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.

Giovanni Losi of REGdom took a few minutes to tell us about his company for Meet The Resellers. REGdom is an important player in the Italian Internet industry. Here’s our chat:

How long has REGdom been doing business and tell us about all the services you offer to your customers?

We started our business in early 1996 as one of the first .it maintainers, registering .it domains at the newly born .it registry (NIC). At first, we were more focused on web hosting as a classic Internet service provider (ISP); however while growing, we acquired our own data center which allowed us to start a new area of activity offering hosting solutions to other companies. This allowed us to develop partnerships and create new product offerings.

In late 2001, we became more aware of the need to split our products in different brands, managing them as different companies in the attempt to be more flexible and quickly follow the changes of the market. Our products lineup now varies from hosting/housing to fax-to-mail services. As REGdom – the brand focused on domain registrations – we’re developing a completely new platform to allow our partners maintain their domains in an easier way.

Any interesting stories from your company’s history?

Our company took part at the first round-table discussing the rules for .it domain registrations when the Italian Registration Authority was founded. It’s interesting to see how this market has grown and how many key players are still here while others are gone. I think that paying attention to the past is a great way to learn and to lead a new path for the future.

We are proud of our contribution to the .it registrar agreement and also were involved in the technical procedure tests. Being a small actor in the progress of the Internet is one of the factors that makes this job so exciting.

Giovanni Losi, Product Manager
REGdom

How did you personally get into the Internet business?

Well, like a lot of people in this sector, it all started as a hobby. I have loved technology and computers since I was a child, so I think I was one of the first to be passionate about the Internet when it became a reality in Italy in the middle of the 90s. After working for a company selling computers and related services I jumped on the new economy ship and started working as a systems administrator for an ISP. I immediately fell in love with this new world and its opportunities. Year by year, I became more interested in how the Internet works and what lies behind everything. In 2008, after some months splitting myself in two different positions, I fully crossed the line to become a REGdom Product Manager.

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

Our headquarters is in Brescia, a city in northern Italy pretty close to Milan. It gives almost the same advantages as working in the more famous city: affordable technology, low prices for bandwidth, without considering that all the biggest ISPs and the MIX (Milan Internet eXchange) are in this area. Apart from that Brescia is more liveable than Milan: less traffic, less air pollution, a smaller city centre. It’s less chaotic. We’re just 20 minutes driving time from the Garda Lake, a vacation spot where relaxing with many activities, from sunbathing to water sports.

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

We signed the contract in 2003 but we started doing business seriously with OpenSRS a couple of years later. At the beginning we used to register domains with many other registrars because we would have loved to try different reseller services. When business started growing we realized we couldn’t afford to have as many web panels with the increase of TLDs. We needed a strong partner with a solid assistance to rely on, and our path led us to OpenSRS showing it as that kind of ideal partner. It gives us the opportunity to keep all our domains in a unique interface and the API support helped and is still helping us to grow and speed up our registration processes.

What can we do to make the relationship stronger?

It has been a good idea to create an European technical department, supplying us a better and faster support, more reliable with the same working hours.

Widening the tld’s choice range would be appreciated too, as our customers are mostly based in Europe and sometimes they want to register European ccTLDs. As we deep developed our systems to connect with your API we would like to fully take advantage of that and register even more domains (and TLDs) with OpenSRS.

Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

The squishy cows you sent us are wonderful! Everybody loves them in the office and I’m planning to bring one on holiday with me for some fancy photo shoot, please send us more gadgets when possible!

Having a direct OpenSRS contact who speaks our language is an additional thing that should not be under estimated. No other operator at an international level has offered this to us.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Nergis Sungur, marketing manager of DorukNet, Turkey’s first and largest Internet service provider.

Nergis Sungur, DorukNet

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

Nergis Sungur (NS): DorukNet was the first Internet service provider (ISP) in Turkey. Since 1993, DorukNet has functioned as a B2B company providing Internet access, shared hosting, co-location and dedicated hosting, local and long-distance telephony and value-added services to corporate foundations.
 
DorukNet has more than 30 POPs in all the major cities of Turkey and two POPs abroad – one in Frankfurt and the other in London. Within this infrastructure, each node is backed up in order to ensure an interruption-free service. DorukNet monitors its backbone and data centers by means of top-notch security equipment and skilled technical staff who are available to provide assistance 24/7.
 
