Posts in: Partners and Resellers

Meet the Resellers: Heart Internet

UK-based hosting provider Heart Internet, OpenSRS reseller since 2004, relies on OpenSRS to provide backend solutions for domain name registrations, SSL certificates and new services like goMobi that will help the company maintain the impressive growth rate that places it at the top of the heap in the UK.

Co-founders Jonathan Brealey and Tim Beresford started heart Internet in 2004. The pair, who had already created two successful businesses in Webfusion and 123-Reg, created Heart Internet to address what they perceived to be shortcomings in existing hosting provider offerings.

Jonathan Brealey, Co-founder, Heart Internet

“It was in a period where any hosting provision was really technical and quite poor and we saw an opportunity to make it easier,” says Jonathan Brealey, co-founder and Director at Heart Internet. To address the need, Heart Internet built a custom hosting control panel at a time when few other companies offered them. Heart combined the easy-to-use panels with hosting packages aimed at resellers.

“That’s an approach that’s still central to our business – making things easier,” says Brealey. From the start, Heart Internet looked to resellers as a way to extend its reach and also as a way to stay lean and focused on further developing its products and services.

“We get to deal with customers who are savvy and understand what they are doing,” explains Brealey. “Thanks to our resellers, we service a large number of websites, but we don’t have a lot of contact with customers because we have our customers who are reselling handling that relationship.”

Wide Range of Reseller Customers

Brealey says they have a good mix of resellers, including full-service agency customers that Heart Internet continues to help expand and develop important customer relationships. “We tell them that if they are selling someone a web site for a few thousand Pounds, then you definitely have inroads to sell hosting, domains and SSL to them as well.”

And for Heart Internet’s smaller resellers, generally one-to-three man shops doing web-design and development, Brealey says offering new solutions like goMobi makes a lot of sense. “We’re reaching out and explaining how to offer services to existing customers like goMobi as a £10 add-on.”

Why OpenSRS?

Heart Internet chose OpenSRS because they were looking for a service provider with a technical background. With innovation comes the need for partners who can provide backend services that keep pace.

Brealey says OpenSRS has always been a good fit. “You guys are technical and that’s how we like it,” he says. “Our developers like your API and the flexibility it offers us in terms of automating our services and keeping costs down.”

It’s a relationship that’s worked well for both companies as Heart Internet continues to bring its unique mix of innovation and simple-to-use, but powerful services to its customers.

Still Growing Fast

The company’s strategy continues to pay dividends. In 2009, Heart Internet found itself second on the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 fastest growing technology companies list and was recognized as the fastest growing Internet company in the UK. In 2010, they again made the Fast 50 list, demonstrating the incredible growth opportunities that continue to exist in the Internet and hosting space in the UK.

Heart Internet plans to maintain that growth and momentum by continuing to innovate and by bringing new services and ideas to their resellers to offer to their customers. For example, Heart Internet recently rolled out an innovative service that looks up usernames on popular social media sites like Twitter and Foursquare at the same time as a domain search availability search. Touches like this are what keep them ahead of the competition.

Meet the Resellers: Softcom

Through its myhosting.com and mail2web.com brands, Softcom, an OpenSRS Reseller since 2000, has established itself as a leading provider of web hosting and business communication services to small business and small to mid-sized enterprises in 140 countries around the world.

In addition to web hosting, Softcom provides messaging and collaboration services to more than 25,000 businesses worldwide, consisting of well over 2 million mailboxes.

Founded in 1997, Softcom has offices in Toronto, New York and Turkey.

Enterprise Email, Competitive Pricing, Personal Service: The Market for SMEs

In the early days of web and email hosting, Softcom realized that small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) were underserved by existing offerings in the marketplace.

There were many no-frills email services designed for consumers and small business, but rapidly growing businesses with 50-100 employees or more, looking for advanced mail solutions with enterprise features were either forced to build and manage their own mail infrastructure, or shoehorn themselves into a service that was not right for them.

Softcom knew why this market was under-served: SMEs have similar demands to large enterprises, but without the big IT -spend budgets, and they can be a difficult niche to support because of their unique requirements. To be successful in this niche, Softcom had to accommodate the uniqueness of each customer and do so as efficiently as possible.

Leveraging Trusted Partners

To keep its razor sharp focus, Softcom leverages the expertise of key partners such as OpenSRS.

