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By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
August 25, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Internet services provider Tucows (tucowsinc.com) announced on Monday it has released the results of a survey conducted by its reseller services group OpenSRS (opensrs.com) at last month's HostingCon 2008 conference.
The survey revealed that resellers of email and domain names are missing significant business opportunities to tap into social network users. Sixty percent of survey participants said they have their own blog or personal website, while nearly 75 percent use social networks like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and FriendFeed to share information with friends and family.
Despite this overwhelming majority of individuals using social networking services, 81 percent of survey respondents in the web hosting industry do not believe these web 2.0 businesses could hinder their business. "It's important that as the web hosting industry moves forward, we understand that Internet users are seeking a customized, personalized, Internet experience for both personal and professional reasons," says Ken Schafer, vice president of product management and marketing for Tucows. "Ultimately, it's about customer relationships. Providers and resellers need to work together to provide the support, services and infrastructure that give users the best experience."
The survey also found that 73 percent of all domain name resellers enjoy working with their provider, 75 percent believe their provider understands its needs and nearly 50 percent have no complaints with their provider.
For those respondents that did have issues with their provider, they cited poor communication or support and lack of the full range of services their customers want as their top complaints. Some cynics may question the implications of a company like OpenSRS conducting a survey and posting the results in a press release, suspecting there to be some kind of hidden agenda.
However, being that OpenSRS consistently promotes itself as a "reseller-friendly" wholesale domain registrar, it would make perfect sense that the company genuinely has the resellers' interest in mind.
And of course, the more successful the company's reseller customers are, the more successful OpenSRS, in turn, becomes.
OpenSRS recently relaunched its wholesale domain registrar services, expanding its offerings to include hosted email and SSL certificates. The company has grown steadily each year and now has over 9,000 active resellers on six continents.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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