Over the years, the quality of the service and the value offered to customers have earned the trust of many small-scale to worldwide well-known global companies, thereby making DorukNet a strong player in the Internet services market. Currently, DorukNet provides over 15,000 companies with data center services and over 500 companies with TDM, PCM, Frame Relay, ATM and G.SHDSL solutions. We use world-class technology and equipment from Juniper, Cisco, 3Com and Alcatel.

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

NS: I began my career as a Marketing Specialist at the headquarters of Akbank which is one of the biggest and most respected banks in Turkey. I was responsible for the development and marketing activities of Internet banking, both web site and mobile banking. I also had the chance to work on different projects regarding kiosks, ATMs, call centers and self-service banking platforms. That is how I had the chance to get into the Internet and IT sector, which I find to be a lot of fun.

Ortakoy Mosque (1854), Istanbul, Turkey

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

NS: We are located in Istanbul, Turkey which is a great place to do business. Turkey is a big unsaturated market and there are currently 6 million broadband Internet subscribers and around 30 million Internet users in total. The population is young and technology-oriented. Also, we have laws requiring corporate entities to have a web site and this enhances the sector. As a city, Istanbul is the financial and commercial center of Turkey which makes the location very convenient for business.

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

NS: DorukNet has been an OpenSRS Reseller for the past 10 years. A partnership should be based on and can flourish in an environment where mutual trust exists. OpenSRS takes our business relationship seriously and provides that environment. We are aware of the fact that OpenSRS does business with its partners on a win-win basis, and we believe that we can always rely on OpenSRS which brings comfort and frees us to focus on our core business.

JM: What can we do to make our relationship with your company stronger?

NS: I think OpenSRS is taking serious steps and on the right track to enhance the relationship with its partners by assigning account managers and its new organizational structure.  I would suggest some general meetings to be held among your Resellers which would be a great platform to exchange some ideas and for fruitful discussions. (Editor’s Note: Our new forum is a perfect platform for our Resellers to exchange ideas.)

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

NS: I would highly recommend that you further develop your Reseller interfaces. They could be more user-friendly and also some useful reporting tools could be implemented. (Editor’s Note: This is a top priority for us this year, and you should be seeing some welcome changes very soon.)

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 Vyacheslav Argenberg for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features John McKown, president of Delaware.net, an innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider located in the American state of Delaware. They recently moved their entire domain registration business to our hosted Storefront platform.

John McKown, Delaware.net

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

John McKown (JMcK): We’ve been in business since 1997. I would call us a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. We have a development team here that builds websites, and we have our own software that we run both in our own data center and also on the Amazon cloud. It’s a platform that consists of four main suites: a content management system (CMS), a customer relationship management system (CRM) for sales and project management online, an ecommerce system and an email newsletter system. We’re especially seeing lots of growth with the CMS suite. In this economy, what we’re seeing is that folks are losing their web designers and they want to be able to manage their own websites. They’re moving their sites to us just so they can manage them better.

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

JMcK: We started as an access provider, and I remember meeting Elliot (Noss) way back then, when Tucows started as a download site, even before it became a registrar. We had conversations about the future of services and where things were headed, and my take on things was that I did not want to be a commodity service. I didn’t want to sell the wire, I wanted to sell what goes through the wire. It was only about a year and a half after being in that business that we decided that we had to get away as quickly as possible from that.

Another lesson we learned is not to take on very large projects just out of ego. Today, every site we work on is making our products better. When folks would come to us with an application that someone else had built that was broken and ask us to fix it, we underestimated how much it would demoralize our programmers to ask them to fix someone else’s bad code. By creating our own SaaS platform, and continually adding new features to it which we roll out to customers at no charge, we instill much more pride in our team because we’re helping our clients make millions of dollars.

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

JMcK: My family had a company and I build an ecommerce system for them, and then our ISP went out of business. We had 48 hours to find a new host, and I had made a spreadsheet of all the area hosting companies. We literally sat around a table and decided that we should just do it ourselves. And we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The company was first called EZ Online and our domain was ezol.com. We’d say to people, “We’re like America Online but it’s easier to do things.” Dialup back then was something like $35 a month.

