Thank you OpenSRS, and apologies to my friends resellers who are
unhappy
I feel I have a strong part in this new offering
I have been requesting DNS services from OpenSRS for over a year now and
am very happy to see OpenSRS listened.
We are in to 100 or so resellers category and developed our own domain
forwarding and email forwarding features that we made available to our
customer base at no extra charge as part of domain registration (
somehow we felt in late 2001 that offering this service will become
mainstreem shortly since more and more cometitors were offering ir
without additional costs to the customers ). We promote domain
registrations to attract new customers who will subsequently consider us
as one of the hosting options when they are ready to host their domain.
We aspire to a situation where a customer who registered their domains
with us this year wont leave us next year when it is time to renew their
domains. We can take care of human part of customer retention equation,
providing good support. It makes sense for us to relinquish certain
technical aspects of domain maintenance to our suppliers. Having 10,000
zones at suppliers DNS at $2500 yearly cost looks like a fair deal to
me. Our people spend an average 200 hours per year maintaining DNS
zones. Right there, its paid off. Not mentioning the cost of
bandwidth, hardware, software, programing to keep up with this thing.
Our DNS zone file count is in 5 figures now - out of which good 50% of
these zones are obsolete. Our DNS is semi human managed. Over the past
2 years domain forwarding, emal forwarding have become standard customer
expectation. Our customer grows more e-intelligent daily and is only
click of a mouse away from competition offering these features built
into their standard domain registration. Over the time, more and more
phonecalls ring in our offices with "Do you also offer online DNS
control panel?" "Can I forward my email to separate email addresses?"
"The so and so offers this and I wanted to check with you before I move
my domains to them 'cause you guys always gave me a good service" We
also check with the customers who transfer their domains to another
Registrar: a strong percentage quotes price issues and another big chunk
of clients quote online DNS control panel - or the lack of in our
case...
We have worked hard to acquire our customer base and customer retention
takes priority over customer acquisition, it is far cheaper to keep
existing customers happy than acquiring and TRAINING new ones. Every
time I have to say "Sorry Mr. Customer, we do not offer that service", I
cringe.... I would much rather say: "Yes, it is built in to your domain
registration" or "Yes, this is an add on feature this is how you can
order it on our site" so I would give our customer less opportunities
to leave us.
I think that having the ability to choose from the evergrowing OpenSRS
menu is important.
- we no longer add on exotic SLD's unless we have extra time to
integrate the code or one of our larger accounts requests them so they
can keep their domains in one place
- we do not utilize Tucows SSL offering as we have a direct relationship
with a lower cost provider, (Although this other low cost provider has
happily taken direct reorders from our customers without comissioning us
on the sales and continues to Market to our Customer base, circumventing
us)
- we do not offer Tucows email add on service because we offer our own
as an add on hosting
- I wholehartedly welcome outsourcing DNS at the righ price so we can
offload/trade that particular area of our overhead responsibility.
I do not feel threatened that Tucows SSL offering impacts our own SSL
sales nor do I feel that Tucows offering Email services impacted our own
email sales. It had zero effect on us. Being able to pick and choose
from Tucows menu is critical. For our part, being able to utilize
Tucowns DNS will result in either increased sales (if we decide to
upcharge for the service) or in lowered deffection ratio/lowered costs
of maintaining customers if we absorb the cost increase and make the
service part of standard domain registration as fewer customers will
have a reason to leave us and we can eliminate several hours per week
worth of labour since our DNS is semi-human managed at present.
I tend view domain registration and management as a commodity, the price
expectations are down, feature expectations are up. Look 6 to 12
months forward after you have looked 6 to 12 months back. So much has
changed in this market over the past year, the same change is imminent
in the next 12 months and the only way to stay in this game is to
continuously strive to anticipate our market direction for the next 12
months and try to be ahead of the curve. Our $15 domain registrations
were a novelty and one of the most competitive out there in year 2000,
offering just plain domain registration at that price in year 2000 was
enough on its own merit to convert a any potential domain registrant to
a customer. Today it is not the case. An average potential customer
will visit 4 or 5 domain registration sites and make a choice based on
several features: price to features ratio, level of support and
accessibility of support offered, credibility of the site, functionality
of the site,... If we succeed in converting a browser to a buyer and
perform well to their expectations, they will faithfully return to us
for their hosting needs when they are ready to take that step with their
domain plans.
cheers
Genie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Tue Oct 19 2004 - 23:37:44 EDT