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A Great Domain for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs? Try .ME

June 22, 2020

Today, personal websites function as a calling card that can help your customers showcase an online portfolio, house their resume or blog, and find creative ways to establish their personal brand.

.ME is a great option for entrepreneurs, hobbyists, and professionals looking to do any of the above. And as more and more of these potential customers hop online, adding .ME to your lineup is a no-brainer.

Why you should add .ME to your TLD lineup

.ME is easy to market

.ME simply makes sense for “about me” pages, online portfolios, freelance business websites, and professional profile pages. Plus, the .ME registry provides tons of resources for those looking to build a personal brand — content that you can draw from in your marketing efforts.

.ME has big market potential

Having a stand-out online presence is becoming increasingly critical for freelancers and professionals looking to showcase their work or grow their businesses. .ME gives you a great option to offer this growing segment. There are no restrictions for the TLD, and “Me” is a word commonly understood by non-English speakers, which gives it a broad, global appeal.

It’s competitively priced (and currently on sale!)

.ME is competitively priced against popular legacy TLDs (.COM, . NET, .BIZ and .ORG), and right now, you can take advantage of $10 promo pricing.

.ME is a solid .COM alternative

Some people are able to snag theirfirstandlastname.com, but the vast majority of us don’t have a terribly unique moniker. .ME provides a short, fresh alternative when your customer’s .COM is taken.

.ME domains are memorable

We all want our websites to stand out and stick in the minds of our visitors. .ME has a novelty factor that causes people to take note. Plus, most of us would agree that websites that feel personal are often more memorable. What’s more personal that .ME?

.ME shows solid customer stickiness

.ME has a high renewal rate. The majority of .ME registrants hold their registration for many years. Customer stickiness can be further improved by combining the domain purchase with value-added services, like SSL and Email.

Marketing .ME domains to your customers

Getting creative with .ME domain names

Website owners can use their .ME to create a space that says “this is who am I and what I want people to know about me.” Some .ME registrants demonstrate the value of simply using their name alone, like medical illustrator, chinamimichaels.me. Others opt for a playful approach that takes advantage of keywords, like UK blogger, thelondoner.me.

In both cases, .ME supports the site owner’s goal of telling their story and presenting their work in a professional, yet unique and individual way.

But .ME is also employed in more surprising ways by big names like PayPal. Check out their creative use of paypal.me to simplify transactions for their users.

.ME resources you can use

The .ME team actively helps new freelancers, recent grads and small businesses to get online and stay connected to the world. Transitioning from a full-time job or directly from the classroom to a freelance career can be stressful, and often these customers spend a lot of time researching their next steps.

The .ME blog is full of resources and advice on personal branding and how to launch a freelance career. Whether it’s tips on choosing the right domain or which elements to include in a freelance portfolio, the .ME blog is full of content that can be used to help support your customers.

Bandzoogle: website builder for musicians

June 1, 2020

Featured, Fun, Industry Insight, Resellers

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Bandzoogle CEO Stacey Bedfor plays guitar in her home.

Stacey Bedford, CEO of Bandzoogle

The Enom team has enough musically inclined members to form at least two in-house rock bands, so we’re geeking out pretty hard about highlighting Bandzoogle on our blog. The Montreal-based SaaS company calls itself the easiest all-in-one professional website platform for musicians and bands. They target a unique vertical, one that their team is hugely passionate about, and they really know their customers: their platform is very much created for musicians, by musicians.

Here, Bandzoogle CEO, Stacey Bedford, provides some insight into how and why they’ve been so successful in supporting their customers and steadily growing the company.

What features are you most proud of? Which do the musicians that use your platform rave about?

Bandzoogle's Technical Support Manager, Adam, sits in his at-home production studio.

Bandzoogle’s Technical Support Manager, Adam, is also a music producer.

Commission-free direct-to-fan sales tools. Bandzoogle provides musicians with the eCommerce tools necessary to sell anything you can imagine: digital goods like albums, singles, EPs, song sheets, tickets, download codes or videos; physical goods like merch, CDs, or vinyl; and services like music lessons. You can even sell recurring subscriptions by tier and set up a crowdfunding campaign or preorders.

