There are scheduled windows in the coming week:

MOBI:
The .MOBI registry has a scheduled maintenance on Saturday, July 4, 2009 UTC.

Date: Saturday, July 4, 2009
Time: 15:00 - 19:00 UTC
Duration: 4 hours
Your local time: Start to End

.UK
The .UK registry has a scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 UTC.

Date: Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Time: 06:00 - 07:00 UTC
Duration: 1 hour
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact for both windows:
Domain provisioning and Whois will be unavailable. Customers who have enabled provisioning queuing will have their orders queued until this complete. Domains will continue to resolve.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Amy Armitage, Director of Business Development at Lunarpages.

Amy Armitage, Lunarpages

James McNally (JM): How long has Lunarpages been doing business and what are all the services you offer to your customers?

Amy Armitage (AA): Lunarpages Web Hosting launched in 1998 providing free Linux web hosting. In 2001, we began charging for our services, providing a personal web hosting plan and domain name registrations via OpenSRS. As we saw growth and a demand for more services, we launched Business hosting, then Dedicated, VPS, Windows, and even a website-builder and hosting plan all in one, Quicksite.

We host the biggest and the best in the industry, utilizing the knowledge that has made us one of the largest web hosts in the world. We tailor each web hosting solution to fit the unique needs of our diverse clientele, ensuring that webmasters at every level can build, design, and launch their businesses and projects with our help every step of the way. We really try to cater to every customer.

JM: Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

AA: I think our beginnings are very interesting. Lunarpages started in the recreation room of our CEO’s house, and our first two servers were housed in a wardrobe! The wardrobe was actually built by our CEO’s son, so he often jokes that he “built” our first data center. ;)

After a few months of providing low-resource free hosting, the demand for bigger and better plans grew, and we started charging for our services and gathering staff to support our customers. And of course we eventually had to move to a new data center!

Today we have servers in three data centers and we employ more than 100 staff and remote contractors from all over the world. And we made the Inc. 5000 list in 2008!

JM: How did you personally get into the Internet business?

AA: I was looking to learn how to build a web site, so I signed up for free hosting with Lunarpages. As a customer, I lurked in their forums for a few weeks before posting my questions. As time went by, I started helping other new webmasters with their questions based on what I had learned myself. The Lunarpages founders asked me to administrate their forums, I recruited customers as moderators, and when we finally started charging for the service, they employed me to work in the support department. From there, I then employed my moderators and built out our support team.

After running their remote support division for a few years from Australia, they asked me to relocate to California to head up Business Development and I’ve been living here for four years now!

Tomorrowland, Disneyland Resort, Anaheim, California

JM: Where are you located and what makes it such a great place to do business?

AA: We are located in Anaheim, California. I think the fact that we can utilize the bigger local data centers and facilities is one of the principal advantages to doing business here. Having the technical resources and large scale partners close to us (and a central location) makes it easier to provide lower cost and higher level services. Plus being in a big city makes it much easier to find qualified system admins, network engineers, and support staff.

JM: Are you sure that proximity to Tomorrowland had nothing to do with it?

AA: Well…we did base choosing our central office location on its mileage from Disneyland…and yes, we do take our lunch breaks to ride Space Mountain…and maybe sometimes our CEO comes in late because he was taking pictures with Mickey Mouse…but we think that’s pretty normal. ;)

JM: How long have you been an OpenSRS Reseller and how has your partnership with OpenSRS helped your company succeed?

AA: We have been partnered with OpenSRS since the beginning actually, so almost 10 years now! OpenSRS is such a fantastic partner for us. They are knowledgeable, professional, and offer a full arsenal of services to help grow our business.

They offer us a high level of communication and support and many ideas to increase revenue and opportunities for our clients.

JM: What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

AA: Bring us more t-shirts, cows, and yo-yos ;)

If you’re a reseller interested in sharing your story with our readers, get in touch with me (jamesmATopensrsDOTcom). We’d love to hear from you!

Special thanks to Flickr user Joe Penniston for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

Last week a bunch of OpenSRS people, including Adam Eisner, Director, Domain Services, were in Sydney, Australia at the 35th International Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). One of the big happenings at the meeting was the signing of a five-year extension of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN.

All global top-level domains (gTLDs) sold through OpenSRS, the Reseller services division of Tucows, are governed by this agreement.

This new RAA has two impacts on OpenSRS Resellers:

1. The ICANN fee for gTLD domain purchases is reduced by two cents to USD$0.18 effective July 1st, 2009. Pricing in OpenSRS will be updated to reflect the change in the ICANN fee effective July 1st, 2009.
2. A change in how WHOIS privacy data is handled will impact a very small subset of Resellers who are operating their own WHOIS Privacy service apart from the Contact Privacy that is included in all eligible domains sold through OpenSRS.

