You don’t usually put a significant part of your business into the hands of a third party unless you really trust them. That’s exactly what KPN, the largest telco in the Netherlands, did recently when it moved its .NL registration business to the OpenHRS platform on the same day as the NL Registry moved to a new back-end registration system.

KPN is the leading telecommunications and information and communications technology (ICT) service provider in The Netherlands, offering wireline and wireless telephony, internet and TV to consumers, and end-to-end telecommunications and ICT services to business customers.

With more than 33,000 full-time employees, millions of customers and $13.5 billion Euros in revenue in 2009, KPN is a huge player in the communications sector in Holland. That reach is beginning to spread through other countries in Europe and as far away as the USA. KPN boasts 2.5 million broadband Internet customers, representing about 43% of the market in the Netherlands as of 2009. The company controls about 50% of the Dutch mobile phone market and over half of the fixed phone line market.

OpenSRS Reseller since 1999

The company has been an OpenSRS reseller since 2000, starting with a move to OpenSRS from Network Solutions when the domain name industry was opened up to competition in 1999.

Joost Pisters, Senior Consultant, KPN, remembers the initial conversations about moving to OpenSRS. “I heard about this company, OpenSRS. I contacted one of the sales guys on the phone and he offered to fly out next week to have a talk,” he says.

“‘What? You’re actually going to come to see us? In person?’” he recalls asking, incredulously. Pisters says he knew then that OpenSRS was a company with a focus on customer service. “That showed me that OpenSRS had a totally different attitude towards resellers and towards the business,” he says.

KPN and OpenSRS enjoyed a ten-year relationship with KPN using the OpenSRS system to manage all of its domain registrations with the exception of .NL domains, for which KPN is an accredited registrar.

In-house or Out-source?

In the spring of 2010, the .NL Registry was requiring Registrars to move to a fully automated registry model with an Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) interface. The change would literally happen overnight and all registrars were required to rewrite their systems to comply with the changes on the registry side.

KPN had developed and maintained its own registrar platform since 1997 to handle its .NL business, but the switch to EPP at the Registry gave them a good reason to look at whether that was the best way to operate.

The company decided to move everything over to the OpenHRS Registrar solution that OpenSRS provides. OpenHRS is built on the same technology that powers the OpenSRS domain management platform and is used by registrars around the world looking for a powerful, managed solution that integrates with leading domain registries.

Pisters says KPN makes a point of looking at off-the-shelf solutions when ever it can, and consolidating operational processes between .NL and the rest of its domain registration interfaces made good business sense.

“We already had an interface with OpenSRS, so why not use it for our .NL domains?” says Pisters. Because the two platforms are essentially the same, integrations with OpenSRS work seamlessly with OpenHRS, offering Resellers an easy upgrade path if they ever decide to become an accredited registrar.

A successful switch

In the weeks and months before the big switchover, OpenSRS worked very closely with KPN to ensure that both companies were ready. “The team did a fantastic job, quite literally working day and night in the weeks leading up to the switch. They had a tremendous job to do and everything was successful,” says Pisters of the work done to get everything ready.

On the big day, KPN was registering .NL domains through OpenHRS an hour after the registry came back online after moving to its new EPP implementation.

“It worked great. You guys had time issues as well, but that is to be expected. Even if you are an agile, fast-moving company like OpenSRS is, it’s still a big undertaking,” says Pisters.

It’s a matter of trust

Both Pisters and KPN realized that there are risks taken on with a project like this one, but Pisters says he always felt confident that OpenSRS would pull it off.

“It’s a huge trust thing. Giving .NL to you guys [OpenSRS] in such a short period of time was risky. It’s always risky to do something like that, but if I was confident with anybody, it’s with OpenSRS,” he says.

For KPN and Pisters, it came down to the long-term relationship that KPN had with OpenSRS.

“Based on everything that we’ve done together over the last ten years, I had complete confidence in you guys delivering what you had promised us,” says Pisters. “That’s exactly what you guys did.”

Founded in 2000, emerion WebHosting has grown to become a leading hosting and Internet service provider to small businesses and individuals in Europe. Founder and CEO Bernd Hilmar oversees the company’s operations from its base in Vienna, Austria.

As with thousands of other OpenSRS Resellers, emerion has been a customer since the beginning. Hilmar says that there were a couple of reasons they chose OpenSRS to power their domain registrations.

