A Review of 2012 at OpenSRS

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A Review of 2012 at OpenSRS Posted: 19 Dec 2012 12:56 PM PST It has been a busy year at OpenSRS, so I thought I’d take the time to look back at some of the highlights. ccTLDs We bought epag in 2011, helping us add over 100 new second and third-level extensions to our portfolio. But doing so took plenty of development and time incorporating them into OpenSRS, making it easier for you to do business around the globe all from a single platform. And we’re not done yet! Working Better with Third-Party Systems We joined the Parallels Domain Name Network early in the year so resellers can signup to sell OpenSRS directly within Parallels products. Plus we’ve been testing updated and more robust plugins for WHMCS. goMobi Updates We’ve had goMobi available for a couple years now, but I think you’d agree some great new features were rolled out this year to make it worth a mention. Some of the new features included: custom icons, live previews, more sharing options, more site templates, custom background images, plus many more. We’ve seen incredible interest in this product, and can’t wait to see the new sites you build with it. Ting Offers We rolled out a revenue sharing Offer for Ting, the Tucows mobile phone MVNO in the US. While still new and relatively small, we’re very excited about the growth in Ting and working with our resellers to expand its reach. And for resellers who’d like to try before recommending Ting, we launched trial program called Taste of Ting. Webmail 5.6  Our hosted email product got a nice facelift on the front-end and some much needed upgrades in the backend. Although email suffered some unfortunate outages this year, we’ve removed the main source of the problem from our infrastructure. 2013 should be much smoother… Super Low EV Pricing and UC/SAN Certs In September we cut pricing on Extended Validation certificates across the board to be industry leading; and boy have you seized the opportunity. Making the jump from OV to EV certs for the better features is now a much smaller price gap; which is a great value proposition you can make to your customers. Perhaps 2013 will be the year DV certs go away… Help & Support Upgrades Part of being “Reseller Friendly” is providing a great customer support experience. To help us achieve this for you each we’ve begun rolling out a few ‘upgrades.’ First, the new support site which brings together in one place our announcements, knowledge bases and forums; plus a robust ticketing system. We’ve also begun asking for feedback after each ticket is resolved and closed; not only telling us how we’re doing but giving insights into how we can improve going forward. We’re delighted to have you as part of the OpenSRS ecosystem; and we’re looking forward to surprising and delighting you in 2013.

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Holiday Hours from December 25, 2012 – January 2, 2013

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Holiday Hours from December 25, 2012 – January 2, 2013 Posted: 17 Dec 2012 08:50 AM PST Happy Holidays to you and yours from the OpenSRS team! We’ll be taking some time over the next week to enjoy the holidays with our families and friends. Here’s our holiday hours by department. Hours by department: Department Dates and Hours Reseller Support No phone, email or live chat support from 5pm on December 24 until 8am on December 26 and from 5pm on December 31 until 8am on January 2. Payments Closed on December 25 and 26 and January 1, with reduced staffing on the remaining days. Compliance Closed December 25 through January 1 inclusive. Service Bureau (for transactions requiring manual processing) Closed on December 25 and 26 and January 1 with reduced staffing on the remaining days. Our normal hours will resume on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013. Best wishes for a prosperous 2013!

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Change to Ting end user offers in January

