Announcements, Articles, Partner Focus

Partner Focus – Namespro.ca

Posted on by Simran Mehta

With an industry experience of 15+ years, Namespro.ca currently is one of the top performing Canadian Domain Name providers. The company started out as a domain name reseller in 2002 and since then, they have always focused on providing top-notch web presence products. Over the years, they witnessed a steady growth of their domain name portfolio and that’s when they decided that it was time for them to level up.

For most domain name resellers, getting ICANN accredited is the best way to establish their brand as the most trustworthy and credible one in the industry; and that’s exactly what Namespro.ca aimed to do. They were looking for a trusted and experienced partner who would help them sail through the entire ICANN Accreditation process effortlessly. This is when their acquaintance with LogicBoxes happened.

In a short tête-à-tête with Vicole So, Managing Director at Namespro.ca, we asked him what exactly was their thought behind choosing to partner with LogicBoxes and how fruitful has this decision been. So let’s hear it from Vicole:

Q. Can you give us a little background on Namespro and when you started off?
Vicole: Namespro.ca has been in the domain business for over 15 years. Like any start-up domain company, we started off being a domain reseller. Our portfolio grew over the years, and we felt that it was the time for us to acquire our own ICANN accreditation. That was when LogicBoxes contacted us and offered to help us achieve that goal.

Q. What were your requirements exactly?
Vicole: We were looking for a partner who brought in a lot of experience and expertise which is a must-have for a process as cumbersome as the ICANN Accreditation process. Also, it was absolutely essential that they have a robust and scalable Registrar management platform.

Q. How exactly did LogicBoxes help you achieve what you wanted?
Vicole: Logicboxes extended their end-to-end assistance in getting us ICANN Accredited. They guided us through the entire process, right from building our application, gathering all the documents to liaising with ICANN as well as the Registry on our behalf. They also set up Registry connections for us which was otherwise a big undertaking technically. The entire Accreditation process went smoothly, and we went LIVE as an ICANN Accredited Registrar in less than 6 months’ time.

Q. What’s the biggest advantage you’ve seen of partnering with LogicBoxes?
Vicole: The most significant advantage since we partnered with LogicBoxes is definitely the acquisition of ICANN Accreditation. Being ICANN Accredited, not only do we save cost in our domain business, but it also helps us present a better image to our users by not being a reseller.

Q. You have also been using LogicBoxes’ platform to run your Registrar operations. How has that been going for you so far?
Vicole: Logicboxes has a very comprehensive management system that makes domain management very easy. They take care of all the Registry-related matters for us which saves our time and cost involved in dealing with each Registry separately. Moreover, Logicboxes offers many different products so we can easily provision and sell them on our own Website.

Q. What about additional web products & services? Did you think of extending your product portfolio beyond domain names?
Vicole: Yes, with LogicBoxes offering a wide range of domain related products such as Hosting, SSL Certificates, G Suite by Google Cloud, etc. and with a very functional API, these products were easily migrated to our business for us to sell.

Q. How would you describe our dedicated Support & Account Management team?
Vicole: So far our experience with Logicboxes is a pleasant one. LogicBoxes has always offered exceptional support when we needed it. Their technical team works around the clock and is usually able to help us with all queries. Same goes for our Dedicated Account Manager, Royston Walder, who is extremely helpful and always responsive.

That’s all from Namespro.ca, our Partner in Focus for this time. Do watch this space for more updates on our other Partners!

Announcements

Monthly Bulletin: July 2017

Posted on by Simran Mehta

We’re back with the second edition of our Industry Round Up. Read on to know more about all the industry updates from the Domains & Hosting space that took place in July.

  • TLD Updates
  • Mergers & Acquisitions
  • ICANN Announcements
  • Net Neutrality

