Today we announced significant improvements to the speed and quality of domain searches conducted using OpenSRS. With these enhancements, your existing integrations will work faster, as will searches using the Reseller Web Interface. But what I’m really excited about is the continued improvements we have made to our domain search over the past two years, which now allows you to offer an advanced domain searching system that will increase sales of both domains and other web hosting services.

A little bit of background

The methodology I refer to as “domain search 1.0” is unfortunately employed by most web hosting companies today. It is an old, archaic way of thinking about domain search. Common symptoms include:

• Forcing potential customers to enter ‘www.yourname.com’ search strings;
• Not allowing customers to register ccTLDs, or even gTLDs not named .com, .net or .org;
• The absence of suggestions for related search terms.

The most common objection I hear from web hosting companies is they don’t see any value in paying attention to domain name search, until I explain domain search 2.0.

Domain search 2.0

The domain search 2.0 approach treats domain names like the key component they are to the web hosting sales process. Virtually every web hosting company puts domain search front and centre on their website, but the technology used to power the search is often archaic. Domain search 2.0, on the other hand, treats the domain search box like a “magic box” – that is, an open, free-text box that will accept any input and spit out highly relevant domain names.

Our research shows this not only greatly enhances the end user experience, but can lead to a 10 to 15 percent lift in domain name sales if implemented properly. It also results in sales of more value-added services by attracting higher-margin customers.

How does it work?

The key to domain search 2.0 is our powerful NAME_SUGGEST call, which we’ve been iterating upon for more than two years. After our announcement today, it contains four key components:

• Domain name lookup: The “lookup” parameter will take any text and turn it into a domain name search, whether you enter “www.hockey.com”, “hockey league” or “hockey@league.com”.
• Domain name suggestions: The “suggestion” parameter will quickly return results of available names based on the original query using technology from DomainsBot, the industry leader in domain search technology. A new feature now allows you to also specify language if you choose to do so, enabling results to be returned in English, French, Spanish or Italian. Our research now shows that up to 15 percent of registrations using domain search 2.0 are from our domain name suggestions.
• Premium names: The “premium” parameter checks our premium names database of over one million names to see if any related names are for sale on the domain name aftermarket. As of today, suggested premium names are also displayed by DomainsBot, leading to a much better search experience.
• Personal names: A new “personal” parameter also allows you to now search for names associated with our personal names service as well.

We’ve also baked in a new “max_wait_time” parameter that lets you specify the number of seconds that the NAME_SUGGEST command can run, and return as many results as can be found in that time period. This will allow you to build real-time, AJAX-enabled domain searches if you choose to do so.

Putting it all together

Have you thought about your domain search lately? We now have the speed, tools and data to equip your business with a high-powered search that will lead to more sales. There’s more information on our website.

Looking for some more techie information about the new API?

Look no further! Read this post and see some code examples. And to dig even deeper, the Developers/API Forum is the place to be.

This is a quick example on how to use new features of the NAME_SUGGEST API lookup. As mentioned in my previous blog post, we added a new feature to the API that allows you to specify amount of time that you’re willing to wait for results. You would do it something like this:

{
protocol => 'XCP',
action => 'name_suggest',
object => 'domain',
attributes => {
searchstring => 'food toronto',
services => [ 'lookup', 'suggestion', 'premium',
'personal_names' ],
tlds => [ '.com', '.info', 'net', 'ca', 'co.in', '.co.uk', '.es' ],
max_wait_time => "1",
}
};

This search will check a limited number of TLDs (as specified in the call), but it will check regular lookups, name suggestions and premium names for each. Behind the scenes, all these checks will happen in parallel, after hitting the local cache and registry zone files that act as a secondary cache.

The parameter max_wait_time is the new feature. In this case, it means you’re willing to wait one second for response (as measured in our system; the total time for a response will include the roundtrip for the data to travel the Internet). We will collect all results that we can in that one second time period and return the results. The response will look something like this:

{
'protocol' => 'XCP',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully',
'is_search_completed' => '0',
'search_key' => 'Ln0ahqiOQ7H3Vab7sURVIronOks',
'action' => 'REPLY',
'response_code' => '200',
'attributes' => {
'lookup' => {
'count' => '10',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully.',
'response_code' => '200',
'is_success' => '1',
'items' => [
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.com',
'status' => 'available'
},
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.info',
'status' => 'available'
},
... (response cut here for clarity)

Now, many of the results will be determined and returned in one second, but it’s likely not all of them can be looked up in that time frame. However, even after we return result set, we continue collecting the rest of the results in the background.

