Many of you know me as one of the original OpenSRS guys, but more recently, I’ve been involved in running Tucows retail services – Domain Direct, NetIdentity and ItsYourDomain. As you may have already read, effective today, we are getting out of the hosting business. You can read the full press release in our Media Archive.
Why are we doing this and what does it have to do with you?
From a retail perspective, we believe that it is extremely important for us to be able to provide world-class quality for all of the services we offer. By examining the market, seeking feedback from our end users, and discussing our strengths and weaknesses internally, one thing became clear. In order to provide world-class quality for all of the services we offer, we must simplify our service offerings.
Many of our competitors attempt to provide a “one-stop internet services shopping experience”. We call this “the Walmart way”. We believe that we have a much higher chance at succeeding by doing very few things extremely well for our clients. You could call this “the boutique approach”. Our goal is to help our customers use their domain names and email addresses with the great services that other companies are already providing. In other words, rather than trying to compete with companies like Hostopia to offer better hosting services than they do, we are going to focus on making sure that our products work better with their great services than any other provider does.
Tucows Resellers also benefit from this increased focus. My retail team spends a lot of time with the OpenSRS and Tucows Email teams to ensure that they understand where their services are succeeding and failing from a reseller perspective. Being in the building provides us with a great opportunity to improve these services for the benefit of all Tucows resellers. With the benefit of our increased focus, we will also be able to invest more time working specifically on translating everything that we are learning about how to sell domain names and email in a competitive market into programs that Tucows resellers will be able to take advantage of. These programs could take the form of new code, new services and new marketing programs, depending on what works best in each case.
I’m very pleased with this development as I really believe it will be of tremendous benefit to all of Tucows customers – retail and resale. Of course, if you have any questions about the specifics of the transaction, please feel free to leave us a comment and either myself, or someone from the team will respond.
And of course, we will be notifying all affected customers about this change and how it will affect their hosting service – if at all. Many of our shared hosting clients are already hosted with Hostopia, so the changes should be minimal for the vast majority.