TLD Updates

  • .BLOG hit the 100,000 Milestone this Month: The new gTLD, .BLOG, announced that it has crossed 100,000 registrations since they entered General Availability last November. This has been a great start for .blog, which now averages around 12,500 new adds per month.
  • Most Popular New gTLD in China: .SHOP was awarded as the most popular new gTLD in China at the Global Domain Summit which was held earlier in July. 
  • Non .COM Premium Domains Top the Sales Chart: It’s a rare case when .COM doesn’t rule the premium domain sales chart. July experienced one of those weeks with .ORG ruling the sales chart with Ruppi.com selling BitcoinCash.org for $48,888.
  • .NET Price Hike: On July 28, 2017, Verisign announced a hike in annual prices of a .NET registration, renewal or transfer from $8.20 to $9.02. This hike will be effective from February 1, 2018.
  • .AMAZON TLD Update: The e-commerce giant has been fighting for its brand TLD – .AMAZON, since it was denied approval in 2014 from government advisors. They received a lot of grief from representatives from Brazil and Peru as they argued that the name has geographic connection to the Amazon ecological habitat. However, recently Amazon filed for Independent Review and have been given another shot at acquiring .AMAZON
  • .McDonalds terminates their New gTLDs: McDonald’s recently sent a notice to ICANN terminating their brand TLDs – .McDonalds and .MCD, joining a bunch of recent .brand TLDs who have terminated their contracts with ICANN
  • .COM/.NET update: The .COM & .NET registry released its results for the second quarter of 2017 on July 27th. Verisign reported a revenue of $289 million for the second quarter of 2017. They ended the second quarter with 144.3 million .COM and .NET domain name registrations.

MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

  • SiteLock expands Website Security with Patchman Acquisition: SiteLock, a global leader in providing website security solutions, finalized its acquisition with the Dutch web security startup – Patchman. This deal will help SiteLock magnify its reach and provide better quality support and services to the Hosting provider community. This will also double the number of websites already protected by SiteLock.
  • GoDaddy sells PlusServer for $456M: GoDaddy, the world’s largest Domain Registrar, has signed an agreement to sell their PlusServer business to BC Partners for a value of $465 million. This deal is expected to close by the end of August. GoDaddy is looking at utilizing the funds received from the sale plus cash in hand to repay its €500 million bridge loan.
  • ArcServer acquires Zetta: ArcServer, an XX company, was looking at adding new talent and cloud capabilities to expand their Unified Data Protection portfolio and found Zetta to be the perfect match to meet their business requirements. This acquisition would help advance ArcServer’s Cloud solutions with Zetta’s technology and expertise.
  • United Internet signs an agreement with ProfitBricks: United Internet has an entered in an agreement with the other shareholders of ProfitBricks GmbH – a technologically leading cloud hosting specialist for complete acquisition of the company. United Nations has been a stakeholder in ProfitBricks and this complete takeover will help strengthen their existing product portfolio of Cloud solutions and will enable them to attract clients looking for a professional cloud infrastructure.
  • Rightside-Donuts Update: ICANN has given a go-ahead to Rightside – Donuts merger. As per the agreement, Donuts acquired Rightside for approximately $213M. This deal will add 40 new gTLDs to Donuts’ existing portfolio of 200 gTLDs – the largest in the industry.

ICANN ANNOUNCEMENTS

  • Registry System Testing Site is Now Live: The Registry System Testing (RST) ensures that a Registry Operator has the capacity to operate a new gTLD in a stable and secure manner. Every Registry Operator must ensure that it has established operations as per the criteria mentioned in the Applicant Guidebook. Any changes to back-end operations may require a new RST test to ensure the stability of those services.
  • No Dates for Next gTLD Round: Despite there being a keen interest from Registries, ICANN sent a letter to the Registries Stakeholder Group stating that the agency will not be setting a date for the next round of new gTLD applications anytime soon.
  • ICANN Publishes Updated gTLD Marketplace Health Index: An updated report of the gTLD Marketplace Health Index had been released by ICANN, dated July 6th, 2017. This index takes us through the current statistics and trends related to gTLDs. You can view the entire report here.
  • Candidates for ICANN 60 Fellowship: ICANN announced names of 60 individuals from 50 selected countries to participate in ICANN’s Fellowship Program at the 60th Public Meeting in Abu Dhabi. This program is an initiative by ICANN in order to create a broader and more diverse base of knowledgeable constituents with preference given to candidates living in underserved and underrepresented countries around the globe. You can view the list of selected candidates here.

Save The Internet!

July 12th, 2017 was the day when some of the world’s largest internet companies together participated online to protest against the Federal Communication Commission’s idea of repealing the existing rules of net neutrality.

‘The Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality’ – as the protest was called, got internet giants like Reddit, Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook & more to post banner ads, blog posts and alerts over the internet to show their support. Twitter supported this cause by heavily promoting the #NetNeutrality hashtag.

That’s about it for the month of July. We hope this post has helped you catch up with all the happenings in the industry during this month. Stay tuned for more, next month!

Announcements, Articles

Save BIG With The BIG Hosting Sale!

Posted on by Neha Mestry

Winter is here and the seven kingdoms are busy fighting for the throne. Sadly, in this case, only one king (or queen?) will win the Iron Throne. But we have something in store which will make ALL you resellers feel like winners!

