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.

Most of our offices will be closed from the afternoon of December 23, 2011 through to January 2, 2012. We’ll be back in the offices on January 3 all ready to serve you in the new year. As always our dedicated team of Technical Support reps continues to be available 24/7 to assist you.
Here are the specific hours by department:

Please note: during this closure, there will be no orders or requests processed for the following Service Bureau ccTLDs: .at, .fr, .ch, .li, .dk and .mx.

Happy Holidays to you, your colleagues and your families during this holiday season and the new year!

ICM Registry notified OpenSRS and other registrars of this extension earlier this week but asked that we not officially announce the extension. Instead, they suggested that we should simply continue to accept applications until the new closing date of Monday, October 31, 2011.

Now that some other registrars are announcing the extension, we do want to assure you that OpenSRS is also accepting Sunrise applications until Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 16:00 UTC.

While we’re on the subject of .XXX, the Landrush phase of the launch begins on November 8th, 2011. Landrush allows members of the Sponsored Community to apply to secure domains prior to the General Availability phase which happens in early December. More information is available on our .XXX launch Information page.

If you have any questions about the launch of .XXX, don’t hesitate to contact Reseller Support.

These two new Comodo SSL Digital Certificates — Comodo SSL and Comodo SSL Wildcard — are exclusive to OpenSRS at launch.

Both new products are available today through the Trust Manager tab in OpenSRS Control Panel and via the OpenSRS API. Full pricing and product details for these and the rest of the Comodo SSL product line is available on our website.

Powerful, Affordable Protection

• Comodo SSL provides powerful, cost-effective security to e-commerce sites. Comodo SSL provides all the same features as the rest of the Comodo SSL line, including 256-bit encryption along with the widely recognized Comodo site seal.
• Comodo SSL Wildcard adds wildcard support allowing purchasers to protect unlimited sub-domains with a single SSL certificate.

More Choice

These two new SSL products from Comodo further expand the OpenSRS Trust Service product line-up. With even more choice in brands and products across a range of price points, our Resellers have the ability to satisfy the varied security needs of their customers, from individuals to small businesses and right up to the largest enterprise customers.

Congratulations to Jeff Layton of Tech One Computer Solutions in Pennsylvania, USA. Jeff sold a Trustwave SSL certificate during the promotional period and was the lucky winner of an Apple iPad 2 when we did the drawing earlier this week.

Like many OpenSRS Resellers, Jeff runs a computer and web consulting business in his part of the world, providing services to small businesses in his community.

Congratulations to Jeff, and thanks to all of you who participated. Thanks also to Trustwave for providing the prize.

Shopping for pumpkins in Ottawa (courtesy Wikipedia)

Monday, October 10th, 2011 is Canadian Thanksgiving, which means that our headquarters in Toronto will be operating on holiday hours.

Typical Canadians – Always Trying to Be Different

For trivia buffs, there’s a really good reason why Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October while Americans wait until November (and no, it’s not because we’ll be snowed in – har, har). A quick check of the Book of Knowledge (aka Wikipedia) reveals the following:

“By the end of the 19th Century, Thanksgiving Day was normally celebrated on November 6. However, when World War I ended, the Armistice Day holiday was usually held during the same week. To prevent the two holidays from clashing with one another, in 1957 the Canadian Parliament proclaimed Thanksgiving to be observed on its present date on the second Monday of October.”

So there you have it – we’re just trying to avoid conflict in our usual Canadian way.

Holiday Hours

Now on to the official business: Our Technical Support team continues to be available 24/7 to assist you. Please note that during this closure, there will be:

• No orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: .at, .fr, .ch, .li, .dk, .com.mx
• No special processing for .ca (registrant transfers, conflicting and municipal registrations) or .eu/.be (redemptions).

Here are the hours by department:

Our normal hours will resume on Tuesday, October 11. Have a safe and enjoyable holiday!

This first public release of the WHMCS Plugin for OpenSRS includes:

• Improved support for ccTLDs
• Name Suggestion Tool lookups
• Full DNS Management (using the OpenSRS DNS Service)
• EPP Lookup support
• Domain renewal support
• Nameserver registration
• Improved Administration Interface
• Whois Privacy support including the ability enable and disable WHOIS Privacy
• Tech contact locking
• Registrant username and password bypass
• Increased security
• Better authentication error handling/messaging

Available for Download Now

Download the current release (v4.5) in .ZIP format: WHMCS OpenSRS Module v4.5 (574KB).

We’ll continue to refine and improve the plugin and we’d love to hear your feedback on how things work so far. The best place for that is in the OpenSRS Forums, specifically in the Developers/API area. We have an active thread going and we encourage you to try the module out and provide any feedback you might have.

Other 3rd Party Tools

This new WHMCS plugin gives our Resellers more ways to integrate with OpenSRS. We are also working on official plugins for Parallels including PBA, PBAS and Parallels Plesk as we announced at HostingCon 2011.

For a full listing of third-party hosting panels and billing systems that feature OpenSRS support, visit our our 3rd Party Plugins page.

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.

Joe Wolff won a $50 Amazon gift card simply by selling a Trustwave SSL certificate in August. Customers who buy from eRacks.com are now nicely protected with 256-bit encryption thanks to a Trustwave Premium SSL with Wildcard cert.

Remember that this incentive program continues through the end of September. We’ll have another surprise winner to announce sometime in September. And one lucky reseller will win an iPad 2 courtesy Trustwave. All the details on the promotion are here.

First, the official business: Our Technical Support team continues to be available 24/7 to assist you. Please note that during this closure, there will be:

• No orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: .at, .fr, .ch, .li, .dk, .com.mx
• No special processing for .ca (registrant transfers, conflicting and municipal registrations) or .eu/.be (redemptions).

Here are the hours by department:

About Labour Day

With that stuff out of the way, I will note that I used to find it kind of ironic that we celebrate Labour Day by not working. However, a quick read on Wikipedia revealed that the origins of Labour Day in Canada can be traced back to December 1872 when a parade was staged in support of the Toronto Typographical Union’s strike for a 58-hour work-week. Makes much more sense!

Absolutely True Facts about Canadians

As is also the tradition here on the blog, I’ll now provide some interesting insights and facts about what we do on long weekends in Canada so that we can further some stereotypes about Canadians.

Here in Ontario, Labour Day is an official day of mourning for kids, and a day of wild celebrations for parents (by government proclaimation). You see, it’s the unofficial last day of summer as everyone is back to school dark and early on Tuesday morning.

It’s also yet another opportunity for many Canadians to drink beer and head for the cottage (preferably in the opposite order – drive to the cottage, then drink beer – Arrive Alive. Drive Sober). In fact, this weekend is one of the last chances to get out on the water before the switchover from jet skis to snowmobiles happens (typical September weather for Toronto is shown to the right).

Those that stick around the city, especially here in Toronto, get to enjoy the last couple of days of the Canadian National Exhibition (the Ex!) just a few minutes south of the Tucows head office at the CNE grounds. It’s deep-fried everything for two weeks. Last year it was deep fried butter…this year it’s deep fried Coke!