Which Site Seal do People Trust the Most? (2013 Survey Results)

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Which Site Seal do People Trust the Most? (2013 Survey Results) Posted: 22 Jan 2013 08:55 AM PST We just found some interesting third-party research from the Baymard Institute regarding consumer’s perceptions of SSL and Trust seals. The survey, from January 2013, specifically focused in on e-commerce websites and gave the following results, showing Trust seals outpacing all of the SSL seals with the exception of Norton. Its an interesting article and I recommend clicking through to read more about the results and some of the implications. Including their suggestion sites show multiple seals to increase perceived site security; while also of course improving site security.

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The Channel Partners Conference & Expo

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The Channel Partners Conference & Expo Posted: 21 Jan 2013 06:52 AM PST We are checking out a new industry show this year that we think could be relevant to a lot of you. 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 like us with products and services to offer come to meet companies like you with end user relationships to offer. This event is focused on the telecom industry. We will be talking mostly about Ting and a bit about our email service. If you offer mobile, VOIP and other telephony solutions to your business customers, this could be chance to learn a bit about the latest trends and products and connect with some of the providers. If you have not ventured into this world much, it is a chance to gauge the opportunity. It sounds like it will be well attended. We would love to see some of you there. You can register here. Use our code, exh13, for a free pass to the Expo Hall or $50 off the Conference and Expo Pass.

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Ting Offers: Updated for BYOSD

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Ting Offers: Updated for BYOSD Posted: 15 Jan 2013 01:19 PM PST Great news! We’ve updated the backend of Ting Offers to now include customers who bring their own Sprint device to Ting; including phones purchased through Glyde. Previously customers who chose those options didn’t receive an account credit and the resellers who referred them didn’t receive credit for the account. As of Monday, we’ve updated the Offers system to support those customers who will now receive a $25 service credit on their account and resellers will receive their referral credit in the same fashion as new customers. In regards to the end-user experience for BYOD; we know it still needs some work to provide a cleaner and clearer path for customers. Rest assured, if a user clicks through your URL to get the cookie, and then visits ting.com/byod, the end user will get a $25 credit and the reseller is assigned to that user for their bounty or revenue share. We are actively working to provide the end user a clearer path for this process so they know they’re getting the discount throughout the process. Just a reminder the Ting offers have changed as well today, as we’ve mentioned before. Please make sure you’ve updated your communications to reflect the changes. As we continue to develop Ting and the Offers plan for resellers, please continue to send in your feedback.

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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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