1.) A Large Variety of TLDs from a Single Source

Whether one is only interested in selling a few TLDs or many, going with a registrar with a wide selection of TLDs is better than a registrar with less.  More TLDs means more options and less headaches over the long term.

Imagine being approached by a large customer of yours about a TLD that you don’t offer.  You check with your registrar and they don’t offer that TLD.  Now you are in a bind.  You either tell your customer, at the risk of losing their business, that you can’t offer the TLD or you frantically try to provision the new TLD through another registrar.  Trying to bring up another TLD through another registrar can entail:

1. Review and execution of a new reseller agreement, which possibly adds more financial commitment or requires upfront capital.
2. Possibly time and energy to integrate a new API with the new registrar
3. Additional time for initial and ongoing testing to ensure the integration stability

As one can see, the scenario is not pretty.  With a registrar like HEXONET, which has a wide variety of domains, such problems are avoided.  In fact, adding a new TLD can be as simple as a few mouse clicks.  This is the power of a registrar with hundreds of TLDs.

2.) ccTLD Growth

Market economics are hard to deny.  The domain industry is seeing a prominence of ccTLDs.  At of the end July, 2010, the following stats were published:

• .COM – 88,831,766 Domains
• .DE – 13,752,101 Domains
• .NET – 13,241,122 Domains
• .UK – 8,654,260 Domains
• .ORG – 8,611,202 Domains
• .CN – 7,246,686 Domains
• .INFO – 6,753,547 Domains
• .NL – 3,976,037 Domains
• .EU – 3,220,758 Domains
• .BIZ – 2,142,157 Domains

As the .com namespace becomes ever so scarce, ccTLDs as an alternative will continue to grow in popularity.  Having a registrar like HEXONET, who offers the wide selection of TLDs makes reselling ccTLDs a snap.

3.) Importance of High Performance Real-Time Systems

In a nutshell, having transactions execute within seconds mean more business for a reseller.  Resellers on a fast platform will have advantages over the competition on a slower platform.

• Check Domain Availability – Execution in seconds results in more domain searches; long execution times will result in customers leaving or never coming back to use your domain search again.
• Domain Registrations – Some registrar have parts of their system running in manual or batch mode, this means the actual registration may happen long afterward, putting a registration in jeopardy.  Registrations need to be completed within seconds and the respective WHOIS should be available immediately (registry dependent)
• Domain Modifications (such as WHOIS Uupdates, DNS Updates, …etc.) should get processed to the respective registry immediately, thus providing you immediate feedback if an update was successful or not.

Speed and execution of the reseller platform will effect how customers view a reseller.  The faster and more reliable the registrar platform the better a reseller looks to the buying public.  At HEXONET, not only do we pride ourselves on having real-time systems throughout our platform, but also for having some of the fastest domain checks and transactions anywhere.

4.) Comprehensive Registry Features

Features and functionality provided by the various registries are intended to assist in the registration and management of domains.  Given the importance of these features, strangely enough not every reseller platform makes these features available.  HEXONET prides itself on allowing for as many registry features in our solution.

• Autorenew feature, including allowing for an autorenew grace period (a defined period of time, which allows you to delete a domain in this period and still receive a refund)
• Multiyear registrations
• IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) capabilities – though many registries allow IDN registrations not many registrars support it.  IDNs are however on the horizon.
• Transfer capability via all methods – many registrars do not offer the full range of transfer capabilities for the respective TLDs they sell

5.) Integration Flexibility

Many registrar systems only offer one way to connect with them.  As it is with TLD selection, a wide variety of choice makes it easier for the reseller.  HEXONET for instance allows for six different ways for resellers to connect and register domains:

• Mailrobot
• SOAP
• XML/RPC
• HTTPS-API
• WebInterface or User Interface or Control Panel
• And as of recently possibly an EPP Gateway

6.) Future Proofing  Through Accreditation Management

A reseller many potential one day have enough domains of a particular TLD to consider becoming directly accredited with a respective registry.  Reseller platforms without a TLD management solution will create huge pains for the reseller at the point of separation or migration.  This pain is also evident if the TLD management solution only supports a small number of TLDs (typically gTLDs only).  Again, support for a wide variety of domains is key.

