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By: Elliot Noss on February 2nd, 2012
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: ting
Comments: 0

We announced some exciting news today, the public launch of Ting, our US mobile service. We have talked about Ting in the past, both here and other places so if you have no idea what I am talking about maybe take a quick look here first.

I wanted to let you know some more about this and especially about how this fits in with OpenSRS and resellers.

Tucows has always been, at its core, focused on being the best supplier of Internet services to service providers around the world. We have approached Ting with that thinking in mind.

We have just completed a closed beta with a couple hundred participants. Over 80% of them were resellers. The closed beta was a great success in that we all learned a lot and there was a great spirit in the group with resellers bringing themselves to the beta as customers BUT keeping well aware that they may be offering the service to their customers one day. This made for a really productive process.

Over the next couple of months, we are going to continue refine the retail Ting experience – from purchase path to fulfillment to customer support. Meanwhile, we would like to start speaking with you now about the reseller opportunity. We would like you to help us design the best wholesale offering possible. We are also looking for a handful of you to participate in a reseller beta and be the first to offer Ting to your customers.

It is worth noting that the primary reason that Sprint has been so supportive of us in bringing this to market is that they share our view that you guys are fantastic distribution partners and together we bring an approach to the market that recognizes that mobile has moved from a phone and voice business to being about small computers connecting to a mobile data network.

Some of you have heard me say that this looks and smells to me just like the early days of the ISP business, which many of us lived through. And that means opportunity.

We have set up a simple form on the site for you to fill out if you are interested in partnering with us on Ting. We will follow up shortly with more information.

Please also indicate if you might be interested in a special discount on Ting for yourselves or your employees. We figure the best way to get you and your team excited about offering this to your customers is to get you to experience the service yourselves. It is also a great way to thank you for all the rest of the business you do with OpenSRS.

It is a big day for us here. We well know that Ting will not succeed to the extent it can without your partnership.

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By: Elliot Noss on January 6th, 2010
Posted in: General
Tags: MySQL, Open Source
Comments: 5

One of our core values at Tucows and OpenSRS is that the Internet is the greatest agent for positive change the world has ever seen. And we strongly believe that open source tools are central to the continued growth and health of the Internet.

You may have heard that Oracle has acquired Sun, and along with it, MySQL, which is is a central building block in the suite of open source tools.

While MySQL holds that position in the world of open source software, it is not important to the Oracle acquisition of Sun. In fact, all of the most important reasons for Oracle doing the acquisition would still be in place if Sun had no role whatsoever with MySQL.

The “cost” to Oracle of freeing MySQL is very low. The benefit to the world is extremely high.

With that in mind, please consider lending your support to the campaign. We’ve added our support by signing the petition. The Save MySQL website has lots of information about why the community feels that MySQL is important, and what you can do to ensure it stays open and freely available to the entire Internet community.

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By: Elliot Noss on January 16th, 2009
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: Email Service
Comments: 0

Dear Customers -

On behalf of all of the members of the OpenSRS team, please accept our sincere and deepest apologies for the service disruption on Cluster A this past weekend.

Many of you have asked, “How could we have let this happen again?” We initially were led to believe that we had a software problem. We have now determined that the string of service problems on Cluster A are related to a hardware problem inside one of our NetApp devices.

Below is a letter of explanation I received from Jeff Goldstein, General Manager at NetApp Canada.

We are not without fault in this situation. Network-attached storage is complex and we trusted our vendor to provide us with accurate advice related to our problems. In hindsight, we should have pressed earlier for replacement hardware.

Please rest assured that we are dedicated to providing a reliable email service and will be working tirelessly to restore your confidence in us. An incident report is available at OpenSRS Status.

Sincerely,
Elliot Noss,
President and CEO, Tucows

Dear Elliot Noss,

I am writing today regarding the recent outage that occurred this past weekend with Cluster A of the OpenSRS Email Service.

As you are aware, Cluster A of the OpenSRS Email Service has experienced a number of service degradations related to issues with our NetApp storage device. Our engineers here at
NetApp worked closely with the technical operations and development teams at OpenSRS to trouble-shoot and resolve these issues. In each of the cases, we believed a software
fault was the cause.

The intermittent problem turned out to be due to the hardware shelf controller as well as firmware in one of our NetApp storage devices, which caused the issues on Cluster A.

We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience that resulted from these hardware and email service issues.

One of the promises we make to our customers is that our solutions provide highly available data management and in this case we let you down.

To begin to resolve this issue, we’re taking immediate action to replace the hardware and firmware in Cluster A at our expense. Our engineers will then test and evaluate the components involved to determine what specifically went wrong and apply those findings back into our own quality control
teams.

Our two companies have been working together for the past nine years. We value our relationship and will work hard to restore your confidence in NetApp and our solutions.

Again, please accept our sincere apologies.

