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HC2011: Impact of New TLDs on Hosting Companies

It’s presentations day for OpenSRS today at HostingCon 2011. We have a pair of speaking slots, and things got started with Adam Eisner’s talk about the impact of new TLDs for hosting companies this morning.

Of course, not everyone is at HostingCon 2011 this week, so for the benefit of all of you not in San Diego, here’s a summary of what Adam talked about. If you are at HostingCon, and missed seeing the presentation live, then you missed out on your chance to win a pair of sweet noise cancelling headphones. Jeffrey Cohen of InternetLitigators was at the presentation and walked away with the prize – congrats to you, Jeffrey, and enjoy the prize.

New TLDs Were Officially Approved at ICANN Singapore

The approval of what are referred to as “New TLDs” was the big news out of the last ICANN meeting in Singapore a few months back. Basically, that decision paved the way for the creation of hundreds of new domain extensions – think .nyc or .eco, and even .apple, .canon and .coke and you get the idea about how far reaching this evolution will be.

This profound change in how the domain name system works will have big impacts on hosting companies. If you are in that business, you’ll obviously want to be aware of what’s happening so you can make sure you’ve positioned yourself to take advantage of the opportunities that new TLDs may present.

Here’s an overview of what Adam talked about (slides are below in the embedded Slideshare):

Right now we have 22 gTLDs (and hundreds of country code TLDs). In the next few years, New TLDs will add as many as 500 new TLDs to the root.
ICANN started talking about new TLDs years ago, and approved the start of discussions about adding new TLDs to the root in 2008. It took a long time, and a lot of discussion with various stakeholder groups to get to where we are today (and we’re not quite done yet).
In June 2011, at the Singapore ICANN meeting, ICANN approved the Applicant Guidebook and officially launched the New TLDs program.
There are three different categories of New TLDs to consider:
- Brand-based: .coke, .canon
- Generic: .search, .blog, .cloud
- Community/Interest Group: .eco, .gay, .toronto
Key point: .XXX is not part of the New TLDs program. It’s a separate new extension that is launching this fall (and OpenSRS is accredited).
Key dates:
- January to April 2012: applications accepted
- April 2012: Cards turned over
- November: Applications approved
- Sometime after that: first New TLDs go live in the root
- Maybe an additional application/approval round after that
Opportunity: Improved end-user perception – having a New TLD raises your stature
- Get your own: no sharing the stage, your name on the right side of the dot, full control! All the good names are available on your own TLD.
Costs:
- $185,000 US Application Fee (if approved)
  - could be more (auctions, multiple groups after the same extension)
  - Marketing, legal fees, etc.
How to:
- Fill out the application, paying special attention to the Guidebook.
- Get a partner who has technology experience, and knows the their way around the ICANN world.
The Other Opportunity: Reach new customers by selling others: hundreds of new TLD extensions to offer.
- New segments, new markets.
- .MUSIC, .LONDON, .SKI and more!!!
- It won’t be easy…look at .com vs. the other, newer gTLDs like .info, tel, etc.
- What makes a “sellable” extension?
  - Priced smartly (less than $30/year)
  - No wacky rules
  - Follows the standards laid down by current gTLDs
  - Resonates with end-users (or a segment of end-users)
- How to sell them?
  - Most new TLDS will partner with Registrars
  - Brands won’t offer names to the public
  - Integration should be pretty much the same as current gTLDs.

The takeaways:

There’s an opportunity to secure a brand or community
New TLDs represent new markets and new opportunities
Having your own TLD means full control of the namespace and anything is possible.

And here’s the full presentation for those who want the slides to go with the summary:

HostingCon 2011 – New Top Level Domains

View more presentations from opensrs.

Help Your Customers Find the Perfect Domain

Are you missing out on sales by not helping your customers find the perfect domain name?

Offering Premium Domains from OpenSRS is one great way to help customer find the right name, and complete the sale. Implementing Premium Names is easier than you might think.

Here’s a couple of different ways to get started with Premium Domains:

Offer a “domain search consultancy” service to help customers find the right domain
Implement Premium Domains results into your search results using the OpenSRS API
Look through existing customer domains for domains with dashes and add-on words and cross-reference for better options from the Premium Domains database

Lots More Help to Get You Started

To help you out with both customer education pre-sale, and to help you or your staff when they are making the sale, we’ve put together some information about Premium Domains, including why you should consider offering them as part of your suite of services.

You’ll also find a new Premium Domains end-user FAQ in our Marketing Resource section that’s ready for you to grab and use to help make the case with your customers that they should be willing to pay a bit more for a Premium Domain rather than settling for something that isn’t quite as good.

We answer questions like “Why are these Premium Domains more expensive than ‘regular’ domains?” and “Why should I consider spending more on this Premium Domain vs. an available domain?”

Those new materials are in addition to the existing Premium Domains video (found on that same page).

Boosting Sales by Adding SSL to Your Product Line-up

Last week I had the pleasure to host a webinar with one of our new Trust Service partners, Trustwave. In that session, Dan Marfione, Trustwave’s Partner Sales Director, SSL, gave resellers some background on Trustwave and talked at length about how adding SSL to your product line up can help boost sales and help your bottom line.

