The platform: key to the hosting sector’s future

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The platform: key to the hosting sector’s future Posted: 14 Jan 2013 05:57 AM PST Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of guest posts by Phil Shih, founder of Structure Research. The hosting business is young and has a bright future ahead of it. But the market is getting tougher and big names like Amazon, Google and Microsoft are circling the sector. What can hosters do to fend them off? What are the keys to competing and winning long-term? The best place to find the answer is to look at the sector's success stories. In the cloud we only need to look as far as Amazon Web Services. In dedicated hosting SoftLayer went on a massive run with its automation mantra and in shared hosting we have seen hosters succeed by unlocking the up-sell challenge. What do these three success cases have in common? They were driven by a platform. What is a “platform”? What do we mean by a platform? In a nutshell, a platform is a unified and consolidated infrastructure delivery system built on a single back end (provisioning, management and billing) and consumed by the end user on-demand and in a highly automated fashion. Amazon's platform might not be the easiest thing in the world to use but for technical users it is a highly cohesive set of virtualized infrastructure services available through a single set of APIs. SoftLayer does the same but with a much better user experience and for a much wider range of infrastructure types (dedicated, virtual, cloud). And in shared hosting the providers that have prevailed have grown ARPU by enabling existing customers to easily buy additional services. A good example of a platform in the shared hosting market is Parallels Automation, which is user by hosters to deliver hosting infrastructure and SaaS applications from one back-end with a single front-end user experience. Why Platform? Why is the platform so crucial? Because it is the foundation of the two main ingredients for hosting success: backend efficiency and an enjoyable end user experience. Backend efficiency translates into margins. And margins mean more available resources for investment in marketing, customer support or product development. An enjoyable and efficient user experience means happy customers that renew and buy more services. It also means easier and faster up-sells. All this translates into margin and higher ARPU, which reinforces customer stickiness. Make no mistake. The platform is the key to the sector's future. Hosters have to continually be ruthless about efficiency and margins and the platform ensures that. There are well-resourced challengers encroaching on the sector and hosters will not be able to leave anything to chance. With an increasingly competitive landscape and tightening prices hosters will also have to boldly differentiate. The platform is uniquely positioned to solve that problem by creating user experiences that convince customers to eschew other options. Platforms are not a new thing and they are far from revolutionary. But the sector will need to continually perfect and refine them in order to keep the challengers at bay. For those hosters with messy and legacy-oriented backend systems they should be thinking now about how to integrate them into a platform. The good news for hosters is that there are few fundamental game changes in hosting. The sector moves at a deliberate and evolutionary pace. There is time for hosters to get this right and remain a viable and valuable option for infrastructure service delivery.

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Beware of DNS services “invoices”

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Beware of DNS services “invoices” Posted: 09 Jan 2013 10:37 AM PST A company by the name of DNS Services Corporation is apparently sending out letters to domain registrants that look very much like an invoice for DNS services. They are likely scraping public WHOIS records to get the names and addresses of registrants to do this. Like the Domain Registry of America (DROA) and Domain Registry of Canada (DROC), DNS Services seems to think it’s perfectly reasonable and ethical to get their customers through these types of practices. A scan of the letter that they send out is shown below (click it to see a hi-res version). We’ve taken out any personal info, but you can see it has been made to look very much like an invoice, and the text indicating it isn’t an invoice is very easy to miss. There are two great ways to protect your customers from getting letters like these. Use Contact Privacy. We provide it for free on all domain registrations (where the registry allows it). With Contact Privacy info shown in the public WHOIS, we’ll end up getting these letters instead of your customers. We already get a ton of them from the Domain Registry of Canada which we properly dispose of for recycling. Educate your customers. Let them know about these types of practices and explain that they should simply discard the letters, or get in touch with you if they have any doubts about any payments or invoices they receive. Your customers will very much appreciate this help – it’s a great part of the service you provide to them. If you or your customers run into any other examples of these types of practices, feel free to send them our way through the Community Forums at our Help & Support portal, or email Reseller Support. We’ll let your fellow resellers know so we can reduce the effectiveness of these types of mailings and hopefully make the whole practice go away. Thanks to very much to Nancy from Aardvark & Associates for bringing this to our attention and shame on DNS Services for using this tactic.

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Q1 2013 Domain Promotions

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Q1 2013 Domain Promotions Posted: 03 Jan 2013 07:33 AM PST 2013 is here, and that means new domain promotions to tell you about. We’re streamlining our promotions program this year to make things easier for you. We’ll be announcing promotions quarterly, and each promotion will usually run the duration of that quarter. We’ll do our best get the word out about upcoming promotions a few weeks before the start of the next quarter (sometimes we get the news from our registry partners at the last minute). Q1 2013 Promotions We’re running promotions on .INFO, .MOBI, .PRO, .CO and .ME this quarter. Like most of our promotions, you must sign up to qualify for the discounts. We pay out in the form of a rebate, deposited into your Reseller account at the beginning of the month for transactions processed in the previous month. We ask that you sign up for each promotion separately because each promotion has different terms and conditions as set out by the registry operator. Usually, that means you agree to do some promotion of domain that is on sale. That can take the form of a banner ad on your homepage, an email blast, a blog post, or even just highlighting the specific extension in your search results. Visit the domain promotions page to see all the Q1 2013 promotions and to sign up for those you wish to participate in. Happy selling!

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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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