If you’re building an AJAX interface, here is a neat trick you can use: Look at the parameter we returned called search_key, and you can reuse it:

{
protocol => 'XCP',
action => 'name_suggest',
object => 'domain',
attributes => {
'search_key' => 'Ln0ahqiOQ7H3Vab7sURVIronOks',
max_wait_time => "2",
}
};

In the call below you’re now using the search key parameter, and retrieving results that have already been collected for you. And you are also specifying that you’re willing to wait another two seconds. If you introduced some sleep() on your end before sending the second API call, you can drop this time too. At this point you will receive back something like:

{
'protocol' => 'XCP',
'request_response_time' => '0.002',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully',
'is_search_completed' => '1',
'action' => 'REPLY',
'response_code' => '200',
'attributes' => {
'lookup' => {
'count' => '10',
'response_text' => 'Command completed successfully.',
'response_code' => '200',
'is_success' => '1',
'items' => [
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.com',
'status' => 'available'
},
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.info',
'status' => 'available'
},
{
'domain' => 'foodtoronto.co.in',
'status' => 'available'
},
... (response cut here for clarity)

As you can see, another important addition is the new response parameter is_search_completed = 1. This value indicates that you have received the full result set, and that there is nothing outstanding. As long as there are still results to be obtained, is_search_completed will be 0, as in the first example…

Hope this helps. You can always visit the Developers/API section of the OpenSRS Forums to learn more about coding to the OpenSRS API.

I wanted to talk today about a few improvements we’ve done to our check-availability API functionality, also referred to as domain lookups.

In summary, we’ve made a number of improvements that will make check availability much faster, whether you’re using RWI or the NAME_SUGGEST API. If you’re integrating with our API now or in the future, NAME_SUGGEST is the call to use to take advantage of all the advanced features and speed improvements.

Warning: Geek Content Ahead

And, now, for geeks in the audience, here are a few more details…

Historically, lookups have been done sequentially in OpenSRS. Whether you were using the RWI or API, your choice was to request lookups one by one, or give us a number of TLDs, and we would check them one by one. In a Worst case scenario, you could wait as long as 60 seconds for lookup of all TLDs, name suggestions and premium names to be returned.

Well, that has all changed now. We’ve completely re-engineered the OpenSRS system for doing availability checks, and we’ve put a big honking internal lookup service in place that does number of pretty neat things:

1. All that work that used to happen in sequence, is now happening in parallel behind the scenes.
2. There is a new cache in place that stores previous lookups for a short period of time to enable very fast repeat searches.
3. We pre-load and regularly update zone files from the most popular of registries, and make this information available to the system as secondary cache.
4. Not only are all TLDs checked in parallel, but all related services are parallelized, including name suggestions and premium names lookups.

With the new system, we can handle over 8,000 concurrent requests, and have several hundred concurrent processes running at any given point. And this is just a beginning, as system is very scalable!

Working with our partners

To give you a sense of the painstaking engineering that went into this piece of the system, we worked hard with our name suggest partner on optimizing their API. By implementing our suggestions, they’ve cut average size of their API response from 177KB down to 0.6KB. Yes, there’s no typo there–that is less than 0.5% of initial size!

Additionally, we trimmed milliseconds wherever we could. The round-trip for name suggest call
has dropped from 1.1s to 0.5s, indicating that majority of this is processing time for name-suggestion engine spin.

What’s the payoff?

So what is the net result of all this? If you were to do lookup before for all gTLDs, ccTLDs, name suggestions and premium names, it would have taken about 60 seconds before. Today, with the new API system, you can expect back a complete set of results in around four or five seconds!

Basically, lookup nowadays will take as much time as slowest TLD. If you’re not selling all TLDs (and for reference .es and .in are some of the slowest we’ve seen), your response is likely to be even better that that. To get most often requested gTLDs, your experience will be around one or two seconds most of the time.

Max wait and search keys

And if you’re an API integrator, it gets better. When sending an API command, you can now specify the maximum amount of time you are willing to wait for results! We’ll time ourselves, and give you all the results we’ve been able to collect by that ‘deadline’. You can use this to make a really snappy interface at the expense of maybe not getting few results here and there.

I’ll follow up this post with another that will show you how to do it in the coming days.

As well, should you be building Ajax interface, you can make it both snappy and complete. Just send us two or three calls! With the first one give us one second, and get back the the fast gTLDs, and suggestions. Then redo the same query a few seconds later to pick up rest of the results. And maybe add one more call five seconds later, just in case…although the API will tell you if result set is complete, so you might not even need that last call.