We have put together a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for our Resellers, but if you have any questions about the new RAA which are not covered there, feel free to contact us as at newRAA@opensrs.com.

Tomorrow is Canada Day and Tucows HQ here in Toronto will be operating on holiday hours.

The picture of Canada’s flag is courtesy of Ian Muttoo. Thanks for making your photo available under a Creative Commons license!

Here’s a list of departments along with any special holiday hours for Wednesday July 1st, 2009:

Nominet maintains the authoritative primary name server for the co.uk, me.uk, org.uk, net.uk, plc.uk and ltd.uk zones. This ccTLD (country-code top-level domain) began in the 1980s with a voluntary group handling the administration. In 1996 as demand for company domains rose, Nominet was created as a private, not-for-profit registry operator. Since that time Nominet has demonstrated their Internet leadership by publishing their mandate and by providing extensive reports such as their Domain Name Industry Reports and Registrant surveys. Nominet is also helping you promote renewals with their dedicated site called Keep your .UK.

Nominet sponsors a Best Practice Challenge, which is designed to recognize British organizations, groups, or people who work to make the Internet a more secure, open and diverse place. Some of the websites recognized are being used in training seniors to use computers, raising Internet standards, and protecting children online. Even the renowned British Library is using .UK. Some of the most famous businesses in the United Kingdom use this domain extension, too, from banks to boots.

.UK Quick Facts

• There are 7.5 million .UK domain names under management.
• Nominet is the registry operator.
• .UK is the third largest ccTLD with 13.6% of the market share.
• Renewal rates of .uk domains were approximately 70% in the previous 12 months.
• Domains older than two years have a higher rate of renewal.

Available Resources

• .UK News page
• Domain Industry Reports
• Marketing Resources
• How .UK works (PDF)
• Member lunches and Registrar events
• RSS feeds
• Technical Blog
• Insight – management blog
• Discussion lists

OpenSRS Domains (Managed DNS only) (revised June 30, 2009)
We have a 45-minute maintenance for OpenSRS Domains (Managed DNS) on Thursday, July 2, 2009. Within this time, Managed DNS customers will experience a brief 10 -15 minute provisioning delay.

Date: Thursday, July 2, 2009
Time: 20:00 -20:15 UTC
Your Local Time: Start to End
Duration:10 -15 minute provisioning delay; 45 minutes (in total) for the maintenance

Service impact:
Managed DNS will experience a provisioning delay within the window of up to 15 minutes.  We will be conducting back-end infrastructure work which requires us to temporarily queue your requests for Managed DNS. Once the work is complete, all items will be processed.

All other OpenSRS services will be fully available. Domains will continue to resolve.

.MOBI:
The .MOBI registry has a scheduled maintenance on Saturday, July 4, 2009.

Date: Saturday, July 4, 2009
Time: 15:00 - 19:00 UTC
Duration: 4 hours
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact:
Domain provisioning and Whois will be unavailable. Customers who have enabled provisioning queuing will have their orders queued until this complete. Domains will continue to resolve.

Cross-posted with permission from The WHIR

Adam Eisner, Director, Domain Services for OpenSRS is in Sydney, Australia attending ICANN’s 35th International Meeting. While he’s there, Adam will be writing regular reports for The Web Hosting Industry Review (The WHIR). Thanks to The WHIR for letting us cross-post Adam’s entries here.

Original article

In my last post I discussed some of the planned proposals for new domain name extensions that had emerged here in Sydney. Although on the surface new domain name extensions are very exciting, the notion of potentially introducing hundreds of new gTLDs has created some polarizing issues. Many of these are being fervently discussed here at the conference.

At one session, a very animated discussion took place around the separation of registries and registrars. Domain name extensions are operated by organizations typically referred to as “registries”. VeriSign, for example, is the registry behind the operation of .COM and .NET. Per their agreements with ICANN, registries cannot sell domain names to the public directly; instead, they are required to use registrars (of which Tucows is one).

But what would happen if a registrar participated in a bid for one (or more) of these new gTLDs? Would registries and registrars really need to be fully separated? Is it a conflict of interest to operate as both? Although no decisions were ultimately made at the conference, the topic was hotly debated, and heated discussions on the issue are sure to continue.

