Meet the Resellers: Korax
By: OpenSRS Team on January 27th, 2009
Posted in: Partners and Resellers
Tags: Meet the Resellers
Comments:
0
This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Alex Bulan from Toronto hosting stalwart Korax.
James McNally (JM): How long has Korax been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers? Any interesting stories from your company’s history?
Alex Bulan (AB): Korax provides web hosting, dedicated servers, and domain registration services to a wide array of customers. Today, our clients range from small to mid-sized businesses to multinational enterprises, government, police services, and non-profits. However, we originally started in 1997 as a dialup Internet access provider catering to Unix shell users. There were many ISPs offering SLIP and PPP access in Toronto at the time, but very few of them offered a Unix shell environment, let alone a decent one. After the purchase and subsequent shutdown of one of Toronto’s oldest commercial ISPs, which had a strong community of Unix users, we decided to try to fill that void. Many of those users came over to us, and some of them are still with us now, 12 years later.
JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?
AB: It all began in 1988 with a 1200 baud modem…which got me into the world of BBSes, which led to running my own BBS for a number of years. As I began learning about the Internet in the early 1990s, I became passionately interested in the technology that made it work. Later, during the mid-90s, I worked for a few ISPs alongside Louis Steiner, now my business partner. It was then that both Louis and I realized our respective skills complemented each other perfectly, and we decided to quit our jobs and start Korax.
JM: I noticed some of the green initiatives mentioned on your site. Feel free to tell me more about why and how you’re greening your business.
AB: From our earliest beginnings, our efforts have always been focused not only on providing reliable, quality service, but also on running a highly efficient operation. To that end, we have made every effort to minimize waste, both in our internal operations and in our dealings with our clients and vendors. On the technological front, we run cool, energy-efficient hardware, and consolidate server roles whenever it makes sense to do so. Thanks to ever-increasing hardware and software capabilities, we can reduce our environmental footprint without compromising on reliability. And perhaps most significantly, through the use of VoIP, our staff are now able to work wherever they happen to be located, and avoid the daily commute — saving time, money, the environment, and their sanity.
JM: I understand you’ve been with OpenSRS since 2000. Can you describe what the hosting business was like way back then?
AB: I might be in the minority of people who think so, but the hosting business hasn’t changed much since then. Prices have come down and numbers (e.g. storage, bandwidth) have gone up, but the product is essentially unchanged. There are good providers, and there are also lots of providers at the other end of the scale, just as there were back then, and “you get what you pay for” still applies.
Unlike the hosting business, the domain name registration system has changed significantly. Fifteen years ago, before ICANN, before there was a domain name industry, and before domain names cost anything to register, it all worked very differently. Organizations with a legitimate need for a domain name were expected to limit themselves to one domain name. There was no cyber-squatting. And who could forget waiting days or weeks for those InterNIC registration templates to be processed? Those templates, by the way, could be submitted via e-mail, postal mail, or fax. Sure can’t do that today!
JM: How has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?
AB: OpenSRS allowed us to seamlessly integrate domain registration and SSL certificates into our services, simplifying the purchase process for our customers and giving them only one vendor to deal with, instead of two or three. We also appreciate OpenSRS’s active involvement at the regulatory level when there are important matters at stake affecting the integrity of the domain name industry.
JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?
AB: We feel that Tucows/OpenSRS has spread itself too thin in recent years, and lost its focus trying to launch and promote numerous other services. We want OpenSRS to refocus back on its core service of domain registration and management, and bring some much-needed and long overdue redevelopment of the tools, interfaces and features it provides to resellers. (Editor’s note: As mentioned in an earlier post, redesigning our RWI interface is a top priority for us in 2009.)
If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!