As the price started to drop, it didn’t take long for us to know that selling the wire wasn’t adding value, that service was the value. I see the same thing happening to hosting as an industry. I think applications are the key. You’re not just using the web. You’re using a browser, you’re using Facebook, you’re using Twitter, you’re using Gmail, these are all applications. So that’s our focus now.

The Old State House, Dover, Delaware

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

JMcK: We’re in Dover, Delaware which is the capital of the state. The reason we’re here is because we’re close to state government, which was a huge part of our company when we started. The ironic thing today is that our clients come from all over the country. Municipalities are a huge vertical for us, we’re building a lot of city websites right now. We’ve got one in Arizona, one in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut. We have struggled with our name, we had an identity crisis with our name for quite a long time and then we realized that it didn’t matter. What matters to people is that we can solve their problem. We learned that if you’re in the service business, you’re in the problem-solving business. We also learned that your portfolio will do your marketing for you.

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

JMcK: Since the very beginning. In fact, we actually made up t-shirts when Tucows came into existence. When everyone was on Network Solutions and that was the only option, they became private and began to poach the database. They were marketing to our clients and that really concerned us. OpenSRS was a bright light in the registrar world to us because they respect the sales channel. The difference in cost is a non-issue for me. It’s someone I can trust and can do business with. We made a t-shirt with the Network Solutions logo that said “Not Worth Delusions”. The silver lining to that experience is that now we’re looking at reselling some of our applications and OpenSRS has been an example to me that we need to nurture and protect our own sales channel. I think Tucows is a model for that.

JM: I understand that you recently migrated your domains into our hosted Storefront. Can you give me a bit of background on that??

JMcK: Firstly, we’re programmers and we could code a lot of things ourselves, but there’s a point when you have to ask yourselves, “Do we want to build or do we want to buy?” With that product, you could get us to market instantly with an interface that better serves our client.

The second reason we moved to it is that we see domain registration as just a cost of doing business for our clients. It’s not necessarily a primary revenue source for us. The most important thing is to get the domain registered, get the domain renewed quickly, and to give the clients self-service tools. The interface works perfectly for those purposes.

JM: How was the experience of migrating and how has using Storefront compared to your previous method of working with the RWI??

JMcK: It was very easy. We simply linked to it and pushed customers to it. They don’t have a problem with that. We were concerend that giving them a self-service option might be construed as a hassle and that hasn’t happened. It’s been very painless, and one of the benefits that we’ve uncovered is that we’re able to not incur interest fees on our credit cards by running the transactions ourselves. And to be honest with you, I think that a lot of service providers that do use credit cards are now finding that the credit card companies are jacking up the rates and so that eats into the domain profit and maybe they don’t want to put all their domain stuff on the credit card in case it’s ever in jeopardy. This solves that problem because the money is going right from the client right to you and we’re not in the middle. There are fewer potential points of failure in the transaction, in my opinion.

JM: What can we do to make our relationship with your company stronger?

JMcK: Communicate more. Communication is what it’s all about. Some people don’t want to be bothered, but that’s not us. We want to bothered, we want to know what’s going on, we want to know what’s available. It was us enquiring that got us to the (hosted Storefront) interface, I didn’t even know that was an option. We were digging. We would have done it sooner had we known about it sooner.

JM: Any other suggestions or feedback for us?

JMcK: One thing you might do is to create some simple marketing or help materials to help end users understand how the domain name process works. You could even make this available through the Storefront interface. Something to explain the role of each link in the domain registration chain, from registries to registrars to resellers to end users. Or even the difference between domain hosting and registration. I don’t think we realize how little the general public knows about how DNS works or how registrars work or how we fit into all that.

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 Mike Mahaffie for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

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.

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.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Sébastien Prat, founder of neoDomaine, a fast-growing hosting company from France.

Sébastien Prat, neoDomaine, with his daughter

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

Sébastien Prat (SP): neoDomaine has been incorporated since 2001 with domain name registration as its core business. Since then we have developed complementary services around domain names, but high volume domain registration at reasonably low prices is still our main activity. On top of that we provide various value added services such as web redirection (URL mapping), mail redirection (with on-the-fly spam and virus filtering), basic hosting packages, snap robot and portfolio monitoring systems.