He notes that the fact that OpenSRS was one of the first Registrars to offer an API was very important. “We found OpenSRS [in 2000] and we were very impressed about the API because it allowed us to automate our domain registrations,” he says.

On Choosing a Registrar Partner

Of course, price was also a key consideration, but Hilmar says it shouldn’t be the top concern for those looking for a registrar partner. “Price is an important reason in this market, but it’s not the only reason to select a registrar,” he says. “It’s important for everything to work well day-to-day in this business.”

Hilmar says communication is also something to think about. He notes that he enjoys the level of communication that OpenSRS provides both through email messages that keep him informed of what’s new and also through regular contact with his account manager, Luigi Lagonigro, who works out of the OpenSRS office in the UK.

From a service availability standpoint, Hilmar says he likes the way OpenSRS keeps him informed of what’s going on. “[OpenSRS] has a status page so we can see by ourselves when something happens, and when it will be resolved,” he says. This allows emerion to more quickly react to, and minimize, any potential impacts on its customer base when service interruptions take place.

This focus on good communication is a philosophy that the company embraces for its own interactions with customers.

Emerion Embraces Social Media

Hilmar says the company is using both Facebook and Twitter to network with current and potential customers. With its Facebook page, emerion has attracted well over 1,500 fans already.

They use social media primarily to keep their customers informed. “We update the community with hosting news and provide them with an inside view of the inner workings of their hosting provider,” he says. But he cautions that too much information can have a negative effect, adding that “people can get angry about it” if you communicate too much.

As for the future, Hilmar says they’re just getting started in the social media space. “There are many ways to use social media. We will do more in future because we believe in the dynamic of the social interactivity,” he says.

A Beneficial Mix of Both Business and Personal Accounts

Emerion’s customer base ranges from personal shared hosting accounts to businesses with more advanced needs. He says having both types of customers allows them to better tailor their systems and provide better service to everyone.

“Honestly, we need both,” he says. “It’s interesting to work with the private customers because it’s an advantage to make the service easy to use for them and to improve the usability.”

But on the business customer side, Hilmar says the customers are often more demanding. “The business customer has more and special needs,” he says. “They want specific things and we improve our service with that needs and try to implement it as standard.”

Emerion welcomes both because they find the mix to be beneficial. “We try to cover both directions because at the end they both fit together very good,” he says. From his experience, servicing both types of customers helps improve the offering overall.

Emerion’s Custom Cloud Solution

Emerion has deployed a custom, clustered server system, which is a cloud,
and offers burstable resources for customers. It provides this in conjunction with a hosting control panel it developed in-house for an end-to-end system.

Hilmar says they decided to opt for a custom solution because it allows them to better serve their customers. “We wrote the software for our hosting control panel all by ourselves and it works together with our own system. Nothing else fit the specific needs of our customers,” he says.

He adds that it allows for more flexibility in providing an easy to use service. “With out own system we are more independent to do interfaces for our customers. It allows us to make it easier for our customers.”

That focus on “ease of use” and a commitment to providing a high level of customer service will no doubt serve the company well as it continues to grow.

Special thanks goes to Heather Leson who did a ton of work on this profile and also to our European office for facilitating a face-to-face interview with Bernd Hilmar at WebhostingDay last week. And of course, special thanks goes to Bernd for taking the time to meet with us and answer all of our many questions. We appreciate it!

‘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.

Masterhost is one of the largest Russian webhosts and an OpenSRS Reseller. We are fortunate to have Alexander Ovchinnikov, COO, join us to talk about Masterhost and the Russian Internet industry.

1.The services you provide are diverse from hosting to domains. Tell us more about what you offer your customers.

Masterhost has been successfully operating since 1999, which means this winter we are celebrating our 10th anniversary. The services we offer include: virtual hosting on unix and windows, including the provisioning of Virtual Private Servers (VPS), offering dedicated servers in Russian and European data centers, and the registration of domain names. We are also accredited Registrar for the TLDs .ru, .su, .?? (IDN). We’re especially proud to be the 2008 winner of the 2008 RUnet Prize award in the category of “Technology and Innovation”. RUnet award was established in 2004 and is a national award in the field of high technology and the Internet, to encourage outstanding achievements and companies – leaders in the field of information technology and electronic communications.

Masterhost is the leading company in Russia confirmed by an independent market hosting statistics on placement of domain names on the servers hosting provider. By the number of supported active sites, Masterhost is among the third largest hosting providers in Eastern and Central Europe (Netcraft, 2007) with more than 150, 000 domains.