HEXONET has a decade of experience and expertise with gTLDs/ICANN and ccTLDs.  Accreditation migration and management has been made as simple as flicking on a switch.  Because of the wide selection of TLDs offered at HEXONET, all gTLDs and most ccTLDs accreditation can be quickly and easily migrated for a reseller.

7.) Updated Engineering – The DNSSEC Example

Some reseller platforms are stagnant.  Feature releases are slow or nonexistent.  New TLDs may rarely happen.  Resellers stuck on such platforms are losing out on both revenue and big profits.  Resellers should look for a platform that is growing and constantly improving.  A simple test, as of the fall of 2010, for your registrar’s engineering speed or willingness is to check if your registrar supports DNSSEC.

DNSSEC is a significant change to the way DNS is handled over the Internet.  If your registrar doesn’t have DNSSEC or doesn’t plan to support it, this might indicate engineering slowness.  To read more on DNSSEC and why your registrar should already be on top of this topic, please read the recent blog post “DNSSEC – Overview for Resellers“.

If you have any questions or need advice on reseller platforms please feel free to direct your questions to sales@hexonet.net.  HEXONET would be happy to provide more insight.

Why DNSSEC is Important to Resellers and End Users

Though technologies like the Domain Name System (DNS) are fundamental to making the Internet work, businesses using the Internet, typically don’t need to know the details of the technology to make use of it.  Most resellers go on without ever giving such technologies a second thought.  However, for those businesses, spending a little time trying to understand important technology shifts can result in real benefits and competitive advantage. DNSSEC (Secure DNS) is one such technology that resellers should monitor.

Without going into the technical mumbo jumbo, in a nutshell, DNSSEC is a secure version of the well established and insecure version of DNS.  Cache poisoning, the unauthorized access and modification of DNS caches to intentionally spoof websites, hijack email, and even steal passwords has been a major vulnerability.  DNSSEC ensures cache poisoning is prevented, that DNS data cannot be forged and that data originating from its stated source is not modified in transit.

DNSSEC is a High Value Security Feature

With the domain and hosting markets being so competitive, a new feature, especially a high value security feature like DNSSEC, can create an opportunity to gain customers.  This is particularly true if one’s competitors are unable to offer the same feature.  Right now, .DE, .ORG, .EU and .SE domains registered at HEXONET can be signed with the registrant’s DNSSEC validation keys.  DNSSEC not only adds a technical layer of security for the domain holder, but more importantly, provides the registrant the peace of mind that their domain can’t be used for malicious purposes.

First DNSSEC Accredited European Registrar with .ORG

Robert Birkner, Chief Strategy Officer of HEXONET, “wants to congratulate the Public Interest Registry, for being the first generic Top-Level-Domain registry to fully deploy DNSSEC. We are delighted to support PIR in many of its initiatives and in particular its leadership in DNSSEC.”

“We congratulate 1API for passing the DNSSEC certification for .ORG,” says Alexa Raad, CEO of .ORG, the Public Interest Registry, “and applaud them for taking a leadership role in the European registrar community for supporting DNSSEC.”

Why Choose HEXONET’s Future-proof  DNSSEC

HEXONET is one of the first registrars to fully support DNSSEC.  In fact, HEXONET’s implementation of DNSSEC supports both DS based and DNSKEY based delegation to ensure seamless interoperability with a wide variety of registries for today and in the future.  Technically this means, as a HEXONET reseller, we have you covered no matter how individual registries implement their DNSSEC.