In reality, there are number of strategies you can use with this feature, but I hope you see the potential. It’s powerful, but not complex, and it will enable you to build that snappy page, with a feel-good customer experience where things are just flying.

Earlier this week, the OpenSRS team (me included) descended upon Miami for the 5th annual Parallels Summit ‘10. We brought with us our own unique blend of excitable energy and enthusiasm.

We talked, we listened, we danced; but most of all, we connected. It was awesome.

There was a lot of great content at the conference and one of my favourites was the keynote delivered by Parallels’ CEO, Serguei Beloussov’s about his company’s vision for the Cloud. Nearly 1,100 service providers, telcos, VARs and ISVs listened intently as Serguei eloquently delivered a speech that described how hosting service companies’ services can be compared to those of a hotel operator.

Where hotels initially offered a ‘bed’ and a ‘roof’, they have innovated to become full-service companies that provided value-added services on top of their traditional offering. Higher margin services such as in-room dining, telephone, Internet, spa, and other entertainment, increase profits while allowing them to be competitive on their core “bed and a roof” pricing. It was a fitting analogy given the beautiful resort where the conference was held: the Fontainebleau Miami Beach Hotel & Resort.

Serguei delivered a convincing argument that small businesses are moving faster than ever to cloud services and hosting companies that offer software as a service (SaaS). A summary of Serguei’s keynote can be found on the Parallels blog and I highly recommend the read.

VeriSign Trusted Seal announcement

Also at the event, VeriSign announced a new service called the VeriSign Trusted Seal. The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) reported that in the 1st quarter of 2009, there were more new strains of malware than in the entire year for 2008. For businesses and brands on the web, this is a concerning number. The VeriSign Trusted Seal service, available to OpenSRS resellers later this year, performs daily scans of a website to ensure that any malware attacks are identified early. When malware is detected, VeriSign will automatically alert the website owner and provide assistance to eliminate the threat.

Other related news about Parallels Summit ‘10

• OpenSRS event photos
• Video and presentations from the Summit (Parallels)
• Using MacOS Server for Hosted Services (The WHIR)
• #ParallelsSummit (Twitter Search: #ParallelsSummit)
• Hosting and SaaS Blog (Parallels)

‘Stop Browsing. Start Building’ is certainly a tagline that OpenSRS can get behind. That’s why it made perfect sense that the company behind the slogan, Yola.com, chose OpenSRS to provide domain registration and management services. Yola provides a way for small businesses to easily create and manage a website with no technical skills required.

Yola.com was founded in 2005, in Cape Town, South Africa, getting its start as an affiliate business that needed a way for their customers to quickly and easily create affiliate websites and pages.

Later, they spun off the website creator tool as Synthasite and things took off from there. The company picked up the current Yola.com branding in 2009, a name that Chris Muller, Director of Business Development for Yola.com, says better represents what the company is all about.

“The name Yola comes from a hindi word that means ‘hatch’,” says Muller. “The Yola brand has helped us move beyond the basics of website building with the Synthasite name to establish us a place to build and grow your entire business online. We also loved that we were able to get a domain name that was short, phonetic, and would work around the globe.”

Yola’s focus is what the company calls ‘micro-businesses’–small companies with one to five employees–and the company’s goal is to help them get online, and establish a web presence.

“Micro-businesses don’t have either the budget or the time to manage a large website but they do need to get their brand out online and maintain a web presence,” says Muller. “That’s where Yola comes in.”

Domains were a focus from the start

Yola has adopted a ‘freemium model’ whereby users can create a free site on a subdomain. Paying customers can buy a premium package that allows them to buy and use their own domain name, along with more advanced features like premium themes and additional storage.

“Domains were the first product that we charged for on our website,” says Muller. “From the start, we realized there was a revenue opportunity there.”

“It’s fundamental to a small business’ needs. If I own Chris’s Coffee Shop, I need to own ChrissCoffeeShop.com. In addition to the Twitter account and everything else that I have to do, I need that domain,” he says.

Muller says that offering domains fits in with Yola’s approach to providing a “one-stop shop” for their customers when it comes to their online presence.

“If they’re coming to us for their web presence, and they’re coming to us to build the website and everything else that’s on it,” he says, “then I think it’s logical to let them manage everything, including the domain name, from one place.”

ccTLDs and Name Suggest to help customers find the perfect domain

Yola’s userbase is global–50% of their users are outside of the U.S.–and because of this, they recently added ccTLDs to the mix of domain offerings.

