Nat's dashboard

Has this suggestion made any progress internally yet?

Jennifer,

I'm more than happy to provide our insights and experiences, but a commitement from you guys would also be nice :)

If it adds any weight to the suggestion, our service is still only in the initial beta phase and we're already into the 1000's of domains/year range. We expect this to ramp up to 100,000's domains/year fairly rapidly though once our marketing efforts hit full swing.

We simply could not even begin to consider ordering our current volume manually, let alone our projected volume, so the ball's entirely in your court :)

We'd be keen to look into a resller's API as well. I use name.com for some of my personal domain registrations, but in our business we absolutely must have full automation.

If you do start seriously thinking about a resellers API, please consider the following points:

1. You absoluetly must have a super-fast, accurate availability lookup service. Ideally this lookup service would be able to accept a list of domains to lookup, rather than separate transactions per domain. An asynchronous lookup would also be fantastic (i.e. we submit a lift of domains for lookup, along with a post-back URL, and your system then asynchronously posts back results as they come through). This way we can decide on our own timeouts which means we retains full control over our own end -user experience.

2. Domain provisioning must be simple, fast and reliable. I won't mention names, but we still have problems with registrations not sticking they as they should with other suppliers.

3. Pre-funded reseller accounts are OK, but you must provide us with an easy way to check our balance, or even better, update our account balance with each transaction receipt, so we have advance notice of when it's getting low. Better yet, allow us to purchase domains using an on-file credit card so we never have to take time out from our beach holidays just to jump online and replenish our domain credits ;)

4. Offer discounts for resellers like us that host our own DNS servers. All we need you for is lookups, provisioning and renewals, after that you're clear of any further involvement/service.

5. Your pricing does not have to be the absolute lowest to win our business. To us reliability, speed and convenience are the main factors. That said, see point #4 - in that case we're offloading responsibility from you, so wouldn't mind that being reflected in the price.

6. Make an API that can be esily consumed from all platforms/languages. No SOAP (great for .net, sucky for everyone else) and No XML-RPC (ok for script, sucky for .net) please. Simple key/value POSTS over HTTPS are fine, and work for everyone. XML REST style is also cool, and provides a little more fault tolerance in the event of changes to the service.

7. VERSION YOUR API SERVICE POINTS. If you want to introduce new API methods/responses, do it on an new endpoint URL please. i.e. name.com/reseller/api/1.1.0.0 vs. name.com/reseller/api/1.0.0.0. Conversely, don't decommission an older API version unless you simply have to. There's nothign worse than being forced into making our development schedule fit someone elses, especially if we don't actually want or need to impement the new features they're bringing on line.

That's a good start, let me know if you want more info/thoughts.