Bandzoogle does not take a cut of any sales, and we have a SaaS model. This is just one component of the tools we offer as an all-in-one platform. Regardless of our robust toolset, our members absolutely adore our customer support team. They’re your band’s roadie, your web tech. Our response time and quality of support is the best on the planet. Best of all, most of our team members are musicians.

How are you supporting your artists during COVID-19?

Within the first month of the pandemic, our team launched commission-free live streaming ticket sales, event ticket refunds, a tip jar feature, transaction history exports and filtering, and a comprehensive guide to musician resources during a pandemic. Every week, our team meets to discuss what has changed in the last week and how we can help. We have quickly adapted our processes to stay on top of artists’ needs.

To what does Bandzoogle attribute your success?

There are a few things I can note here as being key to our success. As you can see, we are constantly building new features and designs that are relevant to artists today. But more than that, we always put our staff and members’ needs first. We have grown into a sizable company but we’ve never strayed from our core values.

At Bandzoogle, our members can expect a very high level of service and an honest partner. It is a streamlined set of pro features, but you’re dealing with a small family vibe.

Lastly, we’re fully bootstrapped— we’ve never taken external funding, and we’ve always made decisions on our own terms, without putting a focus on turning profits. Doing the right thing by our members has resulted in great success.

How do you build an artist community and connect with your customers?

We do a lot of proactive outreach with our customers. This includes webinars, free website reviews (even for non-members), member meetups in different cities, and you’ll also see some of us at different music tech events. We are a small team with a big reach. Part of that reach includes teaming up with other music verticals that hold the same strong values, like CD Baby, Bandsintown, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and ASCAP.

Meaningful relationships with ethical music businesses are important to our business model; as a business, you won’t get very far if you don’t venture off the island. Building bridges is important to grow your artist community and connect with your customers.

What have been your major milestones as a company?

The Bandzoogle team poses for a group photo at one of their annual retreats.

An otherwise remote team, the Bandzoogle staff gets together for annual retreats.

Our members’ success is our success: last month, our members hit 62 million dollars in commission-free sales. In May, we also grew to 50,000 paid active users, with additional thousands of active trial members on any given day. Another huge milestone was growing our executive team. We have a fairly flat organizational chart, but we promoted Colin Mitchell to CTO and Dave Cool to VP of Strategic partnerships. We are leading this incredible group of individuals and for me, it’s a huge win to be able to foster so much professional growth within our small team of 29.

Are there any .COM alternatives that you guys like or that resonate with musicians?

As bricks and mortar stores become less pertinent, .COM TLDs have become a scarce resource. You’ll see many artists soon find out that long-winded .COMs leave too much room for user error, and alternative TLDs can be less costly and easier to remember.

Because of this, we see many artists branching out and using .ROCKS, .BAND, and some old, trusted, but still available, .ORG and .NET options for their band. Bandzoogle plans include many TLD options across all 3 plans, from $9.95 to $14.95 per month.

Are there any exciting plans for the future you’d like to share?

I can tell you that the world is changing rapidly, and, for any business, finding a way to monetize globally is paramount today. We’ll see so many advancements in the tools available to both businesses and artists over the next year, it’ll be a different landscape. Businesses that are adaptable will do well, but it’s about to be a wild ride.

Avoiding COVID-19 Cyberattacks with Security Best-Practices

April 28, 2020

Advice, Featured, SSL

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security lock and credit cards on keyboard

Most of us that work in Tech are familiar with security best-practices, but for many people, including your customers, being thrust into working remotely and conducting more daily activity online can bring with it security risks. Now is a great time to support your customers with tips on how to stay secure online and avoid COVID-related cyberattacks.

We’ve partnered with one of our trusted Security providers, Digicert, to provide you content that can be easily recycled and shared with your customers.

Staying safe online, during COVID-19 and beyond

The ugly reality is that cybercriminals will exploit any vulnerability they can find. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are increasingly active on social media, email, apps and SMS (texting) as we look to stay connected with one another and alert to new information. Some malicious parties are taking advantage of this by using these technologies as a means to distribute malware. Often, these scams involve fraudsters impersonating healthcare officials or organizations.

What can you do to stay safe?

1. Be suspicious of emails and messages about COVID-19 by:

Inspecting the subject line and sender. If you don’t know the sender, or the subject line seems odd, don’t open the message and most importantly, do not click on any links.
Subject lines about a cure or vaccine for COVID-19 are most definitely scams. Don’t open the message.

