Results of Meeting with WHC.ca & Sibername (1.Viewing)

The TBR part of the conversation is posted in the TBR Section
https://dn.ca/viewtopic.php?id=262

This topic is about the rest of the meeting...

We had some problems with the connection and he had a number of his team participating. I was impressed how eager they were to participate with us. I think they understand we are banding together under the DN.ca brand and we will be a force in the .ca namespace moving forward.

1. Number one for me was to get better pricing for our members, especially on renewal rates and Emil guaranteed he can match or beat anyone's price on renewals. I mentioned the $10.99 renewal at Canspace and he said no problems beating that for our members.

2. He said they use the same backend software as Canspace but they are building on top of it and he was eager to find out which bulk tools we needed to get the job done.

3. He is working on providing us with proper landing pages accessible right from our account.

4. Connecting the TBR and Domain account is a given.

5. From what I understand they are working on connecting a number of services similar to what godaddy is doing in their space.

6. We discussed an automated script to bulk domain moving. So it would be easy to move 1000 domains in if needed.

7. He offered WHC hosting services for dn.ca for free and given the hosting issues I had last week that would be nice.

8. I mentioned that we are looking for representatives from all companies in the Canadian space to join the forum and he was quite open to volunteering his crew.

9. He was against charging a subscription fee for wholesale pricing like godaddy does.

10. Looks to me like they want to be Webhost>Registrar>TBR>Wholesale>Domaining Services>Landers etc.

11. Looks like the other extensions are also in the works for better pricing.


Getting tired will post more soon...

I think we are in for some exciting times

Nice work Frank and thanks for laying the groundwork. I found their domain management not friendly but I will keep an open mind on that front and see how it all works out.

I will tag [notify]efalcon[/notify] for this topic.

It shows I posted it this morning but I wrote the post late last night after writing a bunch of new forum code so I was pretty tired, will add items today as they come to me.

Who are they using for the other extensions? I presume tucows?

RedRider said:

Who are they using for the other extensions? I presume tucows?

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Sibername is ICANN accredited, so they will probably start using that accreditation or transfer it.

Thanks Frank for taking the time to speak to us the other day! It's great to finally be connecting with the Canadian domaining community.

As discussed with Frank, we'll be working hard in the next few weeks to earn your business and help make WHC the go-to place for easy .CA bulk domain management (including for transfer-ins), competitive rates, and a leading TBR system. If you manage more than 75 .CA domains please reach out to [notify]gassan[/notify] on this forum or directly to our sales team at WHC.CA for automatic Gold tier pricing on renewals without any additional "membership" fees.

As of last week, WHC has completed Sibername's ICANN accreditation's assignment process, so we are now officially ICANN accredited as well *DANCE* ! You can expect more exciting developments in 2021.

What specific improvements would you like to see in Sibername's current TBR system and what specific features do you look for or enjoy in a domain management platform? We want to build a better domain management system for everyone, so your feedback is appreciated and will help us prioritize features as we move into 2021.

efalcon said:

Thanks Frank for taking the time to speak to us the other day! It's great to finally be connecting with the Canadian domaining community.

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Thank you Emil, it was a pleasure talking with you

efalcon said:

As discussed with Frank, we'll be working hard in the next few weeks to earn your business and help make WHC the go-to place for easy .CA bulk domain management (including for transfer-ins), competitive rates, and a leading TBR system. If you manage more than 75 .CA domains please reach out to @gassan on this forum or directly to our sales team at WHC.CA for automatic Gold tier pricing on renewals without any additional "membership" fees.

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I just purchased a domain and tried to do a masked forward and was told by your team it was not possible without upgrading. I found that odd, I never had to upgrade anything to do a forward before. SO I guess that would be a subscription of sorts...

Is it a one time $1.49 fee or is it a charge each time per domain?

jaydub said:

Is it a one time $1.49 fee or is it a charge each time per domain?

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As far as I've figured out testing the system, it's $1.49 per domain per month. The "Domain Manager" option is on a per-domain basis, so naturally any upgrade would be per-domain as well and that's how it worked when I tested it.

Again, WHC is more of a hosting company that also registers domains, and as such, a lot of their nickel-n-diming is related towards a hosting customer with 1-2 domains, not someone with 100+ domains.

If WHC absorbs all of Siber's domains, then these policies need to change as you're catering to a totally different audience who will transfer out at their earliest convenience.

