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From Web Hosting Monthly, February 2004 edition
February 20, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Though conventional wisdom favors selling to enterprises, the leaders of Tucows (tucows.com) - a company renowned for providing wholesale Internet services to Web hosts and ISPs - vowed to keep their focus on the small to medium-sized market. Ten years after Tucows' inception, its chief executive officer credits that decision as a key to the company's success.
"We made a bet on the health and future of small to medium-sized service providers," said Elliot Noss, Tucows president and CEO. "That, from a strategic direction, has served us extremely well."
Tucows is celebrating its successes this month, as the company marks its 10th anniversary. The milestone tops an ever-growing list of achievements, new product launches and partnerships formed over the last decade.
Tucows (an acronym for The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software) was born a software download site and quickly earned a reputation for being the first to provide software on a "freeware" or "shareware" basis.
Three years later, the Toronto-based company was acquired by Internet Direct, one of its ISP mirror sites, also based in Toronto. Noss recognizes this merger, which allowed Tucows to work with a local provider and offer fast downloads, as one of the first significant steps that helped the company burst into the global market. "We were the way that most of Europe and Asia would get their software," he said.
The company continued to flourish, receiving its ICAAN registrar accreditation and launching OpenSRS to provide outsourced domain name registration and other Internet services to its resellers.
Now, with almost four million domain names and a network of 5,000 resellers in 100 countries, Tucows has become the world's second largest domain name registrar for generic top-level domains, country code top-level domains and internationalized domain names. Tucows network now offers 30,000 software titles to mirror sites.
The company continues to expand with new product launches and partnerships. Just recently Tucows began including digital certificates, e-mail services and managed DNS in their service offering. Last month, Tucows announced an alliance with Solis, a Japanese reseller of Internet infrastructure products, making Solis the primary point of distribution of Tucows' services in that region.
"We recognize Asia's very unique - both as a region broadly, but especially, in terms of each individual market there. You can't compete in this market without addressing local language and culture issues," Noss said, adding that business hours and customer payment methods are other issues that need to be addressed when dealing with foreign countries. "The closer you can be to your customers, the more successful you are going to be."
This celebratory year will also mark a renewed effort by Tucows to stay connected with all of its customers, not just those in Asia. While keeping its target on the small to medium-sized market, Noss said Tucows will focus on developing unique marketing strategies and products to help Web companies broaden services, keeping in tune with customer needs.
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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.
About This Issue | Read Digital Edition
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