By: Dave Woroch on January 19th, 2011
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: .BIZ, .ORG, ICANN
Comments: 1

It’s an unfortunate part of being a domain registrar that we have to let you know about price increases coming up as a result of announced increases by the registries which operate those domain extensions.

Effective April 1, 2011 at 00:00:00 GMT, price increases for .BIZ and .ORG domains will go into effect at the registries. These costs are payable directly to the registry by OpenSRS for domain registrations and we really have no choice but to pass those costs along to resellers and, in turn, to consumers.

Here’s the breakdown for each top-level domain (TLD) involved:

.BIZ (operated by Neustar) – view ICANN notice

• Registry fee increase takes effect on April 1, 2011 at 00:00:00 GMT.
• New cost for a .BIZ domain payable to the registry is USD $7.30 (an increase of USD $0.45 from USD $6.85)
• Total OpenSRS cost including ICANN fee and OpenSRS Management Fee will be USD $10.48.

.ORG (operated by Public Interest Registry) – view ICANN notice

• Registry fee increase takes effect on April 1, 2011 at 00:00:00 GMT.
• New cost for a .ORG domain payable to the registry is USD $7.21 (an increase of USD $0.46 from USD $6.75)
• Total OpenSRS cost including ICANN fee and OpenSRS Management Fee will be USD $10.39.

Our Cost-Plus Pricing Model for gTLDs Provides Cost Certainty

Thanks to our Cost-Plus model for gTLDs, OpenSRS Resellers have complete visibility to our costs associated with domain names. It also means that, as with past registry cost increases, we aren’t going to use these registry price increases as an opportunity to raise our prices on these or other gTLDs by piling on increases for domains where our costs are not increasing.

We strongly believe that our transparent pricing model gives you comfort in clearly understanding how we approach pricing, and provides you with confidence in terms of what you can expect around pricing in the future.

By: Dave Woroch on December 14th, 2010
Posted in: General
Tags:
Comments: 1

I’ve written several posts over the past few months about the reseller-friendly choices we’ve made in our products, our pricing and our policies.

ccTLDs provides another great example.

There are a few approaches that a registrar could be tempted to take on ccTLDs…

You could essentially avoid them. Offering a wide selection of ccTLDs means integrating with a wildly diverse set of registries around the world. They speak different languages and code in different languages. They have different legal constraints and policies. A registrar could satisfy a reasonable percent of the market by offering gTLDs and a few of the simplest ccTLDs and calling it a day.

You could seek to differentiate yourself by offering every ccTLD in the world. Build an awesome list of “trophy TLDs”. Spend months integrating with registries that have a few hundred domain names under management, potentially sacrificing your core services along the way. Hang a bunch of international flags around the office.

You could embrace ccTLDs as an opportunity to pump up your profit margin. The industry tends to compare registrars by gTLD prices. The registry fees on gTLDs are well known. A registrar could bring in resellers by reducing gTLD prices and then make up for it on the ccTLDs.

Needless to say, OpenSRS has a chosen a different path.

We survey our resellers regularly and watch the global trends closely to determine which ccTLDs could help our resellers grow their businesses. That criteria has shaped our current list of 23 ccTLDs, including 11 out of the top 15. It inspired us to add .au in September and is driving us to consider some exciting possible additions in 2011.

We maintain a high standard of reliability and usability across all our products. So, we do not add a ccTLD if we don’t think it offers the sort of experience our resellers expect and deserve. And we weigh seriously whether launching new ccTLDs (or any new products, for that matter) will in any way compromise our maintenance and support on existing products.

And, as the chart indicates, we offer competitive prices, allowing our resellers plenty of room for their own margin. (In fact, this chart would look even better if we brought our .uk price down a bit. So we’re working on that.)

A product offering shaped by reseller demand, focused on reseller satisfaction and priced for reseller profit.

That’s our reseller friendly approach to ccTLDs.

By: Dave Woroch on November 9th, 2010
Posted in: General
Tags:
Comments: 1

We’re continuing to build out our team in Europe and are recruiting the best talent we can find.

I wanted to reach out to our reseller channel to see if anyone knows of a candidate that might be a good fit with Tucows – someone that is passionate about the Internet, the hosting business and our industry in general, as well as having a solid technical grounding and aptitude.

The role we want to fill is a sales position with a mix of account management and business development. Language skills are important, and we are looking for someone that can speak Italian, Spanish and French.

Location is not important, we want to find the best person and are open to the city they would be based out of.

If you know of anyone that might be a fit please have them follow up with Thorsten or myself directly.

Thanks for your help!

By: Dave Woroch on October 21st, 2010
Posted in: Announcements
Tags:
Comments: 8

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Thorsten Einig to the OpenSRS team as our new Managing Director, Europe. Thorsten brings a wealth of experience in the hosting and internet industry, and we’re excited to have him leading the charge as we continue to support and grow our OpenSRS business in Europe!

Thorsten has more than ten years of experience in the hosting and domain industry. He spent eight years with 1&1 Internet in both Germany – being in charge of 1&1’s domain business – and the USA, and last held the position of Business Development Manager for 1&1 in North America. Most recently, Thorsten worked as a Senior Product Manager at Leaseweb B.V. in the Netherlands.

Thorsten’s first-hand knowledge of the hosting industry and his depth of experience, specifically in terms of understanding the unique needs of the European market, will be of great benefit to our existing customers in Europe. We’ve tasked Thorsten with the responsibility for growing our business in Europe while still maintaining and reinforcing the existing strong relationships that we have with our European resellers.

Thorsten will be based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, while his team will remain in the UK to bridge Canada and Europe.

By: Dave Woroch on October 20th, 2010
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: WHOIS Privacy
Comments: 1

Did you know that an estimated 20% of .COM domain owners have WHOIS Privacy enabled on their domain’s public WHOIS record?

For GoDaddy, that means as many as 8 million domain owners pay an extra $8.99 per year to have their personal address and contact information protected from the public Internet. That’s tens of millions of additional dollars into the pocket of the world’s largest domain registrar!

Many wholesale registrars enjoy high margins on WHOIS Privacy as well. For example, when a reseller purchases the Privacy Protect option from eNom, that adds an extra $6 per year to the cost of the domain registration.

At OpenSRS, we offer WHOIS privacy for free.

It’s just another reseller-friendly choice we’ve made (foregoing substantial additional profit) to set ourselves apart from our competition and to help you profitably satisfy your customers and set yourselves apart from your competition.

So, WHOIS Privacy has real value to your customers. You get it for free. This affords you two wonderful options:

• Charge for it (like GoDaddy) and enjoy the 100% profit.
• Make sure your customers know and appreciate that you are not charging for it.

(Look out for some great white label materials soon to help explain the benefits of WHOIS Privacy to your customers!)

Giving you the opportunity. Giving you the choice. For us, that’s what being reseller-friendly is all about.