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By: Ben Lucier on November 25th, 2010
Posted in: General
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Just a quick note to say Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends south of the border!

Unfortunately for us, we’re stuck here at the office, toiling away, as you sit down with your families to enjoy your delicious turkey ‘n gravy, homemade stuffing and mashed potatoes. Mmmmm.

On the plus side, thanks to the power of the Internet, we can live vicariously through you today, relishing your tweets and photos about all the delicious food and the pigskin play-by-plays.

Happy Thanksgiving and best wishes from OpenSRS!

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By: Michael Goldstein on November 19th, 2010
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Full Service versus Self Service

A key strategic question in any service business is where to play along the spectrum from managed service (or full service) to self service. This is particularly true with Web services, which can be either particularly sophisticated (necessitating full service) or particularly simple (enabling self service).

The answer, as always, will be driven by what your customers need and what you are good at. It will also be influenced by your competitive landscape, your resources, your cost of goods and other business considerations.

The OpenSRS Business

I’ll use OpenSRS as an example. We have a big, talented team of engineers and I think we develop pretty usable solutions. Our resellers are also about as capable as they come. But a couple of other factors nudge us more toward managed relationships.

The services we offer are quite sophisticated and quite critical. Registries keep on tweaking their platforms. Spammers keep on spamming. And millions of websites and mailboxes depend on us to run smoothly. It is inevitable that we are going to have to help resellers through our responses and iterations and that they are going to come to us with custom problems and questions. Plus, it’s tough to differentiate ourselves from our competition based on product alone when the product attribute our resellers seem to rank highest is “doesn’t fail”.

So, while we are indeed hard at work on a profoundly more usable control panel, a more flexible API and more robust documentation, we staff a whole bunch of support people, account managers and communications folks and, ultimately, make our living offering superior service.

Although even at that end of the spectrum, we go from lower touch relationships like our Storefront program to higher touch ones like a large email migration, led by our professional services team. So, our resellers can get as much or little as they need from us. And we manage to achieve both the volume and the blended profit margin we need to have a healthy business.

The Web Design Business

Our upcoming launch of goMobi, the do-it-yourself tool for building a mobile website, has me thinking about the web design business in this context.

Web design, like any creative service, is historically as managed as it gets. Clients are paying for talent and ideas. Fees tend to be hourly, reinforcing the fact that the product is human.

But web design is evolving in an interesting way.

The traditional desktop website is still a wonderful vehicle for creativity, beauty, entertainment, provocation and emotion. It can perform valuable functions and it can position a brand. And no template can do what a talented designer can to bring a brand to life or engage a visitor.

The mobile website, however, has moved in a different direction. Thanks largely to the influence of the iPhone, users are showing a strong preference for mobile websites that offer pure function and speed. Icons and buttons. The goal, at least for websites (as opposed to more playful apps), is to navigate as easily as possible and get the information you need.

We think this creates a business opportunity for web designers. It offers an obvious place to draw the line between managed service and self service. “I can build you a beautiful desktop site and you can build yourself an effective mobile site (for less than you would expect).” Maybe there’s some training tacked on. Maybe there’s even some demand for a “supported self service” model. In general, clients spend their money appropriately and get what they need from each channel. Designers continue to make money on desktop sites while they’re awake and now they can make money on mobile sites while they’re asleep.

Web designers will always make their living on talent, ideas and full service. But mobile creates demand for a new kind of website, goMobi has a great self service solution and designers are in a unique position to deliver it to market.

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By: Ben Lucier on November 18th, 2010
Posted in: Announcements
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We’re excited to announce that our OpenSRS Quarterly for 2010-Q3 is now available for download.

Have you found yourself wondering how your own own performance indicators measure up against other OpenSRS resellers? Key performance metrics like renewal rates by quarter, new registrations and transfers in and out have long been providing valuable insight to service providers like yours.

With over 10,000 domain name, email and SSL resellers in over 100 countries, from small Web designers to giant Web hosts and Internet Service Providers, OpenSRS has a unique perspective into industry data and trends.

The OpenSRS Quarterly report is meant to provide you, our reseller, with data you can use to benchmark your own performance and make informed decisions. We’ve analyzed the data across our entire base to provide you with valuable insight. You’ll even interesting stats and numbers related to WHOIS Privacy usage and pricing compared to other popular registrars.

We expect this report to be just the beginning of a conversation within your organization, with your team and maybe even with other OpenSRS resellers about best practices and how we can work together to help you succeed.

If you’re an OpenSRS reseller, click here to request this report electronically.

Happy Selling!

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By: James Koole on November 17th, 2010
Posted in: Industry News, Reseller Resources
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A few OpenSRSers are at the meshmarketing event held right here in our hometown of Toronto. One of the presenters is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) who are the keepers of the .CA domain extension.

Over the past few years, CIRA has doing a ton of work to promote the .CA extension and to show Canadians how people are using their .CA websites.

CIRA .CA Impact Awards

As part of those ongoing efforts, today CIRA announced a new initiative. Starting on January 6, 2011, CIRA will begin accepting submissions for the .CA Impact Awards.

CIRA says they created the .CA Impact Awards as “a celebration of people and organizations that use their .CA website to make a difference.”

Prizes include a cheque for $5,000 for the winner. If you are selling .CA domains through OpenSRS, this is definitely something you will want to pass along to your customers. Who knows, maybe one of them will be the winner!

You can find out more at the CIRA .CA Impact Awards website.

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By: Ben Lucier on November 10th, 2010
Posted in: Announcements, OpenSRS Services
Tags: dotMobi, goMobi
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You’ve probably heard about goMobi service that was recently launched by the dotMobi registry. This wicked cool service turns any standard website into an easy to use, fully customizable mobile site with no programming required. Better still, the service is optimized for many of today’s popular mobile devices.

We’re excited about having this available to our resellers and have been working to integrate the goMobi service into our service offering and we expect to have it available before the year is out. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it’s available.

In the meantime, if you’d like learn how goMobi can help your customers turn their website into a fully functional mobile site with no coding required, drop by the goMobi website.