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By: James Koole on August 31st, 2010
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: GeoTrust, SSL Service
Comments: 0

The GeoTrust EV SSL sale comes to an end today, but we’ve decided to make the lower price permanent. That means going forward, GeoTrust True BusinessID with Extended Validation (EV) will be $179 for one year, and $359 for two years (in US dollars).

A complete price list for SSL products available to be sold through OpenSRS is available here.

All OpenSRS Resellers are able to sell SSL certificates from GeoTrust, thawte and VeriSign. If you haven’t sold SSL through OpenSRS before, there’s nothing you need to do to get started – it’s included and enabled on your Reseller account automatically. Take a look at the documentation for our SSL Service for more information on how to sell and provision SSL through both the Reseller Web Interface as well as via the API. Reseller Support is also just a phone call or email away.

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By: James Koole on August 27th, 2010
Posted in: Reseller Resources
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Comments: 0

It’s sometimes easy to forget that domain names aren’t something that the average person is familiar with. Working in the hosting or Internet industry, understanding how different domain extensions work work is just part of daily life. For those familiar with how domains are bought and sold, the concept of premium domain names and the domain name aftermarket is fairly basic.

But for the general public, these things can be confusing – they often have no clue that they can easily buy a .co or .us domain name, or that they might be able to get a perfect domain name for their business through the domain name aftermarket.

To help educate customers, we created a pair of example videos that explain in simple terms exactly what the different domain name extenstions are and also what premium names are.

Have a look:

Help Your Customers Buy From You!

We talk a lot about offering suggestions to your customers using our Name Suggest domain search API rather than just offering a yes/no answer with domain availability. It really provides a boost to sales if you pair those results with some information to help potential customers make sense of the different kinds of results that are presented when they do their domain searches.

It’s something that’s not all that difficult to create and build into a search results page, but it can really pay off in terms of improved conversion rates on domain searches, and the purchase of associated services like hosting or email.

Take a look at the videos and think about some of the different things you can do on your own site to help educate and guide your customers (both potential and current) through your specific sales processes.

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By: Ben Lucier on August 26th, 2010
Posted in: General
Tags: contest
Comments: 8

We recently decided that we ought to have some nice postcards to send to our resellers, but the problem is that we don’t have enough designs for them. In the spirit of Community, we thought we’d reach out to you, our resellers, and ask for your help in exchange for the opportunity for your creativity to be forever immortalized in an OpenSRS Postcard!

All you have to do is snap a photo of Service Guy and submit it. We’ll choose the best five for our postcards, and your photography skills will become renowned across the globe as your beautiful designs circulate.

Sounds great! How do I enter?

Entering is easy:

• Take a photo of your OpenSRS Service Guy in a creative setting (see our example shots for inspiration)
• Upload your image in a postcard-size format. Minimum size: 6 in x 4.25 in at 300dpi (1875 x 1275 pixels)
• Add your photo to the Flickr group OpenSRS Service Guy Fan Club
• Let us know by tweeting “Here’s my entry for the @OpenSRS postcard photo contest: [link to photo]”
  Alternatively, if you don’t have a Twitter account, you can leave a comment below too.

The contest will be open until September 30. At the end, we’ll take the top 5 photos and turn them into OpenSRS postcards. We’ll give you the credit, of course. In addition, the best designer will receive a nifty OpenSRS Crumpler laptop bag, valued at $120!

Winners will be notified by email or Twitter, and will be announced on the blog.

We’re looking forward to seeing your entries!

I need some inspiration!

Here are two photos we liked; there are lots more in the Service Guy Fan Club on Flickr.

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By: Michael Goldstein on August 24th, 2010
Posted in: Partners and Resellers, Reseller Resources
Tags:
Comments: 0

Here’s another discovery we made at Hover that you can consider implementing.

Renewals were our number one support issue, accounting for 36% of support tickets opened. A lot of those calls and emails came from customers (or friends, relatives, colleagues and assistants of customers) that could not sign in to their account. So, we developed a renewal process that no longer required folks to sign in. Now we are getting fewer support calls and we are solving renewal-related problems much more quickly.

You can read the more complete story here.

If you have any questions about how we did this or need any help with implementation, please feel free to email me directly at mgoldstein@tucows.com.

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By: James Koole on August 24th, 2010
Posted in: Industry News, OpenSRS Services
Tags: GeoTrust, SSL Service
Comments: 0

A recent survey of SSL certificate use by Netcraft, referenced against the top million sites online (as tallied by Alexa), revealed that GeoTrust SSL certificates continue to be the most widely used choice of the one million top websites on the Internet.

The comparison looked at the Alexa 1 Million and counted publically facing SSL certificates. They found over 35,000 GeoTrust SSL certificates amongst the 165,000 total certificates found. GeoTrust led all certificate authorities, with the nearest competitor alomost 10,000 certificates behind.

GeoTrust points to the data as proof that more users look to GeoTrust as the low-cost SSL certificate provider of choice to secure and encrypt data transmitted over the Internet.

With increasing competition in the low-end of the SSL market, GeoTrust continues to provide cost-effective solutions for a variety of different requirements. From QuickSSL, through True BusinessID with or without Extended Validation, there is a GeoTrust-branded certificate to satisfy any buyer.

If you have an OpenSRS Reseller account, then you are also automatically able to sell SSL certificates from GeoTrust (and also thawte and VeriSign). For more information visit our GeoTrust SSL information page.