Archive for: November, 2007

Service Outage Update

Update Wednesday, November 21, 2007 09:54a.m. ET: Parked Pages has been online since the early morning. We are happy to report that all services are online. Thank you for your patience.

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Update at 4:50 p.m. ET:The operations team report that Parked Pages is now intermittently unavailable; they continue to investigate this. We can, however, advise that all other services remain fully online. We’ll keep you updated via System Status regarding Parked Pages.

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Update at 1:50 p.m. ET: Our Operations team has got the traffic hitting our load balancers under control. We’re back online and service has been restored to OpenSRS Domain Provisioning and Management, OpenHRS, CGPRO OpenSRS Email, Blogware, Website Builder, Digital Certificates, Managed DNS Service and WHOIS. Parked Pages remains offline. We’re continuing to monitor our services, analyze and block traffic as required. We’ll keep you updated via System Status and here on the blog.

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UPDATE at 12:57 p.m. ET: Our network operations team has established that our load balancers are experiencing significantly higher than normal traffic levels. Working with our data colocation vendor, the team is currently searching for the source of this traffic. We have put some blocks in place and are continuing to analyze and monitor this traffic so that we can get our services back online.

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Unfortunately, a number of our services are offline including: OpenSRS Domain Provisioning and Management, OpenHRS, CGPRO OpenSRS Email, Blogware, Website Builder, Digital Certificates, Managed DNS Service, Parked Pages, and WHOIS.

Services not affected are the Email Defense Service, the new Tucows Email Service and our ticketing system.

Domain names continue to resolve and all email messages are being queued. No mail will be lost – we’ll deliver it as soon as we resolve this issue.

While we are experiencing higher than normal call volumes, our Support teams are available to take your calls and emails. The ticket number for this issue is 10794.

As our Operations team works to resolve this issue, we’ll keep our System Status page updated, and also keep you posted with updates here on our blog.

We apologize for any inconvenience this outage is causing to you and your customers.

Hours for U.S. Thanksgiving Thursday, November 22nd

Tucows headquarters is in Toronto, Canada. So, while our American friends to the south are digging into Thanksgiving feasts, watching giant balloons make their way through New York City, enjoying football and officially kicking off the Christmas shopping season, we’ll be open for business as usual.

Tucows Reseller support, Platypus support, Payments, Sales and Compliance will all be operating on regular hours on Thursday and Friday.

Have a safe and enjoyable holiday!

p.s. thanks to Flickr user ?ellie? for the photo and for releasing it under a Creative Commons License.

A million ways to say thanks

It’s been a busy year for our domain name business. We’ve introduced our Premium Domains service, dropped our prices, built a more transparent billing structure and made many of our domain name features – including DNS and WHOIS Privacy – completely free.

Today, we’re adding another big announcement to the pile: we’re going to share over $1 million in revenues with resellers over the next 12 months. We’ll be doing this through our Parked Pages and Expired Domains programs, both of which are designed to help our resellers make more money from unused and expiring domain names.

Under the terms of both these programs, we split all net advertising revenue 50-50 with our resellers. And if, at a later date, we sell one of these names through our Premium Domains service, we’ll share 10% of net revenue with the original reseller as well.

So why did we decide to do this? After all, we could have simply kept the money; in fact, many registrars do. Our philosophy, though, is a little different – we think customers should be rewarded for choosing to sell and register names with Tucows. One million dollars, we think, is one very nice way to say “thank you.”

You can read our full announcement here.

Bill Sweetman talks domains

Bill Sweetman, Tucows General Manager, Domain Portfolio is out in Vancouver this week for a marketing conference known as “DM Day.” The DM stands for direct marketing, and the conference is presented by the British Columbia Association of Internet Marketers. Bill was asked to talk domains and gave a well-received presentation titled, “Domain Name Karate: The ‘ancient’ art of maximizing and defending your domain names.”

Warren Frey of Techvibes was there and gives a nice summary of Bill’s talk on the Techvibes blog. You can read about it here.