2. Look for common signs of fraudulent emails. These include:

Poor grammar or spelling
Poor design
Unreliable contact information
No Terms and Conditions provided
Deals that seem too good to be true
Suspicious forms of payment (like sending money to a random PayPal account or paying with cryptocurrency)

3. Don’t download unknown email attachments

For example, the map below — made to look similar to a legitimate map created by Johns Hopkins University — was circulated by scammers via email. The map often included links to malicious sites disguised as official communication.

4. Get familiar with known scams related to COVID-19

The Canadian Anti-Fraud centre is keeping an up-to-date list of known scams, and we encourage you to check for similar resources being provided by your local government.

5. Keep your browser up-to-date and watch for security indicators

One easy way to protect yourself is to ensure you’re using the latest available version of your browser. We also recommend checking that the websites you are browsing are encrypted with SSL.

Digicert has a great guide on how to identify authorized sites. This is particularly important if you are providing any kind of personal information or making a financial transaction.

6. Always check for additional trust indicators

Asking yourself a few of the following questions can help you better determine whether a website is trustworthy:

Do they have Terms and Conditions or a return policy listed?
Do they have a secure site seal?
Are there grammar and spelling mistakes?
Do they have reviews?
Do they have a social media following?
Is there contact information listed in case you need to get in touch with the company about your order?
If you arrive at a website via a link contained in an email, take extra care sure to make sure the site you’re on is the company’s official website – not an imposter.

Questions like these do not guarantee that a site isn’t a scam, but they are helpful guides in determining whether or not you should trust a site.

The reality is, it’s impossible to completely safeguard against online threats. But just like handwashing and social distancing offer a basic line of defence against COVID-19, the best-practices outlined above will help protect you and minimize risk online during these challenging times.

Tucows Celebrates 20 Years in the Domain Industry

January 22, 2020

Featured, Fun

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As of this month, our parent company, Tucows, has officially been in the domains business for 20 years. They introduced OpenSRS (Enom’s then-rival, now-sister company) in 2000, not long after Enom was born. Tucows lifers share a lot of nostalgia for this era; though Tucows has grown to become the largest wholesale registrar and ventured successfully into Fibre Internet and Mobile, a unique fondness for OpenSRS’ early years remains. So what made those early years so cool? Michael Goldstein, Director of Marketing at the time, laid it out for us:

I am intentionally googling none of my recollections about the early days of OpenSRS so they will almost certainly be romanticized, exaggerated or just plain wrong. A few themes jump out at me.

We felt like we were part of a revolution

In a little corner of the world, Network Solutions was an evil empire. A government-sanctioned monopoly was getting fat and greedy and the product that they controlled (domain names) was quickly becoming more crucial to many millions more end-users around the globe. The channel (Web hosts, ISPs, IT consultants) was overcharged and underappreciated. We believed so strongly that these managed service providers (as we liked to call them at the time) knew the end users best and would take the best care of them if they just got the tools and pricing they needed.

It was fun to be a hero to that very narrow target. It was fun to offer a 70% price break from what Network Solutions was charging. It was fun to witness hypergrowth. In fact, you could argue that our unspoken tagline, “OpenSRS, we’re not Network Solutions!” was so successful, Tucows has really just imitated that same model and re-lived that sort of revolution again and again. Hover, we’re not GoDaddy! Ting, we’re not AT&T or Comcast!

We really enjoyed ourselves

When trends and forces are all delivering customers to your doorstep, it’s pretty easy to think you are clever. We ran magazine ads that said, “You can get a lesser product, lousy service and a bad attitude. But it’ll cost 3 times more.” (Oh, fun fact! Andy Berndt, the guy who wrote that ad for us as a freelance copywriter, is now in charge of all creative output at Google as founder and Managing Director of their internal Creative Lab. He also played Duke basketball for a season as a walk on.)

We couldn’t get enough cow references

We built the .MOO top-level domain to demonstrate our registry management solution. I also personally gave away two cows at ISPCon in San Diego to celebrate our two-millionth (I think!) domain name registration. The prize was actually a choice between two cows, a year supply of milk or the cash equivalent. We bet heavily on the winner taking the cash.