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

SP: Yes, we figured out that in the long term, discount registrars are not such a threat as they appear to be. Since we started on the market, prices have dropped heavily but our market share is still strong. When it comes to registration, end users sometimes just look for the cheapest, but they soon realize that choosing the cheapest may not have been so wise (for example some price breakers like Lycos have gone bankrupt with thousands of domain names). Security and quality of service is the best choice for the long term. That is what we do at neoDomaine. For example, among other things, we host our servers at two different physical facilities separated by ten miles. This doubles our hosting cost, but all of our systems are “always up” in any circumstance. Quality at a reasonable price is the best long term choice for end users.

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

SP: I was surfing the web when I came across the OpenSRS web site. It really was as simple as that!

Montpellier, France

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

SP: We are located in Montpellier in the south of France. This is quite a nice place to live and work. We are near the Mediterranean Sea and our Tucows account manager has never missed a visit for a nice lunch on the “terrasse” around springtime.

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

SP: We started the business in 2001 as an OpenSRS reseller. Our partnership with Tucows is a win-win process: if we grow, you grow. Sincerely, we have no grief with OpenSRS. Technically your system is now quite mature and functional and we have always been able to get someone on the phone whenever we needed. Now you have opened an office in Europe. The distance has never been a problem anyway, since the daily business is 100% on computer screens.

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

SP: Come for another lunch around September (the sea is still warm!).

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 Bruno Monginoux for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Steffan Søndermark Fallesen, founder of Servage, an innovative web host located in Germany.

Steffan Søndermark Fallesen, Servage (and friend)

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

Steffan Søndermark Fallesen (SSF): I started Servage Hosting in 2004 with the dream of providing one package that included everything so that customers could grow with it without having to upgrade or make advanced purchase decisions.

Servage Hosting has a unique position in the webhosting market with our simple strategy. We still offer one solution that is loaded with features and includes absolutely everything that a webmaster needs. Every week new features are added and our customers trust that we continuously add new and exciting functions to our package.

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

SSF: Servage is really all about software and great service. So unlike almost all other webhosting companies we started out developing our own cluster structure and control panel software. We wanted to be the first company to offer clustered webhosting to the mass market so that everyone could take advantage of this great new technology.

The first year we went from just two server racks to filling out the colocation facility where our servers were located. So without planning much we had to start building our own datacenter from scratch which was a major challenge for us at the time.

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

SSF: I have been playing around with computers as long as I can remember and ended up studying computer science. During my studies, I did the initial coding on the cluster backend software and after graduation all my time was spent on making Servage ready for business.

Harbor, Flensburg, Germany

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

SSF: Our company is located in Flensburg which is probably one of the most beautiful locations in Germany. Located by the sea and surrounded by nature it is just an ideal place to live, and combined with a fairly large university it is a great business location too!

I grew up in Denmark and after my studies I needed to select a location to start Servage. At that time Germany was just a better place to purchase bandwidth, so without many thoughts I selected the nicest town and moved here.

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

SSF: Servage has been using OpenSRS from day one and we have been quite pleased. When we started out we needed a provider with a really good API and OpenSRS provided us with that, along with fair pricing.

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

SSF: You have done quite a bit already, especially lately, when we got a visit from Marco Zuliani and Elliot Noss. It was nice to meet a few of you guys face to face.

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 Arne List for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Daniela Copacel from ROMARG, Romania’s largest web hosting company.

Daniela Copacel, ROMARG

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

Daniela Copacel (DC): ROMARG entered the Internet business in 2001 as an online services provider, with web design among our primary offerings. After about a year, ROMARG started providing web hosting services and registering .RO domain names (specific for our country) becoming one of the companies that have led the development of Internet services in Romania. Today we offer a large range of web hosting services, offering our customers dedicated servers, virtual private servers, colocation services, email hosting and online advertising.