“”As pioneer in DNSSEC, .SE welcomes 1API as a registrar that can offer DNSSEC to their customers.” – Danny Aerts, CEO of the SE Registry

Homburg, Germany – June 16, 2010 – HEXONET (www.hexonet.net) announced today that over ninety percent (90%) of pre-registered multilingual .tel domain names, placed with HEXONET, were successfully registered on behalf of its clients and resellers, when Telnic, the registry operator for the award-winning, communications-focused .tel, went live with IDN registrations on June 15th.  The first .tel IDN registered was “ärzte.tel”, German for  “doctors.tel”, which was registered through Germany based registrar 1API GmbH – the registrar of HEXONET GmbH.  With the growing importance, popularity, and value of IDN domain names, the acquisition of such a large percentage of pre-registered .tel IDNs has HEXONET customers elated.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are registered and accessed using non-Latin characters.  For Telnic, these are domain names using the following languages – Chinese, Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.  As the Internet continues to garner more global users, the demand of IDNs continues to grow unabated.

According to Justin Hayward, Business Development Director at Telnic, “the value of a .tel name, the Internet’s only concise and universally-accessible online calling card, is now greater and more universal with IDNs.  The ability for anyone to access your online contact information in their own language is highly beneficial.  We’d also like to congratulate 1API GmbH on registering the first .tel IDN.”

HEXONET’s high acquisition success for .tel IDNs is the result of countless engineering hours and years of operational optimizations.  Today, HEXONET customers have access to one of the industry’s most advanced pre-registration systems anywhere.  And with many more new TLD launches on the horizon, like .CO on July 20th, now is the time for individuals, businesses, and organizations to start pre-registering.

About HEXONET
Since 1999, HEXONET has been a leading developer and service provider of reseller technologies for the domain industry, including domain backordering and pre-registration.  Thousands of resellers, startups and service providers from across the world trust HEXONET as their domain platform provider. And today, HEXONET manages over 700K thousands domains for its clients.

HEXONET Media Relations
T: +49 6841 6984-0
F: +49 6841 6984-199
info@hexonet.net

http://hexonet.net

Vancouver, Canada June 1, 2010 — HEXONET (www.hexonet.net) announced today the availability of more backorderable TLDs (Top-Level-Domains), including .ME, to its growing and expansive list of domains to be backordered (snapping up high-value domain names as they expire). The additional TLDs, especially .ME, elevates HEXONET’s Backordering Service into a class of its own. Arguably, this new addition makes HEXONET’s service the most comprehensive backordering service industrywide.

Since the .ME registry opened on July 16th, 2008, .ME domains have been extremely popular. Some of the most identifiable domain names in the domain industry are either being registered or purchased through auction, including domains like fits.me, trade.me, and date.me. According to Robert Birkner, Chief Startegy Officer of HEXONET, “The appeal of .ME is its ability to create personalized or call-to-action domain names ever so naturally. Also, as social media continues to grow and the Web becomes more personal, .ME domains will, undoubtedly, be more important and be more valuable.”

Predrag Lesic, Chief Executive Officer of dotME Registry, was quoted as saying, “Though there are countless great .ME domains open for registration by anyone, we are excited to see technological innovations like .ME backordering making it possible for people to acquire .ME domains in non-traditional ways. Honestly, backordering is probably the best way to possibly obtain some of the most prized .ME domain names that have already been registered. ”

Individuals, businesses, and organizations can sign up for free at HEXONET and immediately start backordering .ME domains. Backordering for other domain extensions, such as .DE, .INFO, .BIZ, .ORG, .ASIA, .IN and more are also available.

About HEXONET
Since 1999, HEXONET has been a leading developer and service provider of reseller technologies for the domain industry, including domain backordering. Thousands of resellers, startups and service providers from across the world trust HEXONET as their domain platform provider. And, today, HEXONET manages over six hundred thousand domains for its clients.