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Change to Ting end user offers in January Posted: 13 Dec 2012 11:13 AM PST I want to let our US resellers know about a change we are making to your Ting promo codes. Starting on Tuesday, January 15, 2013, all codes that currently offer $50 discounts to end users will now be offering a $25 discount. The 25% revenue shares or $50 bounties to resellers associated with these offers will remain the same. Please be sure to revise all communications that promote the $50 by then. Also feel free to let your customer know they should “act now” to get a deal they will not be able to get anywhere on January 15. The simple explanation, after almost a year of analysis on the business, is that $50 is just a bit too much to maintain the margins we (all) need on a customer and that $50 now seems unnecessarily generous for a service that is saving even the smallest businesses hundreds of dollars a year. Of course, the most important thing is that you will still have the best possible offer a customer can find anywhere. To be clear, we will be reducing absolutely any promotions out there to $25 as well. Many of you have $75 service credits, with no associated revenue share or bounty, that we offered you to sign up yourselves and your employees. Those can still be used discreetly. Along with this change, all codes that currently offer $25 discounts to end users along with either 30% revenue shares or $75 bounties will be disabled. These have not been used much since, presumably, most of you only wanted the very best offer you could get for your customers. And with the best offer coming down now, there really isn’t room for these any longer. Also, starting today, if you have not already generated a $50 discount code, you will not be able to generate a new one. Again, if you already have these codes, they will continue to offer a $50 discount until January 15. But we figured we would not make offers available anymore that are soon to be extinct. We know it is never easy to offer the customer less. We hope this does not create disappointment. We continue to focus on crafting an offering that: - Extends significant value to your customers. - Provides healthy, sustainable margins to you. We remain confident that Ting does both. As always, we appreciate any feedback or ideas.

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Making Reseller Support Better plus 1 more

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Making Reseller Support Better Posted: 10 Dec 2012 06:19 AM PST We’re working on making Reseller Support better. That’s pretty easy to say, right? I know I’ve said it to resellers myself when I’ve talked to some of you at trade shows, or on the phone. It’s also pretty easy for you to respond with, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” or something similar. That’s probably a fair response. I know where you are coming from. We know where you are coming from. What “Better” Means “Better” is a neat little word. As a writer, I love to think about words and “better” is one that has a lot of nuance. Better doesn’t necessarily mean awesome. It can mean awesome – as in, “Remember that great dinner we had last week? This one was better.” But “better” can also mean terrible – as in, “An expired can of tuna on stale crackers for dinner is better than nothing.” One thing that “better” implies is that there’s a comparison going on. In the case of Reseller Support, it’s this – “That interaction I just had with Reseller Support was better than the last one I had.’ We’re working right now so that when you mark an issue as solved, you’ll say to yourself, “Yup, that was better again!” In other words, we’re improving things with a recognition that our work will never be done, and that we can always “do better”. You are the best judge of what “better” means right now. Maybe for you right now it’s “okay” or “alright” (or even “terrible”). Eventually “better” will mean great and then a little bit later on, “better” will mean awesome. We’ll get there in time. Measuring Our Progress In order to know whether we are getting better, we need to be able to measure ourselves against some standard. We implemented Transactional Net Promoter Score surveys last week as one way to measure whether we’re getting better over time. Read more about that here. We’re also quantifying some standards for Support so that we are able to easily measure our progress. You deserve to know what those standards are so that you know what to expect, and so you can hold us responsible if we fail to meet them. Here are the objectives we’ve set for Reseller Support: Phone support: Call 1-888-511-7284 (U.S. and Canada) or +800 371 69922 (International) between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST (13:00 and 23:00 UTC) and a live person who is able to help you will pick up the phone within 20 seconds. Outside of those hours, you can call and leave a voicemail message, or you can email help@opensrs.com. Incoming voicemail and email is monitored 24/7 and critical issues will be addressed as required. Email support: We will answer your email support request within 24 hours of receiving it (often much more quickly). You can email help@opensrs.com anytime and the 24 hour clock starts when we get it, no matter the time of day. Support staff will respond to incoming support requests between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST (13:00 and 23:00 UTC). Outside of those hours, incoming email is monitored 24/7 and critical issues will be addressed as required. Chat support: Live, online chat is available between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST (13:00 and 23:00 UTC) at http://opensrs.com/manage. A live person will respond to your chat request within 20 seconds. Those objectives are measurable and clear. We either meet or exceed those standards, or we don’t. If we don’t, we’ll address the reasons why so that we can again consistently meet and improve on them. More importantly, we think that making this commitment is just our starting point. Our intention is to provide you with the best service in the industry. Not just better support. The best. And every time we make it “better”, it is just a next step to best. We want to share more with you That’s a lot to digest in a blog post. We want to tell you more, and get into some of the details and thinking around what’s happening with Reseller Support. We’re inviting you to attend the webinar we’re hosting on Tuesday, December 11 at 11:00 a.m. EST (16:00 UTC) to get some more in-depth information about what we’re doing to make Reseller Support better. It will be an open and honest discussion about Reseller Support with a view to the future described above. We hope you can attend and even if you can’t view it live, register for the event anyways and you’ll automatically get the reminders and a follow-up email with the details on where the recorded version can be viewed. You can register here.