Our VIP clients (approximately 55,000 in total) include the largest and very-well known Russian businesses including TV channels, news agencies, popular portals, Russian MSN Weather, AD networks, entertainment web-sizes, newspapers, telco web-sites, travel web-sites. We aspire to be an innovative knowledge company by providing free hosting projects in the field of education and educational programs for the non-profit educational web project. This project is in collaboration with Microsoft.

2. The Russian market is growing. Can you tell us more about RUnet (Russian Internet) and your locations (Moscow and St-Petersburg).

RUnet is a description for Russia’s national Internet presence. The .RU domain is among the top 20 country-code top-level domains with one of the highest rates of growth over the past five years. (approximately 2,494 835 registered .RU domains). Masterhost has more than 150 000 .RU domains, which is about 11.5% of the total market share.

It’s estimated that the number of RUnet Internet users will increase by approximately 34% in 2009. This is determined by factors such as interest and demand of the population to gain access to the web. There is an active development of the Russian market with various service providers and services (Internet service, broadband, and hosting providers). Internet access is mainly concentrated in Moscow (68%) and St. Petersburg (10%). The remaining 22% is in other regions including major cities such as Novosibirsk, Krasnodar, Ekaterinburg, etc. Masterhost is actively promoting its services these regions.

3. How did Masterhost grow as an Internet business? ??

The company was formed in 1999. In the early days of its existence, the company’s management had a primary goal of not expanding too fast, but rather to accumulate the work experience and build a solid team of professionals. The company’s management made every effort to ensure the proper level of service was built to provide the required level of quality. Masterhost employees over 150 highly skilled specialists who focus on quick and effective solutions to any problems faced by our customers. Their approach to work is crucial to our success. All of this allows our company to be an absolute leader in Russia’s market hosting.??

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

For our clients, we carry out all necessary procedures for the registration of domain names in the most popular domain zones in Russia and the world. We have been working with OpenSRS since 2005. To date, through your company, we register or renew in the order of 250 domains per month in such areas as: .com, .net, .org, .info , .mobi, .eu, .co.uk, .org.uk, .biz , .cc, .tv , .me and .name.?

?5. What do you think about the growth of new ccTLDs?

Unique domain names are a scarce resource in the 21st century yet required for virtually any business. Many ccTLDs are now open for international business. ccTLDs don’t really increase without major geopolitical changes. There are other options.

Located in the heart of the “silicon roundabout”, Ultraspeed /Hostroute is a London-based web host that wears their customer promise on their ‘web-sleeve’.

Jordon Gross, Managing Director of Ultraspeed/Hostroute took a few minutes to answer some questions for our “Meet the Resellers” series

How did you personally get into the Internet business?

I originally got into it in 1997 running a few websites of my own, then I started reselling hosting space. It’s all continued from there, really.

Tell us how long Ultraspeed and Hostroute have been doing business and about all the services you offer to your customers.

Ultraspeed has been in business for 11 years now, and Hostroute for about 8. Hostroute was purchased by Ultraspeed at the end of 2007. Ultraspeed specializes in offering Managed Hosting in the UK, and has pioneered a product known as Diskless Servers (No Hard Drives, 15 minute hardware replacement guarantee, low power consumption) that has been very popular. Hostroute offers virtual hosting and domain names, and is currently getting a major overhaul from the billing system to the website to the hosting products.

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

We are located in London, England; in a particular area of London called Shoreditch. Somehow we got an office here three years ago, and the area has now become incredibly trendy and filled with media/arty types and too-cool-for-school restaurants and bars. Our techie crew sometimes borrows clothes from the vintage store downstairs just to not stand out like sore thumbs!

Any interesting stories from your company’s history?
Many interesting stories, most of which we can’t repeat publicly! One such time was at the end of the 90s in New Jersey, when we spent an entire 24 hour period moving servers in the back of a U-Haul van, fueled only by Dunkin Donuts.

Suffice to say it’s been a huge amount of fun (and hard work!) over the years.

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

Hostroute has been an OpenSRS Reseller since it started really, OpenSRS have always been supportive to the growth of the business, we’re looking forward to putting a huge amount more business with them over the next few years.

What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

Not much, really. Tea at the Wolseley?

Thanks to Dr. Neil Clifton for the photo of the Shoreditch Fire Station licensed under the Creative Commons.