HEXONET Media Relations
T: 604-637-5788
F: 604-909-1868
info@hexonet.net
http://hexonet.net

HEXONET’s advanced backordering technology continues to rapidly expand with the addition of .CC and .TV domains, making HEXONET’s Backordering Service one of the industry’s largest – Twelve total TLDs offered and growing

Vancouver, Canada May 11, 2010 — HEXONET (www.hexonet.net) announced today the addition of .CC and .TV domains to its growing portfolio of backorderable TLDs (Top-Level-Domains). With over twelve TLDs to backorder from, including rare TLDs like .ASIA and now .CC and .TV, HEXONET offers one of the widest selections of TLDs for those looking to acquire high-value, profitable and soon to expire domain names.

Everyday, excellent domain names expire and become publicly available for registration, some even with existing traffic and returning visitors. Expiring domains for both .CC and .TV are highly desirable. Media and television type domains have long been sought after. And with the restrictive registration policies from the Chinese government surrounding .CN, .CC domains, used as “Chinese Company”, are growing in popularity.

According to Jens Wagner, HEXONET’s Chief Executive Officer, “right now the opportunities are tremendous for anyone wanting to obtain expiring domains, either for profit or to simply acquire a domain that one has always wanted. Up to now, the problem has been the lack of service availability for domains like .ASIA or .DE. We are changing the game by not only adding hard to implement TLDs, but by also rolling out many more hard to implement TLDs in the coming months. Stay tuned.”

Individuals, businesses, and organizations can signup for free at HEXONET and immediately start backordering .CC and .TV domains. Backordering for other domain extensions, such as .DE, .INFO, .BIZ, .ORG, .ASIA and more are also available.

About HEXONET
Since 1999, HEXONET has been a leading developer and service provider of reseller technologies for the domain industry, including domain backordering. Thousands of resellers, startups and service providers from across the world trust HEXONET as their domain platform provider. And today, HEXONET manages over 600K thousands domains for its clients.

HEXONET Media Relations
T: 604-637-5788
F: 604-909-1868
info@hexonet.net
http://hexonet.net

“HEXONET recently had the fortune and opportunity to connect with Mr. Predrag Lesic, Chief Executive Officer of dot ME (DoMEn d.o.o. aka Domain.ME), to get his thinking on the .ME TLD.  Predrag’s insights on the .ME registry and where it may be heading are not only engaging, but also highly informative.  HEXONET would like to share his thoughts in this post.  If you have time, please read our last post, .ME Still a Sizzling Top-Level-Domain, as it provides a good context for this article, as well as, to why .ME has been so successful.”

To read the Interview please visit the post @ http://blog.hexonet.net.

dot .ME, the ccTLD (country code Top-Level-Domain) of Montenegro, even now, nearly two years after its release, is still as popular as ever, if not more!  With the Registry’s second anniversary quickly approaching (second anniversary of “Go Live” on July 16, 2010), HEXONET is not only spotlighting the domain, but will also run a huge promotion towards their reseller channel and make obtaining a .ME even cheaper and better.

Personally I’ve always had an interest in .ME for a couple reasons:

• At the very beginning of the Registry, I had the opportunity to advise and assist this TLD through the first few months of its launch in 2008
• The individuals running, maintaining and promoting .ME in Montenegro are not only great people with a true passion for this TLD, but are also people who I call friend.

• A sensational Success Story! Since July 16, 2008 (“GoLive”) dot ME has been on a tremendous journey of success.  Highlights of the past couple of years:

• July 16, 2008 .ME officially launches and ushers in a new era of personalization on the web.  Minimum registration period is 2 years at an average annual market retail price of 19.00 EUR per Domain/Year
• Within two (2) days, .ME has an astonishing 50,000 Domains under management with most registrants coming from the USA, UK, Germany, Canada and China respectively.
• August 5, 2008, just two weeks after launch, the registry announced that they had already surpassed 100,000 Domains under Management!
• September 2008, .ME auctioned the first set of eleven (11) premium domains during the Traffic Conference in New York, where proceeds amazingly total over 218,000 USD! – “date.me” was the highest sold .ME domain at 70,000 USD!
• Keeping the fast pace of changes going at the registry, on October 1, 2008, the Registry reduced the two (2) year minimum registration requirement to one (1) year, for the benefit for all.
• January 2009, the second .ME premium domain auction took place at the domain industry’s premier event “DomainFest Global ‘09″ – five (5) more premium .ME Domains were auctioned off successfully
• February 10, 2009, approx. 7 months after “GoLive”, dot .ME has over 200,000 Domains registered!
• April 2, 2009, Domain.ME releases another 35 premium .ME Domains for auction through SEDO
• May 18, 2009, Domain.ME announces “A Limited Time Auction of Premium Domains with NameJet™” where 15 additional premium .ME Domain names were successfully auctioned.
• May 20, 2009, less than a year after “GoLive”, .ME hits quarter of Million Domains under Management
• August 27, 2009, following up on the first highly successful auction with NameJet™, .ME announces the second premium domain auction with NameJet™.
• September 9, 2009, WordPress starts using “WP.me” as their standard URL Shortener
• January 5, 2010, FaceBook, The World’s Largest Social Network, uses .ME to provide access for its mobile users with “FB.me”
• January 26, 2010, Hollywood realizes the value of .ME domains, by branding the upcoming 3D/CGI movie from Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment with the .ME domain Despicable.Me.

• Continued success after success after success has been the story of .ME.  The dot ME organization has been a model Registry in the way it does press releases, attends key industry events, and most importantly, the way it stays in touch with its registrars.

• Why .ME Continues to Stay Hot! .ME is an ideal domain for the following:

• Personal use for blogs, family pictures, …etc.
• Great for call-to-action domains, such as call.me, date.me, insure.me, …etc.
• Ideal for brands to give your brand a more personal touch, basically making your brand more personal
• Some cool .ME Domains are fits.me, appo.me, despicable.me, fwd4.me, whyhire.me,  … and many more.

• If you are interested in registering a .ME domain, simply go to www.hexonet.net, fill the online sign-up form, load your account and register away!  Be sure to take advantage of our .ME Promo starting this April (running through to  June 30th) where .ME domains will be going away for less than 5.00 EUR per Domain/Year!  Get your personal domain today!

Vancouver, Canada March 3, 2010 — HEXONET (www.hexonet.net) announced today one of the domain industry’s first, if not the first, backordering services for DotAsia domain names. Utilizing HEXONET’s revolutionary domain backordering search engine and service platform, starting today, for the first time, anyone will be able to search for expiring .ASIA domains as well as backorder them even before they expire. Again, only at HEXONET, can .ASIA domain backorders be placed using this new technology.

“With DotAsia’s Landrush anniversary fast approaching, HEXONET was determined to launch the DotAsia backordering service as quickly as possible,” said Robert Birkner, Chief Strategy Officer of HEXONET. Birkner also went on to say, “On February 20th, thousands of domains, if not tens of thousands, first went into redemption (expiration) resulting from DotAsia’s massive launch two years ago. Many fantastic domains are going to be up for grabs towards the end of March and only HEXONET customers will have the newest technology to take advantage of the opportunity.”

Edmon Chung, Chief Executive Officer of the DotAsia registry, has been quoted as saying, “We are excited to see technological innovations built around DotAsia domains. With the implementation of the Asian Free Trade Area between China and 10 South East Asian nations earlier this year, the usage and demand of DotAsia domains will continue to grow, not only for new domains, but also for domains that have been previously registered as businesses expand to the regional Asian marketplace.”

Individuals, businesses, and organizations can sign up for free at HEXONET and immediately start backordering .ASIA domains. Backordering for other domain extensions–such as .DE, .INFO, .BIZ, .ORG, and more–is also available.

About HEXONET
Since 1999, HEXONET has been a leading developer and service provider of reseller technologies for the domain industry. Thousands of resellers, startups and service providers from across the world trust HEXONET as their domain platform provider. And today, HEXONET manages over six hundred thousand domains for its clients.