Playing around with the control panel I remember why I could not use it.

If I have 500 .ca domains I cannot pay 500 times for a control panel and basics like forwarding, masked forwarding and things like that have to work. I spent a half hour going through the control panel and the new domain I purchased is still sitting there because I have no way to forward it to my lander unless I switch nameservers and point it at a service.

Yikes! That certainly won’t work for domain investors.

DomainRecap said:

As far as I've figured out testing the system, it's $1.49 per domain per month. The "Domain Manager" option is on a per-domain basis, so naturally any upgrade would be per-domain as well and that's how it worked when I tested it.

Click to expand...

This won’t make sense for any investors I don’t think.

MapleDots said:

Playing around with the control panel I remember why I could not use it.

If I have 500 .ca domains I cannot pay 500 times for a control panel and basics like forwarding, masked forwarding and things like that have to work. I spent a half hour going through the control panel and the new domain I purchased is still sitting there because I have no way to forward it to my lander unless I switch nameservers and point it at a service.

Click to expand...

I agree with everyone here, the back-end needs to be streamlined. We shouldn't have to buy or activate additional services just to perform basic tasks.

Just look at other mainstream registrars (out of respect for WHC, don't want to name the competition in this thread)...basic tools for setting nameservers, DNS records, forwarding, etc are available to anyone whether you own 1 name or 1000 names

I imagine if you get a hosting account you would be able to attach each domain name and use cPanel to administrate it in any way you wanted. Some cons to this are...

1. Is there a limit to how many domains?

2. Very time consuming to administrate each domain separately

3. No bulk tools in cPanel (that I am aware of)

I did talk to Emil and he said he had a solution but you would have to get a hosting account.

I will be signing up for that to put it through its paces and I will report back here.

MapleDots said:

I did talk to Emil and he said he had a solution but you would have to get a hosting account.

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Gee, big surprise there.

And even so this "solution" is far from seamless, as you have to manually add each domain to your hosting account/CPanel, then also manually set up each redirect.

It's no different than having a hosting account with any vendor, adding them as secondary domains, and then redirecting your domains using CPanel. A lot of manual work.

MapleDots said:

I just purchased a domain and tried to do a masked forward and was told by your team it was not possible without upgrading. I found that odd, I never had to upgrade anything to do a forward before. SO I guess that would be a subscription of sorts...

Click to expand...

I just tried this with a domain (registered elsewhere) that I currently have hosted with WHC and it's not very easy

Setting up a redirect is simple, you just input the other URL into a field and you're good....But that's where the simple stuff ends.

Couldn't find an option to set up masking...no checkbox or anything so I hopped into chat. They told me it wasn't possible to do it via the cPanel interface and instead I would have to modify the htaccess file to specify the masking.

The rep asked if I wanted them to do it for me and I said ok. A few minutes later, they were done. So I go into the file manager to check and instead of modifying the htaccess file, they added an index.html file with a frameset as a Frankenstein solution to masking

So it's a multistep process of

- Get a WHC hosting account
- Add the domain to said hosting account
- Set up a redirect
- Modify the htaccess file -OR- create an index.html file
- Cross your fingers

... and even the chat guy contradicted himself when he spoke about the htaccess but ended up creating an index.html

My nameservers haven't propagated the change to WHC's servers yet so I'll report back if there's an issue


Would be nice if there was just a neat, little drop-down and checkbox option in the domain manager like at Namespro


I don't mean to be a jerk, but I think WHC should register a domain at Namespro to see what their domain manager looks like and just copy it

It makes godaddy look good, it's a couple of keyclicks to forward and one more to mask.

And Namespro too. Forgot to mention it in my post, but the reason I had to host the name at WHC in the first place is because it's registered at Rebel and Rebel doesn't offer masking either

Surprise, surprise WHC's Frankenstein workaround didn't work...there is no masking at all. So it's back to the WHC chat to get it sorted out

I'm spending wayyy too much time with their helpdesk lately for very simple things

I have about 300 domains coming due in January and I need to make a decision where to put them.

I am going to register one at Canspace and report back to see if theirs is any less cumbersome

Again, there is a lot of beefs about godaddy but they have the tools to properly manage domains which goes to show that right now WHC is more a hosting company than a registrar.

The whole thing about Rebel surprises me, I would have figured they have the tools.

Anyone know about dynadot? - how are their bulk tools?