Make way for The BIG Hosting Sale – with up to 30% discount on Shared Web Hosting (all servers) and Reseller Hosting (US servers), you can save BIG this August. We have over 50 hosting plans starting from as low as $0.75 and 100+ TLDs with active promos. You can either resell these products at reduced prices or add a heavy markup and sell them at non-promo rates – either way, you save big and earn big! 

The BIG Hosting Sale!

With plans starting from $0.75, here’s a quick summary of all the specifications that make our Reseller and Shared Hosting packages more compelling than the rest in the industry:

  • SHARED WEB HOSTING 
    • 4 flavours available – SDH Linux, SDH Windows, MDH Linux & MDH Window
    • Servers located in the US, India, UK, Turkey and Hong Kong
    • Unmetered Website Disk Space & Data Transfer
    • Unlimited Email Accounts with Advanced Spam/Virus Protection
    • Add-on Dedicated IP
    • Free Reseller Control Panel for Finance, Billing & Provisioning
    • Free DNS Management
    • HVAC & Fire-Detection Systems
    • 30-day Money-back Guarantee
    • 24×7 Phone, Chat and Ticket Support
    • *Plans start from $0.75
  • RESELLER HOSTING
    • Servers located in the US, India, UK and Turkey
    • Unmetered Bandwidth & Disk Space
    • Unlimited DB/FTP/Email Accounts
    • Multilingual
    • Complete Administrative Control
    • Robust Architecture with 99.9% Uptime
    • 30-day Money-back Guarantee
    • 24×7 Phone, Chat and Ticket Support
    • *Plans start from $7.99

TLD Promos

Apart from Web Hosting, we also have 100+ exciting promos on domain names. The latest additions to our TLD promo list for this month are:

TLD Promo Price
.BIZ $1.49
.ME $3.99
.WALES $1.99
.CYMRU $1.99

Please visit our promos page to know more about all the other TLDs that you can resell at discounted rates throughout this month.

Over to You

Be a part of our Big Hosting Sale and set your cash registers ringing! The sale will be active from August 1 to 31, 2017 and we hope you make the most of it. So make sure to get in touch with us today so that we can sign you up as soon as possible!

Happy Selling!

Announcements, Articles, Voice of LogicBoxes

The Voice of LogicBoxes: Vol. 7

Posted on by Neha Mestry

It has been a while since we published our last edition of the ‘Voice of LogicBoxes’ – a quarterly digest of all the developments that took place at our end. It is a comprehensive report of all the system updates, product & feature launches, TLD integrations, etc. that took place over the last quarter, and also a glimpse of what’s in the pipeline for the upcoming quarter.

So we are kick-starting Vol. 7 of (*drum rolls*) the Voice of LogicBoxes after a long hiatus, in all its glory! Here we go –

