LogicBoxes Partners with Yovole

We are happy to annnounce our partnership with Yovole Communications to help them achieve ICANN Accreditation and to increase their domain extension portfolio. This partnership allows Yovole to leverage on ICANN Accreditation branding and provides access to 45+ Domain Name extensions from LogicBoxes.

As an advantage of being ICANN Accredited, Yovole will now be able to further establish its brand as a serious player in the domain name industry. This will certainly ensure in better volumes of business for the company in the days to come.

Yovole’s choice of partnering with us is based on LogicBoxes’ extensive experience in assisting and managing ICANN Registrars. The partnership also gives Yovole access to OrderBox – LogicBoxes’ Registrar Automation Solution, that will allow Yovole to provide its customers with ancillary web products like Web and Email Hosting, Do-it-Yourself Website Builders and Digital Certificates.

Commenting on the partnership, Qiuzhiwu, Product Director at Yovole said, “LogicBoxes helped us understand the Accreditation process – something that would have been very time-consuming for us to learn first-hand. We’ve saved a lot of resources by partnering with them.”

“A lot of web hosts and large domain resellers are now realizing the advantages of ICANN Accreditation”, said Sandeep Ramchandani, Director at LogicBoxes. “We’re glad to partner with Yovole and trust that we will help them further boost their business in all aspects.”

About Yovole:

Yovole, founded in 2001, provides internet value-added services to SMEs in China, with their main business being IDC (collocation); IBS (internet basic service, e.g. domains, web hosting, cloud computing, etc.) and SaaS (Hosted Exchange , SharePoint, etc). It has 170+ employees that are based out of Shanghai (HQ) and Beijing, Chengdu & Guangzhou. The company has over 100K customers. It is also a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner with competencies in hosting and server platforms.
For more information, please visit http://www.yovole.com

VeriSign’s Registry Fee Hike – In Retrospect

The Registry fee for .COM and .NET will increase 2 days from now. The fee for .COM domain names have increased from $7.34 to $7.85 and the fees for .NET domain names have increased from $5.40 to $5.86.

This is the last of the 4 price hikes that Verisign is entitled to, under contract with ICANN.

Here’s a quick summary of the price changes so far:

Why does Verisign keep increasing .COM/.NET fees?

According to them; in the last five years, the volume of DNS queries on Verisign’s global Internet infrastructure has more than doubled, increasing to an average daily query load of 57 billion in the first quarter of 2011. This daily number was ~30 billion queries on average in 2007 and was a miniscule of 1 billion queries per day back in 1999.

The additional fees help the company bolster and scale infrastructure and platforms to ensure smooth functioning of these systems.

* Data sourced from Verisign.com

The Voice of LogicBoxes – Vol. 2

Hello folks!

Here’s the second volume of the Voice of LogicBoxes – our bi-annual newsletter on OrderBox updates and other changes that affect your Registrar business. This volume covers the latter half of 2011.

SYSTEM UPDATES

• We’ve added 2 new domain extensions to the system – .XXX, .AU
• The look and feel of the Registrar, Reseller and Customer control panels are in the process of being completely re-designed. As a precursor to this, we’ve already made changes to the CSS to give the header, menu and the widgets a modern and cleaner look
• As part of our ongoing exercise to revamp OrderBox, we’ve clubbed all branding-related tasks for Registrars under one roof with the introduction of “Branding Settings”. Older, text-heavy pages have been given a cleaner, crisper and lighter look
• We’ve also initiated a refactoring exercise for our Bulk Tools where we started with the most heavily-used Bulk Renewals and Registrations. Under this, we refactored the backend code as well as enhanced front-end flows of the Bulk Renewal process. Based on feedback received from Partners, we are currently working on further enhancements to the Bulk Renewal process where we will be attempting to make the flows more intuitive for Customers too
• As part of our initiative to build out our Hosting product portfolio, we’ve launched Multi-Domain Hosting (MDH) on our Linux platform. With this product, you can now host multiple domains under one cPanel account.
• For managing feedback, we’ve restarted UserVoice. Our Product Managers are actively interacting with the Registrar Community to prioritise on features and upgrades that need to be added to the system

OTHER ACTIVITIES

• We conducted two webinars in association with Verisign folks:
  1. A detailed walkthrough of the “Verisign Customer Center”
  2. “Verisign New Unit Marketing Promo” that gave Registrars detailed information on upcoming promotions in 2012

• We also conducted a webinar in conjunction with ICM Registry – the .XXX registry to spread awareness about the new .XXX domain name
• We also attended hugely popular conferences like HostingCon, Parallels APAC and the ICANN meet at Senegal. We’ll most probably be attending these events again, so if you want to meet us at these events in 2012, let us know

If you have any feedback or would like to hear more about the content of this edition, do let us know!

Pic Courtesy SparkeyDavis