Regards,

Jeff Goldstein
Canadian General Manager
NetApp Canada

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By: Elliot Noss on October 11th, 2008
Posted in: OpenSRS Services
Tags: Email Service
Comments: 7

Dear Resellers,

I am writing today to speak to you directly about what happened this week with Cluster A of our Email Service. This will not refer to specific elements of the outage, there are other venues for that. The things I most want to communicate are my deep sorrow, why it won’t happen again and what we will do for you.

More than anything one thought keeps going through my mind as I think about this, the future determines the past. I will return to this thought.

First, and most importantly, we are sorry. I am sorry. I have been in this business a long time and do not know if I have ever been more sad about what we have done to you, to your customers and to how people think about us. An email outage in 1995 was different from one in 2000 and even more different from one in 2008. I know what this does to your reputations, to your customers and to your staff – and I and so many people here are just sad about that.

While it seems trite right now, we really define ourselves by how we make it easier for you in your businesses and with your customers and in our deep understanding of those relationships. That means the pain here is that much greater and believe me I know our pain here does not matter, yours does. Just know we are grieving.

Second, what will we do about it and why will this never happen again? I know for some of you that doesn’t matter, you are done with us, but I want to express this for the rest of you. Let me start here with things that were not the problem, old equipment, people, capacity or redundancy. The equipment is new, the people are great, we have plenty of capacity and redundancy. What this will mean for us is clearly the need to take the other elements of the service to a completely new level. Here I mean monitoring, change management, emergency protocols and procedures and operating efficiencies.

We had decided long before this that the most important part of email was reliability, not features, not groupware, not web 2.0 integration but reliability and deliverability. I have been at this a long time and really believe that these people and this service can be the best in the world, better than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft and most importantly the best partner for service providers. We owe you this and will deliver it.

Lastly, what we will do for you as a result of this? Let me start here by saying two things, we will certainly be doing something and that there is nothing we can do that will make up for your loss of reputation in your customers’ eyes. We know that. The people who will participate in that decision are fried right now, as I know even in your anger you can well imagine. I will ask your indulgence that you give us this week to make our plan in this regard.

There is one thing that I can offer now. I would like to make myself personally available to any of you who would like me to either reach out to your customers, or to any specific customer, with a letter, an email or a phone call. I know this will not often matter but perhaps in a few cases it might. My message here would be simple, this was our fault not yours and while you are responsible for the suppliers you pick, you had good reason to pick us and it was us who let you down. This offer stands whether you are leaving or staying.

In closing, the future determines the past. If we move forward and run the most reliable, service-provider focused, email service the world has ever seen this will be remembered as the few days that turned it around, as being a very important event in forging out mutual future. If we have no change in reliability or in service levels this will barely be remembered. It will just be a point on a mediocre line. I will do everything in my power to make it the former not the latter.

Regards,

Elliot Noss

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By: Elliot Noss on May 28th, 2008
Posted in: Industry News
Tags:
Comments: 4

Yesterday a large webhosting company, Dreamhost, told the world that, while they would continue to provide email, their email service was not that great and suggested their customers should probably use Google’s Gmail instead.

They provided some fascinating data about email and support costs. My two favorite nuggets:

“Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.”

and:

“If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!”

And they are clear as to their view of quality:

“(email is) something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better.”

This post was picked up on Slashdot where the discussion, not surprisingly, swung back and forth between “I am a sysadmin managing 20 domains and use Google Apps and Gmail and love it” and, “You should always run your own mail server for privacy purposes and, well, its just plain fun.”

Both the original Dreamhost blog post and the resulting Slashdot discussion completely missed the point. Luckily the comments on the Dreamhost blog did not. They were very clear.

Overwhelmingly commenters said that they often came to Dreamhost for hosted email, they did not trust or want to use Gmail for their business email and many of them would immediately leave if Dreamhost discontinued offering email.

Every service provider should be required to read the Dreamhost blog post and, more importantly, the comments.

Whether geeks like it or not, the vast majority of people want and need simple, reliable email that is easy to use AND they want a supplier who will help them use it. That means providing phone support as well as resources to make things simpler. Support data provides golden information for i) how a service can be improved and ii) what your customer’s needs and wants are. Guess what? People are willing to pay for this.

Contrast the Dreamhost view with that of Rackspace. Faced with, I suspect, the same or similar data, Rackspace responded by going out and buying Webmail.us.

It is amazing to me that because most service providers have chosen to give away email they take that as an existence proof that people do not or will not pay for a quality email experience. People will pay over $80/month for a single cup of coffee per day. People paid Geek Squad over $1 billion last year to “set up” their wireless routers. Every geek knows how hard (or not) that is! My ten-year-old son does just that for my mother-in-law. With regards to email specifically, RIM, the Blackberry people, have a market cap of over $75b JUST FROM PROVIDING A PORTION of peoples email needs!

People, especially small businesses, use email more than anything else on the Internet—much more than they use or need web hosting. Service providers are in the business of making the Internet easier and more effective—whether they like it or not.

Geeks who run service providers may find Gmail great. Human beings, not so much.