Archive for: July, 2010

Holiday Hours: Civic Holiday, August 2

Monday, August 2nd is civic holiday in Ontario (Simcoe Day) and Tucows HQ here in Toronto will be operating on holiday hours.

The photo is courtesy of Stefan Lins. Thanks for making your photo available under a Creative Commons license!

Here’s a list of departments along with any special holiday hours for Monday, August 2nd, 2010:

Department	Hours
Technical Support	Regular hours
Payments	Closed
Compliance	Closed

We wish everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday!

Ken Schafer talks "transparency in action" with Lenny Rachitsky

Yesterday, our very own Ken Schafer talked with Lenny Rachitsky from Transparent Uptime about the benefits, efforts and challenges behind the implementation of operational transparency at OpenSRS.

Being transparent with your customers is an important part of customer service these days. From the interview:

“The days of hiding are over. You now have a choice of whether you want to tell the story or have others misrepresent the story on your behalf. It seems scary to admit you have problems but you gain so much by being open and honest that the stress of taking a new approach to communications is easily outweighed.” –Ken Schafer

Although we have a lot more work ahead of us, we’re proud of our transparency efforts here at OpenSRS. Visit Transparent Uptime for the full interview.

To see OpenSRS Status live view, visit http://status.opensrs.com.

Transferring Domains made Easier

We hear all the time from domain registrants and resellers alike, that transferring a domain name from one registrar to another is too complex. What should be a fairly straight forward process can be complicated by different interfaces at different registrars.

We want to make it easier for your customers to transfer their domains from other registrars to you. To help you out, we took a complete look at the domain transfer processes of the top ten competitor registrars — 1&1, Go Daddy, Joker, MelbourneIT, Moniker, Namecat, Namecheap, Network Solutions, Register.com and Web.com.

Screencasts for Resellers

Using that research, we’ve created a series of PDFs, with screenshots, that will help registrants successfully complete their transfers to you.

“Preparing your Domain to Transfer” includes step-by-step documentation, with accompanying screenshots for each of the top ten registrars. Here’s the PDF for GoDaddy as an example:

Transferring a GoDaddy Domain

Maximize your Transfers-In

Using these tools, you can assist your customers in ensuring a successful domain transfer. Your customers will learn the 4 basic steps required to prepare a domain for transfer:

Ensuring WHOIS contact information is correct
Making required WHOIS privacy changes
Unlocking the domain so it can be transferred
Obtaining the transfer authorization code for the domain

All of the content is white-labeled and ready for you to add your own Reseller branding to share with your customers.

Available for Download Today

To download the complete set in PDF format go to our Transfers-In marketing resources downloads page.

Some ideas on marketing .CO

If you’re read this blog over the past few days, you’ve probably already gathered that we’re bullish about .CO. The numbers so far have been astounding. And Google’s decision to treat .CO as an international (generic) TLD goes even further to position it as a viable alternative to .com. So now we’d like offer a few thoughts on how you might be able to effectively market .CO based on what we have seen with other new TLDs and what we have seen from some of the first resellers out of the gate.

On Your Site

The easiest thing you can do is add some messaging to your homepage (or the beginning of your domain search path) to let users know that .CO domain names are now available through your service. But success will mostly likely be driven by how you integrate .CO into your search results. Customers in the online world are a finicky bunch. Button placement, colors, menus and user interface all play a critical role in determining how much of a consumer’s hard-earned money you will earn. We mocked up a sample search result page to give you an idea where we think you could see results.

Identify .CO domain names as “NEW.” It may also be wise to have a help button a registrant can click on in order to learn about .CO and why it’s a great choice for their business. They key is to reinforce (.com-like) universality and credibility.

Place available .CO domain names at or near the top to grab a registrant’s attention and encourage them to act. (It is actually always a good rule to give better real estate to results that are available than result that are not.) If .CO is buried too low or even behind a “more options” link, the customer might never even consider it.

Suggest a two year registration. (This is actually a suggestion for all domain names.) When the default is one year, most customers will register for one year. When the default is two, it is surprising how many customers will register for two years. So, a good suggestion might be to start with a two year offer (perhaps with a discount), but make sure it is very clear how to change the term to one year.

In Other Communications

Besides having your front-end tuned to convert, another important step is to communicate the .CO news directly to your customers. An effective way to do this is through an opt-in email marketing campaign. Assuming you have an email list of customers, here are some suggestions that have produced results for our resellers in past TLD launches:

Don’t assume your customers know about .CO. Sending a simple email about the availability of this new TLD could be enough to drive additional business.

You could perform a batch check on your customers’ current domains and see which .CO equivalents are available. Many customers will want to protect their name across all generic TLDs. For example: “Dear customer, we notice that you have companyxyz.com…we want to advise you that companyxyz.co is now also available….”

If you have the data, you can also look through past unsuccessful domain searches and reach out to customers where the exact-match .CO domain is now available.

In your marketing messages, it might be worthwhile to note that Google (and presumably other search engines) will be treating .CO domain names as generic TLDs. (This addresses fears that a .CO name will only get SEO results in Colombia!). You might also mention that the .CO registry is spending significant marketing dollars to make sure Internet users (your customers’ visitors) will know and respect .CO when they see it.

We will continue to monitor what folks are doing and what seems to be working to share with the network.

Please let us know if you have ideas or questions.

Sysadmin Day: Use our fancy 'certificate of awesomeness' to show you care!

Sysadmins have a thankless job.

They keep the file servers serving, the email servers delivering and the accounting servers counting. These heroes of the office network are often paged late at night to deal with a broken application server, spend countless hours writing (and troubleshooting) scripts that automate tasks, and sometimes get called on to restore a files from a backup that some noobie user accidentally deleted more than 3 months ago.

When was the last time your own sysadmin received a pat on the back for a job well done? Where would you be without their countless hours of hard work? At OpenSRS, our sysadmins literally keep the Internet running. Without them, we’d be resolving DNS hostnames with Popsicle sticks (I’m not sure how that would work, but go with me on this.)

Sysadmin Day 2010 is this July 31 (next week!). Since it’s a Saturday, we’re encouraging everybody to celebrate on Friday 30th instead. To help our resellers honour their hardworking admins, we thought we’d take a moment and give you some ideas around how you can show your appreciation, starting with our handy “Certificate of Sysadmin Awesomeness” that you can customize with your own words of appreciation!

The certificate has been designed in MS Word (for PC) and Pages (for OS X). If for some strange reason, you don’t have a program that can open either of these formats, we also have a PDF version that can be filled in by hand.

Download Certificate of Sysadmin Awesomeness (MS Word)	Download Certificate of Sysadmin Awesomeness (Pages for OS X)
Download Certificate of Sysadmin Awesomeness (PDF)

Gift ideas that show your Sysadmin you really care

If you’re feeling extra generous and would like to honour your hardworking sysadmin with something a little more special, Hong Kiat has a great post with a compilation of products that any sysadmin would salivate over. Below are a few pics of my favourite: