Denic eG is the registry provider for .DE, the third largest TLD and second largest ccTLD in the world. Like other early TLDs, .DE had its start in the 1980s in a university setting (in this case, the University of Dortmund). It quickly expanded with the growth of Internet use requiring the need for more formal management. A foundation was formed in 1993, followed closely by the establishment of the Denic cooperative in 1996. By then, there were approximately 20,000 domains in existence. Now more than a decade later, the volume of .DE domains has grown to more than 12.9 million.

.DE Quick Facts:

• Denic cooperative founded in December 1996
• Number of .DE domains: 12,923,320 (check out their Daily Domain counter)
• Third largest TLD and second largest ccTLD in the world
• Full historical timeline
• Administrative contact must be a resident of Germany

Available resources:

• Denic Website
• Extensive FAQ
• Great RFC (Request for Comment) Library on DNS
• Zone check tool
• Mailing lists (including maintenance)
• News and press releases (in German)
• DNSSEC presentations
• Statistics

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Darko Bijelic, Chief DNS Administrator at PLUS Hosting, Croatia’s leading hosting company. PLUS are a brand-new Reseller and we recently helped them manage the migration of thousands of domain names into their OpenSRS account.

Darko Bijelic, PLUS Hosting

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

Darko Bijelic (DB): PLUS Hosting primarily provides web hosting and related services, including domain registration, dedicated and VPS server rentals, colocation, audio/video streaming, SSL certificates…basically everything that web hosting companies usually offer.

PLUS Hosting was founded at the beginning of 2001 by Adriano Plisko. At the time, there were only a few companies in Croatia offering hosting-related services, so Adriano, already a proven business visionary and entrepreneur at just 28 years of age, decided to start a web hosting business. It is very interesting how our company grew from a small provider with none of our own servers into the largest hosting provider in the country with more than 50 of our own servers.

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

DB: In 2001, hardware and cable-pair were extremely expensive for a startup hosting company, so PLUS Hosting was reselling hosting space originally bought from FastHosts in the UK. After the initial boost, the company decided to rent dedicated servers from Burst.net in the US. However, due to some unfortunate things that happened to Burst.net, we soon decided to switch to dedicated servers from ThePlanet, who are today probably the world’s biggest provider of hosting servers.

We used ThePlanet’s equipment for a few years, until we got a deal with Optima, one of the largest local ISPs, who partnered with us, and provided us with acceptably-priced high-speed Internet access. From then until now, we have used our own servers located in a facility in Zagreb (Croatia’s capital city) and we migrated all our clients from ThePlanet’s servers to our own servers there. Now we have more than 50 servers under our own direct administration.

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

DB: I am 29 years old and have worked in the domain and DNS business for more than 8 years now. I have worked with PLUS Hosting almost from the begining: I joined at the end of 2001. Although the company always had a need for Linux/Windows administrators, I always had an affinity for domains and DNS, so I have stuck to that. I have always liked seeing what kind of domains people register, and what they do with them. I also liked to compete with domainers around the world, waiting for domains to “drop” and registering them before somebody else. That was before companies like Snapnames and Pool.com even existed. DNS is the basic backbone of the Internet, and without it, the Internet wouldn’t exist as it does today. And you always see and find something new in the DNS world, which is why I like my job so much.

The story of how I got here where I am is pretty interesting also. I was at college and was participating in some marketing projects (I actually graduated with a degree in marketing, not something more technical) for my Faculty of Economics, and one day my marketing professor said it would be nice to have a web page. I saw an ad that a local company was offering free web hosting for projects. So I went there and met Adriano. A few months later, he called me and asked me if I would be interested in working with him. I agreed and here we are now. :)

Roman Amphitheater, Pula, Croatia

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

DB: PLUS Hosting is located in Pula, Croatia. It is a nice city of about 60,000 people, with a famous Roman Arena. It is located on the Istrian peninsula, so we have the Adriatic Sea all around us. :) It’s assumed that for business, it is always better to be in a larger city, because of infrastructure, potential employees, etc., but at PLUS, we’ve never thought of it as a disadvantage being located in a smaller town. We have our facilities and servers in the large city of Zagreb, but we administer everything remotely. If we’re ever needed on-site, we can be there in less than three hours.

I understand many of your readers might not have even heard of Croatia, or don’t know where it is. Maybe all they know is that a war took place here 15 years ago. Many people abroad wonder if we even have electricity, but actually Croatia is a pretty modern country. Some things could be better, but hey…come and see for yourself! By the way, Elton John had a concert yesterday right here in the Roman Arena, 50 meters from our offices!

JM: I understand you’re a brand-new OpenSRS Reseller. What made you decide to switch and how has your experience been so far?

DB: Yes, we are brand-new OpenSRS resellers. Being part of OpenSRS is something new for us and we are still adapting to it. We are still implementing the API on our system, transferring our domains to OpenSRS, and if I may say, we still have a lot of work to do. I am very grateful for all the help we’ve received from OpenSRS staff, especially from Claire Lam and Ben Reuss. I am amazed how they notice everything I ask for or want.

The story of how we decided to switch to OpenSRS is pretty straightforward. Our former registrar (I wouldn’t like to mention its name) got in legal trouble for alleged cybersquatting. Although they were our partners for years, and we never had any problems with them, we realized that we needed a reliable company to take care of our domains. So we decided to change providers for domain registration. At almost the exact time we started searching for a new provider, Ben Reuss and Marco Zuliani from OpenSRS called me and offered me great terms. I already knew that OpenSRS was one of the world’s biggest reseller-friendly registrars, but with such great prices (and free WHOIS privacy which makes me happy the most), I just couldn’t refuse. So our search for a new partner was over pretty fast. And I am happy we decided to join OpenSRS.

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

DB: Since we are still a new reseller, I don’t have any particular suggestions. Everything is perfect. I am just happy our domains are secure, and don’t need anything else :)

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 Boris Licina for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

And yet, as I saw Farhad Manjoo’s article in Slate.com last week (www.thosenewdomainnames.areforsuckers) get traction - including the front page of Techmeme - I couldn’t resist the opportunity for some serious fisking.

Here’s goes…

“Now ICANN, the international body in charge of domain names, says it has a way to rid the Web of cybersquatting. Late last month, the group voted to create Web addresses that end in a much wider variety of letters than .com, .org, .net, and the dozens of country-specific suffixes that are currently available.”

Manjoo seems to be conflating two different issues. ICANN does indeed intend to introduce newTLDs but the goal is increasing diversity in the domain name space rather than eliminating cybersquatting. Some businesses objected, fearing that newTLDs would increase cybersquatting and essentially force trademark holders to preemptively buy all these newTLDs to protect themselves.  The response was the hotly debated IRT/URS process.

“When the proposal goes into effect later this year, businesses, municipalities, and other large organizations will be able to purchase domains of their own creation. The city of New York could buy its own suffix—to get to a city site, you’d type Police.nyc or Fire.nyc, and you’d e-mail Michael Bloomberg at Mayor@cityhall.nyc.”

Yes, it will be possible for companies to go to ICANN to get their own TLDs, but they’ll be owning the ENTIRE namespace for that TLD if they do that. Once they do own the TLD it is up to them to decide how domains within that TLD are apportioned.  Some TLDs will sell domains without restriction at prices similar to a regular domain today while others will set criteria for acceptance and still others will keep the TLD all to themselves.

So some people using new domains will pay a VERY large amount (for the entire TLD) while others will pay the going market rate.

“But ICANN’s plan comes about five years too late—cybersquatting isn’t a problem anymore.”

Not so. People still register domains that are precariously close to other popular sites or that incorporate trademarked terms in confusing ways. In fact the total number of UDRP filings increased last year (as did the number of registrations), so it’s hardly fair to say this isn’t a problem anymore.

“Indeed, ICANN’s plan to sell all these new top-level domains at very high prices—tens of thousands of dollars or more—seems like a scam, because domain names themselves just don’t matter that much nowadays.”

This is my real beef with the article.  Let’s look at the case he builds for this claim…

“Web browsers have gotten a lot smarter since the 1990s, and they’re now pretty good at determining what we want when we type in names that have many possible meanings. If you’re a fan of the Slate private-party venue in New York and visit its site often, you’ve just got to type S-L-A into your browser’s address bar and the site will pop up in a drop-down list. That Slate would be foolish to pay very much to buy Slate.party.”

Well, yes, auto-complete is a great boon to web users everywhere but that has nothing to do with domain names. It’s about getting them there in the first place so that auto-complete will complete to them.

Besides, on subsequent visits the domain STILL matters as the auto-complete is based on the domain anyway.  If “Slate” was at fdfsfsdfsdfsdfd.info then typing “S - L - …” isn’t going to help you.

“What’s more, lots of people now abandon the address bar entirely and rely, instead, on search engines to get around the Web. How do folks get to Match.com? According to Web traffic analysts, people type Match.com into Google and then click the top result. Are these people stupid? No, they’re smart: It takes a lot of work to remember every company’s exact domain name (is General Motors at GM.com or GeneralMotors.com or General-Motors.com?) and it’s much faster to let Google keep track. Chrome, Google’s Web browser, combines the address bar and search bar into a single field, which lets you use search terms as Web addresses. You don’t have to remember Josh Marshall’s long URL—Talkingpointsmemo.com—to get to his blog. Just type in josh marshall, and Chrome displays Google’s top results.”

Well, yes, search is becoming more effective all the time and the number one result in major search engines quite often does have the information we want.  But that’s not the point. People buy domains to be found when they are NOT the top search result. Imagine you’re some OTHER Josh Marshall.  How will people find you?  Being joshmarshall.me or theotherjoshmarshall.com might be the way to go.

And don’t forget that search engines have to figure out what to show as the top results and a relevant domain name matters.

Yes, SEO is important but so is a domain name. It’s not an ‘either or’ kind of thing.

“To be sure, cybersquatters are still plying their trade, and according to trademark experts commissioned by ICANN, domain-name disputes have lately been on the rise.”

Uh, then why did you say it wasn’t a problem anymore?

“At the same time, though, you see Web sites getting much more adventurous in the domain names they pick—look at the Lolcats site Icanhascheezburger.com or the social-bookmarking site Del.icio.us (which later changed its name to Delicious.com). These names suggest a nonchalance about URLs. It no longer matters whether a domain name is really long or has an unconventional spelling; people will be able to find it, anyway.”

Oh dear.

Funky Web 2.0 names have in no way helped these sites. Yes, a few have flourished in spite of their odd names but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to follow their lead.  This is a case of “survivorship bias” - thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of sites have been launched at sub-optimal domains that have hindered them considerably. The fact that a few made it to the big time is irrelevant.

Interestingly, Manjoo’s parenthetical note that del.icio.us changed it’s name to delicious.com just proves the point.

“And for cybersquatters, there are now other places to play. Social-networking sites are now the Web’s biggest properties, so getting your identity on Facebook or Twitter has become much more important than getting a good domain. Recently Facebook offered its users vanity URLs—e.g., www.facebook.com/farhad.manjoo—on a first-come, first-served basis; the addresses were snapped up at a rate of more than 500 per second.”

Do you want your domain name to market you or Facebook? What happens when you tire of Facebook (like we tired of MySpace, and Friendster, and GeoCities and AOL before that)?  Owning your domain name lets you point at all the interesting places you might be hanging out online.  Does anyone want to print business cards with facebook.com/mynickname on them when they could spend a few dollars and own a name they want forever?

“Twitter, meanwhile, has become a haven for imposters. The site has had to close down accounts impersonating Exxon Mobil, Kanye West, and my colleague Emily Bazelon, among many others. Twitter has vowed to become more vigilant in its fight against poseurs, and surely it will implement a plan to do so. Because Twitter has total control over its names, it can deal with squatters much more quickly than is possible on the domain-name system, which is administered by thousands of registrars across the world.”

But what recourse to you have when Twitter (or any site) arbitrarily shuts down your account and/or gives your name to someone else? None. This to me is the equivalent of saying “why bother with these complicated laws and lawyers, judges and juries, why not just let the King decide”.

