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By: James Koole on October 4th, 2011
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: Holiday Hours
Comments: 0

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!

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 3rd, 2011
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: Integration, WHMCS
Comments: 10

We’re happy to announce a new officially supported module that integrates OpenSRS into the popular hosting control panel WHMCS. This module is developed by OpenSRS for use by our Resellers.

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.

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By: OpenSRS Team on September 29th, 2011
Posted in: Announcements
Tags:
Comments: 21

We’re pleased to announce the latest addition to our Reseller Friendly promise: OpenSRS Offers. This new service will allow you to share special promotional offers with your customers. These promotional offers can be used as incentives for new customers or rewards for existing customers, and will help you stand out from the competition.

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.

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By: OpenSRS Team on August 31st, 2011
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: trustwave, winner
Comments: 0

We have another winner to announce in our Trustwave SSL incentive program.

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.

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By: James Koole on August 29th, 2011
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: Canadians, Holiday Hours
Comments: 0

Next Monday, September 6, 2011, is Labour Day here in Canada (aka Labor Day if you are in the USA) and that means some special hours for a few departments here at OpenSRS.

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!