebook. Businesses have been drawn to the power of the social network and have launched company pages there. Facebook has so much momentum we are even beginning to see the facebook.com/companywebsite URL more often than the traditional Web address in advertisements. With the amount of traffic going to Facebook it is simply good business to have a presence there. Ignoring Facebook is tantamount to shutting a business off from a significant piece of the market. Will Facebook replace the traditional domain + website model? So is Facebook going to do the same in the business market? Is it going to replace traditional Web sites and further impact the hosting business? The short answer is no and this is at the heart of why we believe that Facebook is actually more a friend than foe. That is right. The social network that is stealing business away from you is still a friend to be embraced. Let me explain. The notion of Web presence has changed. It is not just about a Web site anymore. Web presence is multi-faceted. It is about a Web site, a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. People go to all three places and in no particular order. This does not mean that standard Web presence is losing value. Far from it. In fact, all three are important and they complement rather than replace each other. But in the business arena Facebook pages are reinforcing the value of the Web site rather than replacing them. They are driving traffic to each other and extending a company's reach to a wider audience and with greater speed. At the end of the day the real issue is how to integrate all three and find synergies between them. Opportunities for hosters And this is where hosters can jump in. Hosting is no longer just about providing a domain name and space on a server. It is about helping customers solve problems in the realm of Internet technology. With Facebook and Twitter, online presence has become much more complicated and that is great news for hosters. They have an opportunity to step in and add value by sorting through and making sense of that complexity. Hosters can build out social media Web presence for customers. They can help set up services where they create and manage Facebook pages and align content and messaging with the traditional Web site (that is of course still hosted with them!). Over time we fully expect hosters to take advantage of APIs and build automated tools for managing multiple Web presences from a single platform – owned and monetized by the hoster. There is no denying that Facebook is in some ways a competitive threat. But the good news is hosters can offset the negative impact by moving up-market and focusing on the business space where Facebook is a just another part of the complexity that is the modern Web presence. Bring Facebook in and make it a part of the hosting value chain and you will see how it can be turned from a foe to a friend.

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