Author Archive

.MOBI Renewal Season

Every year, around the end of September and early October, a greater percentage of .mobi domain names come up for renewal. That’s because the .mobi domain extension launched beginning in September, 2006 with land rush on September 22nd, and general availability on October 11, 2006.

Many people who bought their .mobi domain names around the launch still have them and as a result, it’s worth it to do a specific campaign around .mobi renewals to remind your customers to renew their names now to avoid having them expire.

dotMobi Marketing Kit for OpenSRS Resellers

We worked with the dotMobi registry to put together a special marketing package for OpenSRS Resellers to use. You’ll find logos, stats and other information that you can use to reinforce the .mobi value proposition. You’ll also find some ready-to-use email copy that you can plug into your existing email templates, or use on your website to help encourage renewals.

Visit our .mobi marketing resource page to learn more and download the package.

Holiday Hours for Labour Day – Monday September 6

Where did summer go? Seems like it was just last week we were looking forward to the Victoria Day long weekend and the unofficial start of summer up here in Canada. Now here we are just a couple of days before it all comes to an end and the kids head back to school for another year.

To celebrate the end of summer, we’re taking a long weekend (along with the rest of the country). Not everyone, though…

Here’s our hours by department for Monday, September 6th, 2010:

Department	Hours
Technical Support	Regular hours
Payments	Closed
Compliance	Closed

Have a great weekend!

Meet the Resellers: DiscountASP.NET

Carving out a niche, then staying focused has been the key to success for web host and OpenSRS Reseller, DiscountASP.NET. That singularly focused approach meshed perfectly with OpenSRS and its consistent commitment to the wholesale Internet services market.

The Pasadena, California based webhost started out in 2003 as a shared hosting provider with a twist, offering Windows-based hosting aimed squarely at the ASP.NET developer community.

The company’s developer customers have one-stop access to everything they need, including domain names, SSL certificates and a hosting platform that sports all the latest technologies from Microsoft. That complete package of services enables them to create websites and other web-based applications.

Takeshi Eto, VP Marketing and Business Development for DiscountASP.NET, says that strict focus on the Microsoft ASP.NET market has been critical in building a successful business in the long-term.

“If you try and do too many things, it’s hard to target marketing, and it’s hard to provide adequate support,” he says. “From the very beginning, we made sure that everything we did was about serving the needs of the .NET developer and we’ve been very successful in doing that.”

A Partner with a Similar Perspective

Eto says they looked for a similarly well-focused company when evaluating domain registration providers. Eto found, in OpenSRS, a company that built a reputation for providing the best wholesale domain registration platform and service.

That laser-focus on the specific needs of its wholesale customers was something that Eto could relate to. The fact that he found an API and platform that he liked was icing on the cake.

“We evaluated a lot of registration partners and we liked the APIs that OpenSRS had,” he says. “It made the integration and automation a lot easier.”

Savvy Customers = Tech Support Challenges

DiscountASP.NET’s customer base runs the gamut from hobby sites, to blogs, to businesses. According to Eto, those business customers make up the majority of the base.

“About 60% of our customers are doing some sort of business website with our service, whether it’s the .NET developer themselves, or an application or website that developer did for the business,” he says.

With a tech-savvy customer base like DiscountASP.NET has, providing tech support does offer some challenges. Eto says that overall, the number of support requests is lower than typically seen in mass-market hosting, but that doesn’t mean support is easy.

“The sophistication of the support tickets is very highly technical,” he says. “The challenge for us is to make sure our tech support staff is trained on all the new stuff.”

To ensure that his customers get the help they need, Eto has to look around a little more to find the right people to work in tech support.

“Trying to find talent to hire may take us longer,” he says. “But those that join our team are assured of a dynamic environment where they will always be learning and working on new technology. It’s fun and challenging.”

On Trust

DiscountASP.NET developed its own control panels and hosting platform using .NET technologies because they wanted to demonstrate to customers that they were the best option. “What better way to show that we’re .NET experts? Our control panel is .NET, our website is .NET — it all helps in the marketing message,” he says.

He also says the company works very hard to keep up with the latest developments from Microsoft and aims to be ahead of the needs of the customer.

That kind of commitment to keeping ahead of the game also means Eto needs to rely on, and trust his chosen vendors to do the same.

As far as OpenSRS is concerned, Eto says dealing with the company has been “great,” and that he’s always found OpenSRS to be “very responsive.”

Eto also says that he appreciates the regular interaction he has with OpenSRS people. “I see them all the time at different mixers and networking events and they’re always cool, fun to hang out with and good to do business with,” he says.

It’s definitely a relationship that is paying off and Eto sees a solid future for DiscountASP.NET.

$179 GeoTrust EV SSL Sale Price is the new Regular Price

The GeoTrust EV SSL sale comes to an end today, but we’ve decided to make the lower price permanent. That means going forward, GeoTrust True BusinessID with Extended Validation (EV) will be $179 for one year, and $359 for two years (in US dollars).

A complete price list for SSL products available to be sold through OpenSRS is available here.

All OpenSRS Resellers are able to sell SSL certificates from GeoTrust, thawte and VeriSign. If you haven’t sold SSL through OpenSRS before, there’s nothing you need to do to get started – it’s included and enabled on your Reseller account automatically. Take a look at the documentation for our SSL Service for more information on how to sell and provision SSL through both the Reseller Web Interface as well as via the API. Reseller Support is also just a phone call or email away.

Educating Customers and Boosting Sales

It’s sometimes easy to forget that domain names aren’t something that the average person is familiar with. Working in the hosting or Internet industry, understanding how different domain extensions work work is just part of daily life. For those familiar with how domains are bought and sold, the concept of premium domain names and the domain name aftermarket is fairly basic.

But for the general public, these things can be confusing – they often have no clue that they can easily buy a .co or .us domain name, or that they might be able to get a perfect domain name for their business through the domain name aftermarket.

To help educate customers, we created a pair of example videos that explain in simple terms exactly what the different domain name extenstions are and also what premium names are.

Have a look:

Help Your Customers Buy From You!

We talk a lot about offering suggestions to your customers using our Name Suggest domain search API rather than just offering a yes/no answer with domain availability. It really provides a boost to sales if you pair those results with some information to help potential customers make sense of the different kinds of results that are presented when they do their domain searches.

It’s something that’s not all that difficult to create and build into a search results page, but it can really pay off in terms of improved conversion rates on domain searches, and the purchase of associated services like hosting or email.

Take a look at the videos and think about some of the different things you can do on your own site to help educate and guide your customers (both potential and current) through your specific sales processes.