A Winner in our Trustwave SSL Incentive Program

We have a grand prize winner to announce in our Trustwave SSL Incentive Program.

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.

Holiday Hours for Canadian Thanksgiving, October 10

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:

Department	Dates and Hours
Technical Support	Regular hours
Payments	Email support: payments@opensrs.org
Compliance	Closed October 10th (Monday)
Service Bureau	Closed October 10th (Monday)

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

OpenSRS WHMCS Module Now Available

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.

Announcing Google AdWords Credits through OpenSRS Offers

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.

Meet our Reseller: HostingPanama

A couple of months ago we had the opportunity to sit down with Eduardo Vilá, Chief Sales Officer for HostingPanama while we were at HostingCon 2011. We spoke at length about the business, the market in Panama and beyond, and how HostingPanama’s partnership with OpenSRS is working for them.

You can read more about HostingPanama in the latest article in our Meet Our Resellers series.

We love working with the leading hosting companies in countries around the world – companies just like HostingPanama. And we’re committed to helping all of our resellers to continue to grow their businesses even further. Special thanks to Eduardo and his staff for taking the time to hang out with us in San Diego.

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