Archive for: September, 2011

Announcing Google AdWords Credits through OpenSRS Offers

We’re pleased to announce the latest addition to our Reseller Friendly promise: OpenSRS Offers. This new service will allow you to share special promotional offers with your customers. These promotional offers can be used as incentives for new customers or rewards for existing customers, and will help you stand out from the competition.

Starting today, you can offer Google AdWords™ credits to your customers in Canada and the United States (at no cost). We allow you to to provide AdWords™ credits values of up to $100, and you can manage your credits through the Control Panel or API. For resellers with customers not in Canada and the U.S., don’t worry – we’re working hard to get this offer extended to you as well.

Credits are available in tiered amounts of $25, $50, $75 and $100, and we’ve got a few ideas on how you can use the tiers in a way that suits your business. For example:

If you offer tiered hosting packages, offer $25 credit with your ‘small’ package and $100 credit with your ‘large’ package, or use credits as an incentive to upgrade to a larger hosting package.
If your service is a one-time payment, use AdWords credits as a value-added bonus to your customers.
Use the credits as an incentive to boost transfers-in – reward customers who have their domain registered through you with AdWords credits.

Over the next few months we’ll also be working to establish relationships with more vendors so you can pass on even more value-added incentives to your customers.

We’ve put together some marketing resources to help you start offering Google AdWords. These include:

High-resolution logos
Ready-to-use HTML email template
Sample marketing messages
- “Why AdWords?”
- “7 reasons to try Google AdWords”
- How to segment your message based on company size, line of business, and more.

Getting started is easy – just log in to the OpenSRS Control Panel and click on the Offers Manager tab.

Meet our Reseller: HostingPanama

A couple of months ago we had the opportunity to sit down with Eduardo Vilá, Chief Sales Officer for HostingPanama while we were at HostingCon 2011. We spoke at length about the business, the market in Panama and beyond, and how HostingPanama’s partnership with OpenSRS is working for them.

You can read more about HostingPanama in the latest article in our Meet Our Resellers series.

We love working with the leading hosting companies in countries around the world – companies just like HostingPanama. And we’re committed to helping all of our resellers to continue to grow their businesses even further. Special thanks to Eduardo and his staff for taking the time to hang out with us in San Diego.

SiteLock and TRUSTe Join the Trust Service Lineup

Starting today, OpenSRS Resellers can sell two new Trust Service products, SiteLock and TRUSTe.

SiteLock Website Security

SiteLock Website Security provides website security scanning that identifies vulnerabilities and protects sites against threats. SiteLock is offered at three different levels of service – SiteLock Basic, Premium and SMB Enterprise. Similar to other Trust services like SSL certificates, SiteLock is provisioned through the OpenSRS Control Panel. Plans start at just $10/year.

TRUSTe Privacy Policy

TRUSTe Privacy Policy lets you help your customers increase sales with an online privacy policy that turns consumer confidence into clicks. OpenSRS Resellers can offer two TRUSTe privacy solutions to their customers – TRUSTe Website Privacy and TRUSTe Website Privacy with Seal. TRUSTe is also provisioned and managed through the OpenSRS Control Panel in the Trust Manager tab. TRUSTe plans start at just $15/year.

We have much more information about SiteLock and TRUSTe on our website in the Trust Service section. Learn about the various features and benefits of both products and see full rundowns on the differences between the different plans available for each product.

Learn more at our webinars

We’re hosting a pair of webinars in the coming weeks to help introduce SiteLock and TRUSTe. You’ll learn not only how the products work, but also how to provision and manage them using OpenSRS. And we’ll share marketing advice and ideas to kickstart your sales efforts.

SiteLock Webinar
Available for on-demand viewing

TRUSTe Webinar
Available for on-demand viewing

Tucows’ Employee Lucas Cochran and His Discovery Channel Debut

If you’re a fan of the Discovery Channel, you may have seen our very own Lucas Cochran during Daily Planet’s, “Future Tech” a new segment that covers Tech, Gaming and Social Media.

Lucas is no stranger to the camera. In 2009, he had his own show called “Pimp My PC” on Butterscotch TV, where he helped viewers creatively customize, personalize and trick out their boring beige box PCs.

During business hours at Tucows, Lucas is our go-to guy for all things related to IT and can be counted on to handle everything from the deployment of an authentication cluster, to troubleshooting audio/video issues on Skype.

But labeling Lucas the Tucows IT guy and leaving it at that just wouldn’t be fair…

This man has the geek cred of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ lead character Lewis Skolnick, combined with the stage presence and comedic timing of Jerry Lewis, and the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of Ron Popeil. When George Clooney needs help with the ladies AND programming his VCR, Lucas is #1 in his speed dial. At least, he will be as soon as George sees this episode of FutureTech.

A word of caution however: never (ever) agree to play Star Wars trivia with this man (you will lose), and never, ever bet Lucas that he’ll be unable to get an old Logitech webcam working on a MacBook Pro (I lost $5 bucks to him this way just last week).

But seriously, Lucas is a great example of the super talented people we get to spend out days with at Tucows/OpenSRS. His intrinsic desire to teach himself new things, combined with his super friendly nature and ability to teach others will undoubtedly make him a great addition to the Daily Planet team and we’re all extremely proud of him here at Tucows.

Congrats Lucas!

To see what Lucas has to say, check out the segment of FutureTech on this week’s episode of Daily Planet.

.XXX Launch Updates and Webinar Archive

If you missed our .XXX launch webinar last week, we have the archived version available now for on-demand viewing.

Patrick Donaldson, Registrar Liaison for ICM Registry and Adam Eisner, Director of OpenSRS Product Management, shared some good information to help you make the most of the launch of this new domain extension.

Win-Win-WIn

Patrick talked a bit about how .XXX is a win-win-win for everyone involved – the adult entertainment industry, consumers and those who want to avoid adult content online.

One of the key points that Patrick made was that regardless of what your customer base is like, there is an opportunity with the launch of .XXX to help them out. If you want to provide services like hosting or domain registration to those in adult industries, then you can help them acquire new .XXX registrations, or domains matching their existing .com domains. For those who don’t wish to be a part of the extension, then you can help them out with blocking registrations or simply registering the matching .XXX domain to the existing .COM or other extension.

There was also a lot of information from Adam about the different phases of the launch including what happens and who can register domains during Sunrise A and B, Landrush and General Availability.

View the archive here.

.XXX in Horizon Test Environment

In addition to the webinar, we can also tell you that .XXX is now available in our Horizon Test Environment for testing. That includes both the Reseller Web Interface, and the API. If you plan to participate in the launch, log in to the Horizon Test Environment RWI and see how things work.

We’ll continue to update our .XXX launch information page as required. Documentation for the RWI and API has already been updated and posted in advance of the launch.