Another issue discussed at length was the interests of trademark holders versus those of the larger Internet as it pertained to registrations of names under these new extensions. While new gTLDs will likely mean more choice, it could also open the window for exponentially more abuse by cybersquatters and other nefarious entities. Securing your company name in the popular .COM, .NET and .ORG forms can be difficult as it is. Now imagine potentially trying to secure it in dozens, or even hundreds, of new extensions. The notion has many in the community concerned, and a team was put together to recommend an approach. The team’s ultimate recommendation was a sort of centralized “clearinghouse” concept: a universal database containing trademark information for registries and registrars to consult. The recommendation was scrutinized and discussed at length during the conference, and it became immediately clear there were many both for and against the solution. This is another issue which is sure to be discussed and reviewed at length in the coming months.

Neither these nor many other issues related to gTLDs will be resolved at this meeting. In fact, ICANN doesn’t yet have a fully definitive timeline for they will be introduced to the market (best guesses at this point is late 2010). However, the purpose of these meetings isn’t to always come up with ultimate conclusions; rather, they’re for the Internet community to come together to discuss major issues at hand and collaborate on solutions.

In this Meet OpenSRS series we will talk to people from our Technical Support, NOC (Network Operations Center), Ops (Operations), Security and Development teams. We know you count on us to give you high levels of service, so that you can manage your businesses. Our goal is to give you an inside view into how we support and maintain your OpenSRS services.

In these three 5-minute videos, we talk with a few folks from our NOC and Support teams. We refer to our OpenSRS tailored ITIL/ITSM process for ticket handling which uses 4 basic types of tickets (Request, Incident, Change and Problem). In today’s videos we will focus on Request and Incident tickets. Requests are tickets that you submit to our Technical Support team via reseller.supportATopensrsDOTcom or calling us (Toll Free Phone: 1-800-371-6992 or Toll Free Phone (Intl): + 800-371-69922). These tickets are reviewed by Technical Support and can be handled using their expertise or escalated to the NOC for further investigation. If the NOC receives a ticket, it becomes an Incident ticket. They work with Technical Support and other teams to resolve issues. Incident tickets are also created by NOC for items identified by internal troubleshooting or monitoring. (We will talk about Problem and Change tickets later this month when we focus on Operations). All tickets are rated by the type of issue, the service or functionality affected and the number of users affected, so that we can address and report issues in a timely manner.

The first video features Kevin Rueckert, NOC and Support Manager. Kevin talks about his department and how they are working to fulfill the Reseller promise.

Next up is Frank Lemire, Technical Support Team Lead. Frank is very passionate about doing the right thing for Resellers.

Ben Zanin is a Senior NOC analyst. He provides insight into the types of tickets and how NOC responds to escalations and monitored issues.

Let us know if you have any questions about NOC and Technical Support. You can leave a comment or join us in the forum. In the next part of this series, we will talk with AJ Mirani all about Operations.

HostingCon is fast approaching and if you want to take advantage of early-bird pricing, you’d better hurry, because it ends on June 29th. What’s HostingCon, you’re asking? Only the largest gathering of hosting professionals in the world. We have full details over at our brand-new events page, along with a handy registration link.

Find out more.

There are a few maintenance windows announced for the coming week:

OpenSRS Email Cluster B:
As a reminder, we have network maintenance at our data center for Friday, June 26 2009 UTC. OpenSRS Cluster B will remain fully available. We will use this time to upgrade firmware on two devices in order to address a number of outstanding bugs. These changes will not have any impact on service availability and should be completely seamless to our customers.

Date: Friday, June 26, 2009
Time: 02:00 - 04:00 UTC
Duration: 2 hours
Your local time: Start to End
Service Impact:
OpenSRS Cluster B will be available during the window. As it is an important task, we wanted to keep you informed of our work. We are scheduling 2 hours as a precaution and do not anticipate requiring the whole window.

.COM/.NET
VeriSign has maintenance windows scheduled for .COM/.NET on Sunday, June 28, 2009:
Date: Sunday, June 28, 2009
Time: 01:00 UTC - 01:45 UTC
Duration: 45 minutes
Your local time: Start to End
Service impact:
Domain provisioning and Whois will be unavailable. Customers who have enabled provisioning queuing will have their orders queued until this complete. Domains will continue to resolve.

OpenSRS Storefront
We are scheduling OpenSRS Storefront maintenance for Sunday, June 28, 2009 to implement storage device improvements.

Date: Sunday, June 28, 2009
Time: 02:00 - 03:00 UTC
Duration: 1 hour
Anticipated Downtime: 15 minutes
Your local time: Start to End
Service Impact:
During this window, we will be preemptively shutting down the OpenSRS Storefront environment to perform system maintenance. We will be moving our back end database to a device with higher I/O capacity. Storefronts will be unavailable for approximately 15 minutes within the window. We are scheduling a full hour for maintenance as a precaution.

All other OpenSRS services will remain fully available and are not affected by this window. All domains will continue to resolve.