  • NEW PRODUCTS & SERVICES
    • Domains
      • As a part of .CO’s 7th anniversary celebration, we offered .CO domains at a special promo price of $1 from July 20 to 27.
      • We integrated two new gTLDs – .LAT and .ART, in OrderBox which are now available for reselling. To find out more about more such exciting TLDs with ongoing promos, click here. 
      • CentralNic announced the sunsetting of 8 second-level domains. We notified our partners that the registry will cease to operate the following second level domain extensions – .AR.COM, .GB.COM, .HU.COM, .KR.COM, .QC.COM, .NO.COM, .SE.COM and .UY.COM, from May 1, 2017.
    • Web Products
      • G Suite by Google Cloud: This marked our first product launch of the year. We exclusively partnered with Google for G Suite, to provide our partners an array of widely popular and intelligent apps, starting at just $4/month/user. 
      • Cloud Hosting on Indian Servers: We launched Cloud Hosting on our state-of-the-art India datacenter. This now enables our Indian resellers to offer 2 times faster, super-scalable and user-friendly Cloud Hosting solution hosted closer to their Indian audiences. 
      • WordPress Hosting: This feature-rich, fully managed hosting solution went LIVE in March. The product promises high security and automatic backups, Cloud-based core, SSD-based storage, instant scalability in case of traffic spikes, advanced integrated caching and much more. 
      • Linux KVM VPS: This solution serves as an ideal bridge between Shared Hosting and Dedicated Servers. Using open source technology like OpenStack and KVM, we offer VPS that is both powerful, easy to use and promises breakthrough speed. 
      • Dedicated & Shared Hosting by HostGator: Our resellers now can manage all the products under a single ecosystem and enjoy the guarantee and reliability of one of the world’s largest web hosting provider – HostGator. All plans under their Dedicated & Shared Hosting include HostGator’s true round-the-clock support. 
      • Dedicated & VPS Hosting by Bluehost: Through its Dedicated and VPS offerings, Bluehost offers fully managed hosting solutions, with an easy-to-use cPanel that provides increased power flexibility, control and security for your customers’ websites. 
      • Windows Dedicated Servers: We added a new flavour to our Dedicated Servers portfolio. Similar to the all our Dedicated Servers, this option too features super-fast processing with complete Administrative Access. We announced this launch with a limited duration promo.
  • SYSTEM UPDATES
    • Updates to our Terms of Service: Starting August 1st, 2017, LogicBoxes’ partners located outside of India will be contracting with P.D.R. Solutions (U.S.) LLC, while partners located within India will continue to contract with Directi Web Technology Private Limited – both are subsidiary companies of The Endurance International Group, Inc. Read more about it here.
    • Goods & Services Tax (GST): We implemented GST, a fundamental tax reform that recently went LIVE in India. In order to make OrderBox GST-compliant, we made a host of changes to the way receipts, credit notes, debit notes and transactions in general, will be treated on our system moving forward. More information here. 
    • LogicBoxes’ India Payment Gateway Updates: We updated our payment options to include two new payment methods – CCAvenue and PayU. Find more details here. 
    • Renewal Reminder Email Process: ICANN set the expectation that renewal reminders to Registrants must be sent between 26-35 days, and between 4-10 days before expiry of the domain name. Owing to this, we had to change our process such that registrants will receive compulsory renewal reminder and expiry notification emails on predetermined timelines. More details here.
    • WHOIS Validation Changes: We notified our clients about the several validation checks with respect to telephone numbers (as per the ITU-T E.164 format) that have been made mandatory under ICANN’s WHOIS Accuracy program. Find more details here. 
  • CONFERENCES

Our conference calendar was packed to the brim for the first two quarters of 2017. While we were present at APTLD 2017, Telecoms World Asia 2017, ICANN 58, HostingCon Global 2017, WHD.india 2017 and ICANN 59 as attendees, we had a booth presence as official sponsors at NamesCon 2017 and WHD.global 2017. Do you want to see what we did there? Check this out!

That’s all (and a lot) that happened in the first two quarters of 2017. As for the next quarter, we’ll continue to add lucrative VAS offerings to our product suite and integrate new TLDs as and when they launch. Additionally, we’re also in the process of giving our website a brand new avatar. Stay tuned for that!

If you have any feedback about the content of this edition or if you would like to hear more, do feel free to let us know by posting your comments below. To stay updated on all activities at LogicBoxes and other important industry news, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Until next quarter,

Team LogicBoxes

 

 

 

 

 

Announcements

Meet Aditya Arya – Our New AVP, Business Operations

Posted on by Neha Mestry

We’re delighted to announce that Mr. Aditya Arya has joined the LogicBoxes team as the Associate Vice President of Business Operations.

As part of his new role here, Aditya will be working closely with every single core function that constitutes LogicBoxes, building further on the solid foundation and momentum that the team has achieved so far.

Aditya is an accomplished professional and has tried his hands at multifarious roles such as Digital Advertising, Marketing, Business Development and Business Operations. Having over 11 years of work experience, he brings a great mix of leadership, inspiration, operational experience, technical breadth, passion and a wealth of knowledge to everything that he does.

After graduating in Electronics & Telecommunications Engineering, Aditya found his calling in the world of Marketing and Business Development. Be it writing content for mass mailers and brochures or chalking out critical business strategies that directly impact the P&L, Aditya has done it all! What is most amazing about him is the fact that even today, Aditya will readily contribute to an email copy or discuss the nuances of website design if the need arises. The energy he brings along to work is infectious and one can’t help but be inspired by it.

Reflecting on his appointment as the new AVP, Aditya says,

Over the years, LogicBoxes has carved its own niche in the web hosting & domains industry. I am extremely encouraged with the way the business has been exploring new avenues by integrating an array of high-value web presence products and launching tailor-made programs catering to SMBs, Enterprises, and everyone in between. At a time when the industry is looking beyond domains; it is an interesting time and space to be with the LogicBoxes and Endurance team who are committed to building products that will be an important instrument in the web services eco-system.

The vision and mission of the brand have always centered around making LogicBoxes a wholesome and the most-preferred provider of premium web presence services. We can say with utmost confidence that Aditya’s addition to the team will translate this vision into reality.