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

DC: There is always something interesting to say about ROMARG. For us each challenge that has been conquered is a special moment, worthy of discussion. No two days here are the same, and each one has its own story that can be shared. This is due to our clients who often give us interesting suggestions in their feedback. Right now, we can talk about some recently added services that have been introduced to customers, such as Video Hosting, Enterprise Hosting, WAP Hosting and Games Hosting and other applications that help us increase service quality. If you look into this type of business in our country, you will notice that these solutions are young and we are happy knowing that we contribute to bringing them to the public. While we enjoy remembering things that happened in the past, we are much more enthusiastic when we talk about present achievements.

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

DC: It is interesting the way life can surprise you. In my case, with ROMARG it happened in the same way, and I am grateful for that. In my role as Marketing Specialist, I am lucky to be part of a young, enthusiastic team from whom I am always learning. As a new person working in this industry, there were times when I felt like a customer who asks too many questions and I was pleasantly surprised by the answers I received, answers that seemed specially tailored for me to understand. I believe this capacity to adapt to each person is extremely important in this business.

Brasov, Romania

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

DC: We are located in Brasov, Romania, and we operate in the whole country and also abroad. Why is Romania a good place for this kind of business? Simply put, we deal here with a population who are very open and receptive to our service offerings. In our industry, which has grown every year in the last decade, we face a younger generation who are aware and interested in the services that we offer. As a local provider we feel we have an advantage in the way we communicate with them.

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

DC: Our collaboration with OpenSRS began in 2006 and we can say that this partnership has made a very substantial contribution to the level of services we offer to consumers. We strongly believe that only cooperating with reliable partners, who have the same orientation as ours in terms of professionalism and quality of services, can make us a successful company. We also believe that our relationship with OpenSRS has a personal side which makes it special.

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

DC: In any type of relationship, business or personal, good communication and personal involvement are important to strengthen the ongoing partnership. And let us also not forget that it is harder to stay on top than to reach it, so work hard and good luck!

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!

Photo credit: Oana Marginean

This latest installment in the “Meet the Resellers” series features Steve Rogoschewsky, CEO of BlackSun, a fast-growing Canadian web hosting company.

Steve Rogoschewsky, BlackSun

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

Steve Rogoschewsky (SR): BlackSun was founded in 1998 and offers high availability hosting, domain name registration, dedicated servers, colocation services, and email solutions. We recently expanded our data center in order to provide the infrastructure requirements for entering into our Cloud Computing phase.

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

SR: The people who work here are the big difference — most of our staff come from non-IT backgrounds and bring a new perspective to the industry. Each and every employee at BlackSun has a hand in shaping the company and the direction we take as a business. As such everyone has a vested interest in the success of the company — you can see the results of this connection in the care and attention paid to every detail of our operations.

This unique conglomerate of personalities and backgrounds has made for not only some great innovations and ideas, but an interesting office dynamic and corporate identity. Our name, BlackSun, was derived from an episode of Space 1999 entitled “Journey to the BlackSun”. The television series exemplified the process of overcoming impossible odds and achieving lofty goals — a motif still active within our company today and a clear example of individual employee influences. Similarly, our “Customer Service 2.0″ brand is attributed to the personal touch customers receive at BlackSun.

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

SR: I started out with internet consulting, primarily helping clients succeed in establishing an online presence. BlackSun web hosting was actually born out of frustration at not being able to find reliable web hosting services in Canada, and the focus of BlackSun was established around providing personalized service based on the customer’s individual web hosting needs.

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

SR: BlackSun is located in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is a great place to establish a hosting facility. We are the only web hosting company in the world that can boast being “farthest from a fault line”, free from earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and weather. Nothing much goes on here, making it a great place to put your data!

Saskatoon in Winter

Saskatoon is a city of about 250,000 and has a great entrepreneurial spirit. Innovation Place Research Park, where we are located, has a mandate to employ sustainable building design and operation. As such our corporate offices and data centers are housed in one of the few “Go Green Plus” certified buildings in Saskatchewan, giving us a head start in building an environmentally sustainable business platform.

I should mention that we also have technical support and sales staff in Alberta, British Columbia, and Sweden.

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

SR: We have always been an OpenSRS reseller, and we love getting the same “personalized service” that we are proud to give our customers. We consider OpenSRS more of a partner than a vendor.

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

SR: I think if we got together more often in person, this would really enhance the relationship.

JM: I’ll take that as an open invitation!

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 Martin Cathrae for making his image available under a Creative Commons license.