“We just added .co.uk, .eu and .ca domains based on a combination of where our traffic comes from, and what our customers have been requesting,” says Muller. “It’s been great. We simply added them to a drop-down and their sales have taken off without any marketing push. It’s an important step towards localization.”

Yola sees the domain name as a critical part of offering localized service to their customers. Muller notes that “having a localized domain name is almost as important, or even more important, than having a localized website.”

Yola also makes use of the name suggestion tool that is a part of the OpenSRS API. They offer up relevant alternative domain suggestions to users during the initial search and help their users find the perfect domain name for their business.

Muller says they realized that SMBs are building a brand around a domain, and that helping the customer find the right domain goes a long way in ensuring that customer is successful and remains a customer for the long term. He says Yola makes extensive use of the name suggestions and that they’ve found that the OpenSRS tool to be “very effective for us and very helpful.”

Managing a move

Yola came to OpenSRS after starting out with another domain name registrar.

“We chose OpenSRS because of their robust APIs and the flexibility that their platform offered around messaging and options such as a variety of ccTLDs that we could offer down the road.”

Fortunately, the experience that OpenSRS has in managing transitions onto the OpenSRS platform from other Registrars meant the move went very smoothly.

“It worked out really well. Working with Steve Barnes (Business Development Manager at OpenSRS) saved us lots of days and the transition went really well,” Muller recalls. “It was fantastic, as smooth as we could expect.”

Poised for growth

As for the future, Muller says Yola is intent on continuing to help small business manage and grow their online presence. On the services side, Yola is partnering with Logoworks by HP to offer professional design services, Wpromote to offer search engine marketing, and TRUSTe for management of privacy policies.

On the domain side, Muller says “We’ve done a lot of work over the past few months with domains, like adding ccTLDs, adding transfers, changing the way we do availability checks. We’re really excited.”

Adding the ability for customers to transfer domains to Yola and OpenSRS from other Registrars or webhosts was no brainer, according to Muller. “Allowing customers to transfer domains that they already own to Yola helps us become a one-stop shop for small businesses online.”

Looking at the product roadmap, Chris says Yola is going to keep adding value to their premium bundles and expand their resources for small businesses. One of the ways they’re going to do this is by including domains and related functionality in the core offerings. He also said they’ll continue to expand the ccTLD offerings and continue to refine their domain suggestion tool to help customers find the perfect domain name on which to build their business.

Tucows is hiring developers and NOC analysts to join our OpenSRS team and we’re hoping you might recommend some friends. If you know any developers or network support reps with mad skillz in the Toronto area and ready to work for one of the Internet’s most established and respected companies, we want to meet them!

At Tucows, our agile development and network operations center teams design, support and build simple, useful services that help people unlock the full power of the Internet.

We’re not looking for just anyone; we’re looking for Internet superstars. Somebody who stands out in a crowd, whose mission in life has been to geek out. Who might fit the bill? We have a few examples below that help to paint the picture and give you an idea:

Do you have a friend who complains their monthly hydro bill costs more than their rent because the Sun V240 Sunfire servers they bought on eBay for 50 bucks aren’t the greenest servers in their bedroom? If so, they might be Tucows material. Has your friend’s Lego hobby train set been running collision free in the past six months thanks to the sensors and programming code they tweaked one afternoon? Then they may be Tucows material. Does your friend value the relationships they have with their friends and colleagues? They’re probably Tucows material.

Humour aside, our people really do work hard to make a difference each and every day. They’re encouraged to learn new things in an environment that rewards teamwork and initiative. And yes, they will have fun. The official job descriptions are below and if think you know somebody who would be a great fit, please encourage them to apply.

More about Tucows

Headquartered in Toronto, Tucows is a leading domain name registrar offering wholesale services to our 9,500 OpenSRS resellers, with more than 9 million domains names, millions of email mailboxes and thousands of SSL certificates under management. We have 150+ staff in our Toronto office located in the heart of King West’s Liberty Village.

• Official job description for Sr. Application Developer
• Official job description for NOC Analyst
• Official job description for QA Developer

The .TEL domain extension is almost a year old and that means it’s time to think about renewals.

It was on March 24th, 2009, that the .TEL Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) launched into General Availability. That was the day that anyone could register their .TEL at the regular cost in a free-for-all landrush for available domains.

Now, as we are quickly approaching the first birthday of .TEL, it’s important that you remind those who bought a .TEL domain in those early days that it’s time to renew.