“You can build a hosting provider yourself from the ground up, but you’ll have a very difficult time staying ahead in a game like that.” says Celal Ulgen, Softcom’s chief marketing officer. “We’ve partnered with the best vendors in the world when it comes to spam and anti-virus, data retention, control panel automation and domain registration management. When you have relationships with best-in-breed vendors, you don’t have to make excuses.”

Mr. Ulgen is proud of what his company has built. “By partnering with vendors like OpenSRS, we can focus on all the little details that are important to the small enterprise. For example: organizations might not need certain premium features for every employee in the company. We went to great lengths in our service to let customers design their own service plans based on their own unique needs. They pay only for the features they need.”

OpenSRS Reseller Since 2000

Prior to 2000, Softcom didn’t have a long term strategy for domain name registrations. Business either brought their own domains with them, or new domains were registered manually by Softcom’s team.

When it came time to talk about domain names, Softcom had some hefty requirements. They needed a partner that was going to be around for a long time, with experience in private label wholesale services and the same focus on customer service in which Softcom prides itself. They also needed a platform that could integrate easily with their existing platform and had batch management features to handle the many thousands of domain names Softcom would be managing.

“I’ve been in this business for a long time. When ICANN opened up the Registry to other registrars, OpenSRS became the first wholesale-only domain name provider in the world. We did look at some other options in the market, but in the end OpenSRS was the obvious choice thanks to their API and the sheer focus they place on the needs of their resellers. More than ten years later, it is one of the strongest partnerships we have.”

Meet the Resellers: (mt) Media Temple

They are often considered to be a tough bunch to please, but OpenSRS Reseller (mt) Media Temple has built an extremely successful hosting business by catering to the specific needs of web designers and taking a customer-centric approach to everything they do.

Those often tough-to-please designers demand a hosting provider that they can trust to host their customers’ sites dependably and reliably. That meant Media Temple needed partners that they could count on to provide the same level of service.

They rely on OpenSRS to provide a worry-free solution to domain name registration and management that’s fully integrated into their advanced hosting platform.

Premium Hosting, Premium Service

Media Temple offers a premium level of hosting and customer service. The company, in turn, looks to its partners, including OpenSRS, to help them provide that higher level of technology and service.

Rather than competing for customers at the low-end of the hosting market, they instead pioneered innovative solutions like their (gs) Grid-Service along with being early providers of both virtual server technology and affordable dedicated hardware options.

“We made the decision to be a quality host – we’re in high-end data centers, and we use high-end hardware from HP,” says Alex Capehart, VP Business Development, (mt) Media Temple, who adds that, “sometimes the technology of what we do gets lost behind the marketing or branding.”

OpenSRS Reseller Since 2003

Media Temple has been an OpenSRS Reseller since it began offering domain names back in 2003. The company chose to outsource domain registration and management to OpenSRS so that they could focus their efforts on what they do best – providing superior hosting and customer support to their customers.

“You guys have done a great job for us,” says Capehart. “You’re always asking us, ‘What more can we do for you?’ whether it’s adding new TLDs or other services like SSL certificates. When it made sense for us to do it, we could count on you to be there for us.”

Media Temple also recognizes the importance of providing a single interface to manage domains and hosting. Their custom control panel allows customers to manage all aspects of their hosting packages, utilizing the OpenSRS API to completely integrate domain name management into their system.

Capehart says offering this kind of complete integration is key.“There’s no good reason to send customers to another provider for domains,” he says. “Keeping them within our own eco-system ensures that they are getting our awesome customer service and support and a consistent experience throughout the process.”

Committed to people

As part of the commitment to customer service, the company works to maintain its corporate culture, providing an enjoyable and challenging workplace, where employees are empowered to make the customer feel wanted and appreciated.

“The company was built on that and we haven’t seen anything that works better than having happy employees and happy customers,” says Capehart. “It doesn’t matter how big you are, as long as you maintain that high-touch approach, you’ll be successful.”

The company believes that a continued focus on people, combined with in-house development of its hosting infrastructure, along with key partnerships with companies like OpenSRS, will ensure future success in a competitive environment.

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.

"No Hassle Renewals" at Hover

Here’s another discovery we made at Hover that you can consider implementing.

Renewals were our number one support issue, accounting for 36% of support tickets opened. A lot of those calls and emails came from customers (or friends, relatives, colleagues and assistants of customers) that could not sign in to their account. So, we developed a renewal process that no longer required folks to sign in. Now we are getting fewer support calls and we are solving renewal-related problems much more quickly.

You can read the more complete story here.

If you have any questions about how we did this or need any help with implementation, please feel free to email me directly at mgoldstein@tucows.com.