goMobi v1.8 to be released on December 17, 2012 Posted: 10 Dec 2012 04:15 AM PST On December 17, 2012, goMobi plans to release v.18 of the goMobi mobile website service. Like all goMobi releases, there’s nothing you need to do as a reseller or goMobi customer. New features will automatically show up for all users on the release date as goMobi updates the application on its servers. New Features Version 1.8 brings a long list of new features including a new Site Navigation Menu bar, Google+ integration, the ability to hide features from the homepage and more. Additionally, this release addresses EU Cookie regulations. More information More information and a rundown of specific changes that are part of this goMobi release can be found in the OpenSRS Help & Support site.

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Announcing Taste of Ting

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Announcing Taste of Ting Posted: 05 Dec 2012 10:43 AM PST One of the biggest requests we’ve heard from potential Ting resellers is an interest in trying out Ting before recommending it to clients. We think that’s a great idea! We now have 10 HTC EVO 4G LTE phones to ship out for a 30-day trial. We’re even including a $25 service credit to help you get started and to test out the network in your area. Plus, you’ll see how great the Ting user experience is, from the online tools to the help forums to the customer support. To get started, click on over to www.opensrs.com/tasteofting to sign up. We’ll let you know once a device is ready. Update: the first batch of devices will be going out next week.

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Verisign and the US Department of Commerce – Our Take

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Verisign and the US Department of Commerce – Our Take Posted: 30 Nov 2012 12:16 PM PST This morning, it was announced that Verisign and the US Department of Commerce had come to an agreement that allows Verisign to continue to operate the .com domain for another six years. What was missing from that contract was the hot topic of conversation this morning – Verisign no longer has the right to four price increases of 7% over the term of the agreement. In other words, .com domains will likely remain prices at $7.85 until November, 2018 when the new agreement comes up for renewal again. Verisign does have the right to increase prices if they can prove “extraordinary” expense resulting from and attack or threat of attack on the security or stability of the DNS. Any price increase would require Verisign to prove that the increase served the public interest before the Department of Commerce would approve. Verisign could also seek a price increase if it could prove that market conditions no longer warranted the new restrictions that are put in place with this agreement. Again, that would require Department of Commerce approval. Tucows’ Take Elliot Noss, Tucows President and CEO, says that the new agreement between the Department of Commerce and Verisign “rights a wrong in the last contract.” Tucows has been very outspoken about .com pricing, and we were clear at the time of the last renewal that we did not believe Verisign should have been given the right to price increases. It’s good news for registrants and the Internet as a whole. Elliot also suggests that the new contract could even turn out to be good for Verisign going forward. The previous contract provided them with an opportunity to raise prices. As a public company with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value, Elliot notes that investors, who often think in the short term, would put immense pressure on Verisign to exercise those price increases. He goes on to suggest that having the option to raise prices four times in the next six years may have turned into a competitive disadvantage for Verisign given the new gTLDs coming online within the next 12 to 18 months. By not having price increases available to them as a way to grow revenues, Verisign is will be driven to more efficiency and innovation. Certainly, the conference call Verisign hosted this morning featured a lot of talk of innovation, patents, and the addition of new value-added and revenue generating services like Distributed Denial of Service attack protection. One thing is for sure, and perhaps this is the most important part of the contract extension announcement: Verisign continuing to be the operator of the .com extension for the next six years is great news for everyone. Verisign has proven itself to be an exceptionally good operator of the root. From a technology and service perspective, .com is clearly in good hands. You can read the US Department of Commerce statement here. [cross posted from the Tucows blog]

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