Telhosting Update Coming in March

To help you convince .TEL owners to hold on to those domains heading into year two, .TEL is rolling out an upgrade to the TelHosting platform. That’s the system that allows .TEL domain owners to edit their contact information, and it’s also responsible for the serving up of the actual .TEL webpage that each user gets with their .TEL domain name.

Telnic says that the new look was created based on feedback from the .TEL Community and features new templates, colours, social media integration and an embedded search:

“With the new design, you will be able to customize your .tel by choosing a colour scheme from a selection of templates and adding a link to your photo or logo. You can have a different graphic in every folder. For large .tel resources, the search function will also be useful, and you’ll be able to hide the “All .tels” search mode so that visitors won’t be allowed to go to other .tel resources from your page. Finally, the custom icons for popular online services will be added automatically when your .tel page is loaded.”

Selling .TEL

.TEL is different from regular domain names because it doesn’t require separate hosting, nor does the domain owner need to know how to create and manage a website to use it.

It’s a great solution for small businesses looking to take a first step in getting online, but it’s also a super way for companies and individuals that are already online to beef up their online presence and make it easier for customers to find them.

When you market .TEL, be sure to reach out to new customers, but don’t forget about your existing users who may already have a domain name–offer them a .TEL as an inexpensive complementary web service that will help them get found online and drive traffic to their regular website.

Happy Family Day from the OpenSRS team!

We’ll be closed this Monday for Ontario’s Family Day holiday. We’re looking forward to spending some quality time with our loved ones.

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, .nl, .ch, .li, .it, .dk, .com.mx)
• No special processing for .ca (registrant transfers, conflicting and municipal registrations) or .eu/.be (redemptions).

Here are the hours by department:

We have another webinar coming up in two weeks and this time, we’re aiming the presentation squarely at developers.

We recently made available a PHP API Toolkit that Claire Lam, our Manager of Implementation Services put together. This Toolkit is a PHP library that aims to make working with the OpenSRS easier. A Ruby version, put together by Keiji Suzuki, will be available very shortly.

Claire has been talking about the Toolkit in the Developer/API area of the OpenSRS Forums for the past month or two and based on feedback from developers that have tried out the code, we’re ready to make it a little more official. This webinar will serve as an introduction to the code and help explain how to use it, and why we’re releasing it.

By developers, for developers

This is going to be a developer webinar–if you don’t know code, you’ll probably won’t be interested. If you do like to dig in to API docs and write a few lines of code now and then, feel free to join us. And, by all means, pass this along to your in-house developers, or anyone else you think might be interested.

The PHP version of the API Toolkit is available for download today. A Ruby version is just about complete and we’ll be making it available very shortly as well. You can find those downloads and documentation for the API Toolkits here.

Webinar: Introducing the New OpenSRS API Toolkits
with Claire Lam, Manager of Implementation Services, OpenSRS
and Jonathan Clarke, Implementation Specialist, OpenSRS
on Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 9:00 A.M. EST and 2:00 P.M. EST

Register Now

Hi.  We made a really exciting hire to the OpenSRS team last week.  Here was the email introducing him internally…

Some of you might be wondering about the guy with the goatee asking all the questions.  I probably should have sent this out sooner…

That’s Ben!  Ben is the newest member of our marketing team.  His job will be to energize and expand the OpenSRS community.  Energize means fostering lively, productive conversations about our services, our resellers’ services, our industry and the Internet.  It means generating a steady flow of feedback we can use to improve and news about the things we are doing to improve.  Expand means to growing the circle of people in that conversation beyond our current resellers to potential resellers and anyone else who might have an interest in our services.

And he’s the right guy to do it.  First, he has helped build, sell and manage the sort of services we offer and our resellers offer.  Ben has been a part of the webhost, e-mail, broadband access and VoIP service provider community for more than 15 years.  He was the co-founder of HIP Communications, a national Voice over IP service provider. He’s also held senior positions with wholesale webhost InQuent Technologies (now part of Network Solutions) and a number of Ontario-based Internet service providers and CLECs.  Second, he is naturally engaging.  Check out his blog at www.benlucier.ca.  Talk to him.  He is curious, empathetic, intelligent, creative and entertaining.  Finally, Ben is an OpenSRS sort of guy.  Throughout his career, he has always focused on customer service and relationships.

We’re really excited about the role and the guy.  (We’re also working on a job title that befits the role and the guy.)  Please welcome Ben and take the time to teach him something.

So Ben is here for you, our reseller community.  Please welcome him and please engage him.  Tell him what you’d like to hear from us, suggest ways for us to hear more from you, give the poor guy a title.  He is tweeting @opensrsben.  His email is blucier@tucows.com.