Top 5 Reasons to register .ASIA Domains:
#1: With all the restrictions CNNIC has now imposed on .CN Domains, why not change to a TLD that provides security and stability and is used and commonly known for ASIA?

Recently, CNNIC the official TLD Registry of China disabled .CN registrations from international registrars, meaning international accredited registrars were no longer permitted to register .CN Domains on behalf of their customers.  Just recently CNNIC has opened registrations once again for international registrars, however the burden is now on the registrars to collect the required documentation from the registrant prior to submitting the registration request.  With all this manual work, the prices of .CN Domains are bound to sky-rocket or you may even see many registrars start taking .CN off the shelf.  It is very unfortunate that it had to come this far with .CN Domains.  Everything was working fine without any problems, until CNNIC started giving away .CN Domains at a few cents, basically opening the gates to Spammers worldwide.  Based on the above one should now consider if a .CN Domains is the right choice.  Given all of the above, I would recommend going with a .ASIA Domain, which is stable and secure.

#2: Anybody can register a .ASIA domain, quickly and easily without the hassle of documentation

An .ASIA Domain can be registered within seconds and no additional documentation is required.  You immediately know, if you got the domain or not, thus providing more security and stability to the registrant.

#3: Asia is the market of tomorrow.  Did you know, that a .ASIA Domain improves SEO for searches relevant to the Asia Market?  With all other SEO elements held equal, domain anmes make a difference in search results.  The term “ASIA” itself is already one of the most popular search keywords.  A “.ASIA” domain helps improve search engine rankings naturally, especially when Internet users search for information about Asia.  Getting a .ASIA is a cheap and efficient way of increasing your SEO.

#4: Did you know, that every .ASIA registrations helps fund community work in ASIA?
DotASIA has a core mandate towards digital inclusion, education and development.  Today, DotAsia is already supporting many major community projects: Relief.ASIA, ISIF.ASIA (R&D Grants Fund), CreativeCommons.ASIA, OLPC.AISA (One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative in Asia), … and many more.  Every registration contributes funds to the social and technical development of the Internet throughout Asia.

#5: How likely is your desired domain to be taken beneath .COM and still available in .ASIA?  Very likely indeed.  The .ASIA namespace is still fairly young, hence the chances of your desired domain name taken beneath .ASIA is significantly lower than searching for your domain in .COM.

To emphasize on this prime opportunity, HEXONET is offering a special price promotion throughout the months March and April 2010.  The required Asian CED Contact is provided with each registration free-of-charge.

In the event you are interested in registering larger volumes of .ASIA Domains, please drop sales@hexonet.net an email and allow HEXONET to make you an offer.

Clearly from my perspective:

• HEXONET has the know-how
• HEXONET has the right people with the right skills and expertise who could make it happen
• HEXONET showed me in preliminary models, the company was already highly successful in grabbing backorders, some which turned out to be worth a lot
• HEXONET further proved to me, the company’s technology is FASTER AND BETTER than others at grabbing domains, when DE introduced single/two character domains and HEXONET kicked butt in acquiring them
• HEXONET offering one of the widest selection of gTLDs and ccTLDs, makes HEXONET the perfect company to be building domain grabbing technology for all TLDs

For these reasons, we simply had to build the HEXONET Domain Backordering Service by January 2010. And strangely enough, it became our first new year’s resolution for 2010!  Yes, committing to a new years resolution in the fall of the previous year is kinda odd, but we were serious about making the domain backordering service our first milestone of the year.  And we actually accomplished our goal (resolution) January 5th, 2010!

On January 5th 2010, HEXONET launched the better “Domain Backordering Service” for .COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, INFO, MOBI, US, DE & SE.  Though starting off with just a handful of TLDs now, more ccTLDs are already in the pipeline.  And by the end of 2010, we believe, this service will be the premier ccTLD backordering anywhere.