My company has been successful in business for almost a decade but it is getting harder and has been especially hard this past year.
In a message dated 9/7/2002 10:32:07 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I hope you are not surprised at the reaction you met when you came in here, on a Tucows discussion list, guns blazing, praising eNom. eNom not only SPAMs themselves - which apparently does not bother you - but they also will market directly to your customers. Their TOS grants them the full right to sell your contact information and the contact information of all your customers to any third party marketing group they wish, and they refuse to address issues with their resellers like Domain Registry of America/Canada/Eurpoe/Etc who clearly have violated not only the spirit of the law, but in some cases the letter of the law, with their deceptive "renewal" invoices.
Though I could save a few dollars per domain with eNom, I would also have the worry of eNom going after my customers directly when their domain portfolios are "big enough" to get eNom's attention. No thank you.
Tucows has it's blemishes as well, and with a little searching back on this discussion list archive you'll find a few. We have had fairly hot debates on this list of things we don't like about Tucows/OpenSRS. Yes, they are publically traded now. They have changed since their early days. They have lost some of the "Zen of OpenSRS" that was with them at the start. That is to be expected however, as a company grows and further defines it's place in the market. If anyone thinks that the domain market is a place you can be stagnant and survive, you are mistaken. Changes will happen. We simply look for the most ethical and predictable place to do business, and then we can trust out suppliers to not crap on us down the line.
I have that trust in Tucows/OpenSRS. While eNom and Register.com have both come at me hard to get us to move our business to them, we have decided to stay - based on this trust and ethical relationship. We believe that we will be better treated here.
I personally also do not believe that the eNom business model will survive past their first year of registration drops. They are registering many thousands of domains at sub-$10 through a reseller channel of hobbiest. These guys will go away. Their domains will be transferred around and around through various other resellers until the end customer just doesn't know who he is dealing with. We are already seeing transfers to us from eNom - so there is something other than price that's driving people to select a domain registration service.
Good luck in your quest. I don't know that you'll find any forum on the Internet without a bias here one way or another. Since you stated you are not a reseller, but you are a retail customer of one of Tucows/OpenSRS RSPs, you cannot know what the relationship between Tucows/OpenSRS and its resellers is like. You can only take our word for it. OK. You've heard form me - we think it's a more stable, predictable and honest relationship than we can get with eNom or some other registrars. You can belive that or not as you see fit. You can't really debate it because it is my opinion. Yours can differ, but it's not a point of debate.
As for how to make money in this market, there are as many ideas as their are resellers out here. We expect to see a number of resellers for any number of registrars go away in the next year. If you started this without a serious business plan and capitalized for at least a year of no-profit, you'll fail. Most small businesses do (more than 90% in their first year according to the SBA).
-t
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myOstrich Internet
http://www.myostrich.net
