David Iyoha wrote:
>
> Hello Kris,
>
> > No, it wouldn't be... you're asking them to provide more services for the
> > same price.
> Good point. It all depends on how much more sales that the additional
> features can generate. Which is what has to be considered for any new
> feature that RSPs ask for
>
> > Already, they're making low profit (isn't the Verisign GRS fee $6/domain
> > year?)... do you think they really want that even lower?
> depends on the market, sales volume etc. if the new features help gain more
> market share it would be worth it. If not ... then it is a bad idea
I have to disagree here, as well. Say the new features cost OpenSRS $0.50
more per domain to offer. This means that their costs go from $6.00 to
$6.50, however their revenue does not go up.
Say, we're talking about 40,000 .com domains. That's $400,000.00 that
comes to them. $240,000 is the amount of money paid to VGRS, $20,000 is
cost of providing these services. Granted, they have numerous other
things to support that make their margins even lower, however this is, say
an extra $20,000 that comes out of their pockets. That means they have to
sell an additional 5700 domains to make that worth it. That's a 14%
increase in market share that you're hoping to obtain from offering
services the big (and most medium) providers would do themselves.
Most of the features requested by the RSPs are not ones with large ongoing
costs. When we ask for a feature to be able to delete names, they program
it in, test it, and if all works well, they don't have to touch it for the
rest of this codebase's development. You're suggesting daily backups,
redundant computers, etc. That costs enough money to build and even more
to maintain that I certainly couldn't justify (if I was Tucows) building
it into the existing domain fee, nor would their marketing dept likely
allow an increase in the per-domain-year fee -- it's very possible (if not
probable) that a large number of the resellers would leave for greener
pastures if asked to pay more.
-kb
--
Kris Benson
ABC Communications
+1 (250)612-5270 x14
+1 (888)235-1174 x14