And while I’m on the topic of Bill and domain names, our man Sweetman was down at Traffic in Miami a few weeks back and talked to a few of the movers and shakers in the domain industry. You can listen to those interviews by way of his podcast series, “Marketing Martini.” Not surprisingly, those can be found at http://www.marketingmartini.com/. So far Bill’s posted chats with Monte Cahn, founder and CEO of Moniker, Phil Corwin, legal counsel to the Internet Commerce Association and Peter Lamson of NameMedia.

You can listen right on the website, or subscribe to Bill’s podcast series in iTunes via this link.

ICANN Los Angeles Recap

Most people would jump on the opportunity to spend 10 days in Los Angeles. Sun, surf and stars – it doesn’t get any better.

Of course, most people aren’t involved in ICANN. 10 days with no sunlight and all of our surfing was done on the web.

A typical ICANN meeting starts out with the pre-meeting activity. This time, I flew down a couple of days ahead of the pre-meetings for some pre-pre-meetings to make sure that the pre-meetings went smoothly. Confused yet? Me too and I’ve been doing this for eight years.

The big item on the agenda this past week was the issue of Whois. The problem that we face is that ICANN’s requirement to publish personal contact information on the web via Whois contradicts privacy laws in many countries. We’ve been actively involved in trying to find a compromise between the anti-privacy crowd who wants to continue with Whois in its current form regardless of what the law says and the pro-privacy folks on the other hand that are looking for exemptions that would allow regular people to opt-out of having their data publicly accessible. Not all of their data, just their phone number and email addresses.

The anti-privacy folks (mostly the same people that brought you the RIAA and other over-zealous intellectual property organizations) don’t like this approach because they believe that this will make it easier for normal folks to infringe on their intellectual property rights. I won’t go into the details of their arguments, but suffice to say that there is very little in the way of “intellect” in their opposition.

I personally spent four days in various back-room meetings trying to negotiate a compromise that would work for everyone. At one point, I had an explicit agreement from the intellectual property representatives, but when the chips hit the table, they “forgot” that we had made a deal. Serves me right, I should have had them sign something. Never do a handshake deal with a lawyer from Hollywood.

I won’t go into all of the gory details around Whois, there are a bazillion press reports on the subject. Dvorak called me “stupid”, elsewhere I was referred to as “emotional” and that I was “overreacting”. Very few of the reports actually got the details of the story right – most of them were heavily influenced by the highly-organized lobby against our compromises. Never underestimate the capabilities of a ticked off intellectual property lawyer.

Nick Jesdanun and Burke Hansen wrote my two favorite stories, although what Burke thought was an attempt at a protest was actually an aborted attempt to sneak out to the washroom.

The next big issues on the ICANN policy agenda relate to domain tasting and “front-running”. There will also be some additional work in the area of domain transfers. We will continue to take a leadership role on these issues as we have on other ICANN issues in the past. It is an important organization that makes important decisions related to the future of the internet and we believe it is critical for us to make sure that we look out for the interests of our business and those of our resellers in this forum.

This meeting also marked the end of Vint Cerf’s term as Chairman of the Board. At a gala event at Sony Studios, everyone from Al Gore to Darth Vader participated in sending Vint off in style with the kind of words and more than just a touch of Hollywood flourish.

Vint will be replaced with Peter Dengate-Thrush, a long time ICANN participant with roots in the ccTLD community. Tucows completely supports Peter and we strongly believe that he will have a positive effect on ICANN and its future direction. It is definitely worth noting that Peter was one of the few ICANN directors that voted against allowing Verisign the unchecked capability to increase domain name registration prices.

The next ICANN meeting will be held in New Delhi this coming February. Tucows will of course be there – our 28th consecutive meeting. Whew!

(photo’s by AP and Joi Ito)

Archive for: November, 2007

Service Outage Update

Hours for U.S. Thanksgiving Thursday, November 22nd

A million ways to say thanks

Bill Sweetman talks domains

ICANN Los Angeles Recap

Become a Reseller

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