Some of the key things Dan pointed out during his presentation:

SSL isn’t just for banks and big business: there’s a real need for SSL to provide encryption right across the spectrum of Internet users. End-user confidence in Internet data security is not good right now thanks to some recent high-profile hacks. Whether your customers are mid-sized businesses with an e-commerce website, or just a small business that has a small mailing list and collects a little customer data, the transmission of that data needs to be encrypted in order to instill a sense of confidence in customers.
Higher-end SSL products like Extended Validation (EV) certificates aren’t just for the big guys anymore: Extended Validation certificates provided end-users with peace of mind. Not only is their data encrypted, but they know who they are sending it to. Again, that’s key in providing confidence to end-users and customers that they can trust who they choose to deal with online.

Customer Education is Key When Offering SSL

When it comes to offering SSL to your customers, Dan pointed out that it’s important to ensure they know what is involved in the process. Whether it’s an Easy Trust domain validated certificate, a Premium SSL organization validated certificate, or a Premium EV extended validation certificate, you need to make sure your customer knows what to expect during the validation process and what documentation is required of them.

Dan did a great job explaining the process from start to finish for each certificate type so you can be sure to not only make the initial sale, but also make sure that your customer gets that certificate validated and issued as quickly as possible.

To help you understand the buying and provisioning process, I showed you how easy the new Trust Manager in the OpenSRS Control Panel makes it to provision a new SSL certificate. I went step-by-step through the process of ordering, validating and receiving an Easy Trust domain-validated SSL certificate and showed you the emails that go out, and explained the process that your customers will go through to have an SSL certificate ordered and in their inbox in minutes.

On-demand Recording Available

If you missed the presentation, we’ve archived the session for you on OpenSRS.com. Click here and you’ll be able to view that recording on-demand, at any time.

For more information on Trustwave and the full line up of Trustwave SSL products available through OpenSRS, including the lowest cost DV certificate we offer, visit the Trustwave SSL product page.

Congratulations to Our Winners

We also want to pass along our congratulations to three lucky attendees. Thanks to Trustwave, we gave away an iPad 2, an iPod Touch and a $25 iTunes gift card to three attendees in a random drawing following the webinar.

Jason Klien was the winner of the iPad
Doug McIntyre won the iPod Touch
Arvind Parmar will receive the iTunes gift card.

Leveraging Content to Drive Acquisition

I’m at BlogWorld Expo in New York this week learning all about the relationship between content and marketing, and how you can turn your content, and your customer’s content into a tool to grow your business.

Disclaimer right off the top: this isn’t your usual “you need a blog” blog post. You do need a blog, but the truth is that beyond needing a blog, what you really need is a content strategy. In the spirit of openness around sharing with our Resellers, I’ll tell you this – we’re still learning about content and marketing ourselves, just as you are and I’m super excited about some of the insights I picked up today at BlogWorld.

I’m not going to go in depth on anything right here, but I do want to cover off a few of the big things that I picked up in sessions today that I think will be of use to you in your business. If you want to check out some of my notes from the sessions I attended today, I’ve opened up that part of my Evernote collection to you. Check that out here. And if you have any questions, hit me in the comments, through my personal Twitter account or through @OpenSRS (I’m ^JK).

I’ll give you three neat things that made me go “Oh, wow!” today when I heard them:

Having a content strategy is key. It’s not enough to have content. You need to create the right content. That means thinking about and identifying what your core subject is, then finding some related topics, your passions, and even looking at content that’s already out there that you can use. There’s more in my notes for “Building your Content Bubble” with David Murray. Great session – follow @davemurr on Twitter and check out his blog for lots more.
Pick a niche and dominate it. Identify your customers, figure out what they want and then target keywords and categories to provide content that they will find through searches. They have problems, you have the solutions – use your content to help them find you and it will lead to customer acquisition. There’s lots more in the notes from “Dominate Your Niche with Social SEO for Blogs” with Lee Odden. Lee blogs as well, and can be found on Twitter @leeodden. Worth checking out.
Social Media can drive customer acquisition big time. No, seriously – it can. And you can measure it and prove it. Case studies showed how you can induce your customers to create the right content for you, then leverage that content to drive more potential customers to your site. The secret to getting people to share content is to let them share their content. I just about fell off my chair at this point..of course! Lots more in the notes for “Using Social Media Marketing to Drive Acquisition” with Chris Baggott including those real-world case studies. Check out Chris’ posts at Compendium.com and follow him on Twitter @chrisbaggott for more.

More to come!

I’ll be taking notes again tomorrow and sharing more thoughts throughout the day both through Evernote, here on the blog and on my Twitter account, @jameskoole. No worries – I don’t live tweet sessions! You won’t be annoyed, I promise.

Meet our Reseller: UsableWeb

We’ve added another great “Meet our Reseller” profile – this time around we’re making the trek over to Greece, where OpenSRS Reseller UsableWeb Ltd is the market leader in hosting and domain registrations for both business and consumers. The operate under two brands: pataki.gr and TopHost.gr.

I spoke with Usableweb founder Dimitris Anthoulakis and he graciously explained UsableWeb’s approach, talked about their partnership with OpenSRS and provided some really good insights on the Greek hosting market in general. From talking to him, it’s clear that Dimitris sees lots of opportunity for growth in Greece.

“More and more businesses are realizing the importance of an online presence and the Greek market will grow significantly the coming years,” he says. “The fact that Greece ranks 23rd in Europe in terms of Internet penetration means that there are huge opportunities for growth for our company.”

We’re super happy to be working with UsableWeb in Greece!

→ Click here to read Meet our Reseller: UsableWeb