I rented the cows from a nearby dairy farmer for just one hour and paraded them across the plaza outside the conference center to chants of Who Let The Cows Out! (If that reference isn’t immediately familiar to you, I’m not going to explain it.) If I remember right, we intended to also highlight the winning registered domain name in our promotional materials and media outreach but chose not to because it was pretty shockingly pornographic (like the thousand domains registered before and after it). Good times.

We weren’t thinking about 25 million domains

Everything we did was done to quickly solve a problem or seize an opportunity. We listened well. We hustled. But we never expected that we would be using the things we built twenty years later. We certainly never imagined that we would eventually acquire and integrate half the other challengers that launched at the same time we did. Now we’re all growneded up. We are building an integrated platform that can accommodate over 25 million domain names and over 40,000 managed service providers (or whatever we call them these days) around the world. We proudly offer a huge selection of TLDs, from .ABOGADO to .ZONE. We talk about scale and efficiency. We brainstorm and measure site usability. I think we ultimately do a better job for our customers today than we did back then. I don’t think we’ll ever be quite as cool .

Our Ongoing Commitment to Combatting DNS Abuse

October 18, 2019

Announcement, Featured, News

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Abuse is a significant problem on the Internet today and, as a provider of Internet infrastructure services, we constantly consider what role we should play in combatting this issue. We actively investigate and respond to reports of abuse, but like other registrars and registries, we’ve been alone in developing our approach—until now.

Abuse has been a growing topic of conversation in our industry. Today, several major registrars and registries released a DNS Abuse Framework defining what types of abuse to the domain name system (DNS) we are the appropriate parties to take action on. It’s our hope that this commitment by DNS providers to address abuse on our platforms will help establish industry-wide standards that both protect free speech and ensure that the Internet remains free and open while keeping malicious online activity in check.

What is DNS Abuse? On the surface that should be easy to answer: it’s abusive use of the domain name system. But as you get into the details, there are often more questions than answers. Who decides what is abusive? Who should respond when it happens? As a domain name registrar, our obligations are spelled out in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), but although we must “take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately to any reports of abuse,” (RAA 3.18.1) the RAA doesn’t provide a specific definition either of abuse or of what steps are reasonable.

For some registries, Specification 11 of their respective Registry Agreements provides more assistance, referring to specific types of behavior as security threats: pharming, phishing, malware, and botnets. Until now, however, there has not been a consistent, common understanding of how to define abuse, meaning we haven’t been able to come to an agreement on who should respond when it happens.

This new DNS Abuse Framework proposes a shared definition of DNS abuse, relying on the Internet & Jurisdiction Policy Network’s definitions of the four behaviors listed in the Registry Agreement plus spam (but only when spam email is used as a delivery mechanism for another type of abuse, such as malware). This Framework also considers additional types of abuse that DNS providers should respond to—even if we are not required to do so under our respective contracts. Reaching a common agreement about what constitutes DNS abuse is a crucial component of any industry-wide efforts to mitigate that abuse.

We encourage all Enom resellers to read through the Framework and become familiar with these types of abuse. To help, here’s a summary.

Malware is software that is installed on a device, such as a computer or smartphone, without the owner’s consent and for malicious purposes (that’s where the “mal” comes from). This includes things like viruses or spyware.

Botnets are networks of malware-infected computers, controlled remotely.

Phishing is the term for a fraudulent or copycat email that tricks users into thinking it’s legitimate in order to obtain personal data or financial information such as credit card numbers.

Pharming is the use of DNS redirection to bring Internet users to a different website than the one they intended to visit, in order to obtain personal data or financial information or install malware.

Spam is unsolicited email; it is included in our definition of DNS abuse when it’s used as part of the delivery method for these other types of abuse, such as malware or phishing.

As one of the collaborators of and signatories to this Framework, the Tucows family of registrars is committed to taking action when our services are used for these malicious purposes. As a community of stakeholders all seeking to provide safe and reliable Internet services, we’ve come together to find the most effective and appropriate means to mitigate these significant concerns. Since rules vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and there is no single global standard, we hope that this Framework helps to provide one. Having a consistent, industry-wide approach will help make responding to abuse faster and more successful, and this Framework can help those who encounter abuse online to know where to best direct their concerns so they’ll be addressed promptly.

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A Great Domain for Freelancers and Entrepreneurs? Try .ME