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By: Michael Goldstein on January 27th, 2011
Posted in: General
Tags:
Comments: 0

Does everyone know how a Superbowl box pool works?

You have a grid like this. There are 100 boxes available. Participants generally claim boxes by writing their names in them. In this case, I will put your logos in the boxes. Once all the boxes have been claimed, we pick numbers 0-9 at random and put them in that order along the top. Then we pick 0-9 at random again and put them in that order along the side.

Those numbers indicate what score would  produce a victory for the owner of each box. If you have Pittsburgh 3, Green Bay 4, for example, you would be a winner with a score of Pittsburgh 23 – Green Bay 14, Pittsburgh 3 – Green Bay 24 or any other other score that ends in those two digits. Winners are generally declared at the end of each quarter.

Now, here’s how you get yourself a box.

Send me evidence of the following at mgoldstein@tucows.com:

• .CO highlighted in some way on your domains page
• .CO as one of the top two TLDs presented in your search results
• Some sort of flag or highlight on .CO in your search results
• A promotional .CO price
• A campaign to your customers about .CO

Each one of these earns you one box.

Also send me a company logo so I can put it in each of your boxes.

I will post the populated grid by Friday prior to the Superbowl so you know what numbers you have. Watch the game on Sunday, February 6 to see if you win. Watch your sales on Monday, February 7 to see if you win again.

Winners of the first and third quarters get authentic OpenSRS fake sports team t-shirts and $50 Amazon.com gift cards. The halftime winner gets a t-shirt and a $100 gift card. The final score winner (whether that’s the end of regulation or overtime) gets a t-shirt, a $200 gift card and a Service Guy collectible action figure.

Let us know if anyone has any questions. Good luck!

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By: Ben Lucier on January 26th, 2011
Posted in: General
Tags: How-To
Comments: 1

These How-To videos were captured during our “New Reseller Interactive Screencasts” we ran last year. They were a great opportunity to connect with new resellers in a live, interactive video format.

I thought it made sense to publish these as is since they serve as a fairly thorough walkthrough of the OpenSRS Reseller Web Interface (RWI), covering some of the major topics new resellers have asked in the past including:

• Funding your OpenSRS Reseller Account
• Introduction to Storefront
• How to Register a New Domain Name
• How to Setup DNS Records and Templates

Without further adieu, I hope these videos help. And if they don’t please come find me and I’ll be happy to hunt down anything need.

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By: Michael Goldstein on January 26th, 2011
Posted in: General
Tags: .CO, Superbowl
Comments: 0

On February 6, Go Daddy will promote .CO in their Superbowl commercial.

We will no doubt be left pondering the connection between .CO, car racing and cleavage. But one thing is certain. Demand for .CO will go up.

Tens of millions of Internet users and publishers will become aware of .CO for the first time. Millions who were already aware of it will now regard it as more credible. Many will come to your front doors looking for it or at least more willing to consider it than they were before.

This is the upside of having a competitor like Go Daddy. There are times when they will subsidize our marketing efforts and help drive our businesses.

So, what can you do to capitalize on this opportunity?

• First, just make sure it is clear that you offer .CO. Put a .CO banner on your domains page. Move .CO results up in your search results. Maybe flag them with a NEW banner. (“As seen on TV” is probably a bit cheesy.) Reach out to your base with the message that the domain name they couldn’t get in .COM is likely available in .CO. Check out some of our marketing suggestions from when .CO first launched.

• Offer your own “what” and “why” around .CO. The Go Daddy spot will likely leave consumers titillated but slightly confused. Explain in the most honest, helpful way that .CO is simply a great alternative to .COM. Internet users are getting more comfortable with it. Google acknowledges it as a global (generic) domain. And, most importantly, it offers millions of great available domain names.

• Consider taking advantage of our promotion to offer a small limited-time discount. I am not encouraging you to try to compete with GoDaddy on price. You already know not to do that. A price promotion just creates a bit of “do this now”. And, with the promotion, you can achieve this without even eating into your margins.

Every once in a while, external forces push some business in your direction. I think this will be one of those situations. (By the way, I also think Pittsburgh will top Green Bay 24-7, propelled by a defense that returns two turnovers for touchdowns.) Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you make the most of it.

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By: Ben Lucier on January 26th, 2011
Posted in: General
Tags: Malware, StopBadware
Comments: 0

The Internet can be a dangerous place, even for the professionals who live and breath it. Imagine the frustration felt by website owners after realizing their site has been compromised and attempts to infect its visitors, many of them potential customers.

StopBadware, a non-profit organization, founded at Harvard University in 2006, helps stop badware: viruses, spyware, and any other software that fails to respect a user’s choice about how his or her computer or network connection is used. From the StopBadware website: “Badware is a threat to the open Internet, one of our greatest political, economic, and cultural shared resources. As an independent non-profit organization, our focus is singular: how to protect users effectively and responsibly from this threat.”

Request for Public Comments (deadline Jan 31, 2011)

StopBadware, is seeking comments from web hosting providers, security experts, and other interested parties on the first public draft of their new document: StopBadware’s Best Practices for Web Hosting Providers: Responding to Malware Reports.

Additional context for the development of this document can be found at: http://blog.stopbadware.org/2011/01/20/request-for-comments-on-new-best-practices. You can download the draft of this document in MSWord and PDF format below.

• Best Practices for Web Hosting Providers: Responding to Malware Reports
  (PDF | MS Word)

Comments or marked-up versions of the document may be e-mailed to contact <at> stopbadware <dot> org. The deadline for comments on this draft is Monday, Jan. 31, 2011.

About StopBadware

StopBadware originated at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 2006. In 2010, they spun off as a non-profit organization with the support of Google, PayPal, and Mozilla. Their board of directors, chaired by PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett, also includes Vint Cerf (Google), Esther Dyson (EDventure), Paul Mockapetris (Nominum), Mike Shaver (Mozilla), and our executive director, Maxim Weinstein.

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By: James Koole on January 25th, 2011
Posted in: Reseller Resources
Tags: retention, tips, winback
Comments: 0

It’s really easy to think of a domain transferred away from your reseller account to another registrar as just that – a domain. But every domain is attached to a customer, and those customers often take more than their domain when they leave for a competing registrar.

OpenSRS provides a few tools to keep you informed as to when your customers are moving their domains (and by extension, their hosting or other services). Armed with that information, you can take action when a transfer away is initiated to try to hold on to that domain and customer.

We put together a tutorial that will help you:

• make sure you KNOW when someone requests a domain transfer away
• ensure that you HAVE A PLAN to address customers who are transferring domains away
• ACT on domain transfers to retain some of those customers