But squatters wouldn’t get very far even if Twitter never got its act together. Last year, someone got on Twitter and began tweeting as Shaquille O’Neal. When the real Shaq got wind of the faker, he didn’t offer to pay for his identity; rather, he set up another name—The_Real_Shaq—and set the record straight. Now, it no longer matters that Shaq doesn’t own his Twitter name; when you Google Shaq Twitter, The_Real_Shaq comes up first (he’s got more than 1.5 million followers). We all should follow Shaq’s example—don’t ever pay for a screen name or a domain name again.

.basketball!

OpenSRS Blogware:
OpenSRS Blogware has a scheduled maintenance window on Wednesday July 15, 2009.

Date: Wednesday July 15, 2009
Time: 02:00 - 02:30 UTC
Duration: 30 minutes
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact:
We are using this 30 minute window for Blogware to reconfigure our firewall infrastructure. This is a proactive measure in an effort to segregate and isolate critical services on our network to increase overall resiliency during attacks, abuse or hardware failure. The actual downtime we’re anticipating will be about 5 minutes within the window.

During that time blogs, the blog control panel and your Administration Panel will be unavailable. All other OpenSRS services are unaffected.

.ME
There is a 4-hour scheduled .ME registry maintenance on Saturday, July 18, 2009.

Date: Saturday, July 18, 2009
Time: 15:00 - 19:00 UTC
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 Services:
There is a 4-hour maintenance window scheduled for Sunday July 19, 2009.

Date: Sunday July 19, 2009
Time: 03:00 - 07:00 UTC
Duration: 4 hours
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact: We will use this time to upgrade our core routers to accommodate 10 Gigabit cards. To minimize the impact on your services, traffic will be routed through secondary routers. This action should limit the actual down time to approximately 15 minutes within the 4 hour window.

The following OpenSRS Services will be briefly affected:

• OpenSRS Provisioning and Management (includes: ordering, renewals, transfers, deletion and management of domain names.)
• Storefront (includes ordering, renewals, deletion and management of domain names.)
• Provisioning of Digital Certificates (SSL) and Managed DNS
• Website Builder
• Blogware
• Email Cluster A: Email connectivity via Webmail, IMAP and POP, inbound/outbound mailflow and provisioning via the Mail Administration Center (MAC) will be unavailable during that time. For OpenSRS Email Service Cluster A we will also be upgrading hardware used by the provisioning system. This hardware upgrade will occur in parallel to our network maintenance so there should not be any additional outage to the provisioning system within the window.

All domains will continue to resolve.

Find out more.

European Registry of Internet Domain Names (EURid) is the registry provider for the .EU ccTLD. EURid is a private, not-for-profit organization that provides .EU for European businesses and individuals.

The EURid website provides many valuable customer testimonials and success stories on the site in both text and some video format. The range of countries, businesses and individuals is truly indicative of unique ways to streamline your sites while broadening your market reach. Check out this innovative cartoon series by French cartoonist Wandrille. The series started appearing in the European Voice in June 2009.

.EU Quick Facts

• There are about 3 million .EU domains
• .EU became available in 2005
• 500 million Europeans in 27 countries are eligible (residency in one of the European Union Member States is a requirement)
• Since 2008, it has grown by 10%
• Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have the largest concentration of .EU. (data from the Q1 2009 report)

Short video about .EU (30 Seconds):

Available Resources

• Registry site
• EURid quarterly report (PDF)
• .EU statistics
• News via RSS
• News Archive
• Newsletter (PDF)
• FAQ

.EU Promotion:
Our .EU promotion runs from July 1st until July 31, 2009. There’s more information on the promotion page.

.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

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.

.TEL:
There is a scheduled 90 minute maintenance .TEL (Telehosting Platform only) on Sunday, July 5, 2009.

Date: Sunday, July 5, 2009
Time: 08:30 - 10:30 UTC
Duration: 90 minutes

Service Impact:
All .TEL ordering, Whois searching and .TEL profiles will be fully available. This maintenance is for the Production Community Telhosting (PCT) Platform. (The Telhosting platform is where end users add their content for their .TEL listing).

.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:
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.

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: