Relatively transparent and positively ISP-friendly, this domain name registrar could be your ISPs perfect partner—especially if your Internet service does a lot of business south of the border.

by Jeff Goldman [April 30, 2001]

The global domain registrar GKG.NET, based in College Station, Texas, offers a broad range of reseller options for ISPs, nestled in between its two basic arrangements. With its parallel Spanish-language site, the company attracts a global customer base and has a number of its reseller partners located in Latin America.

Paul Marvin formed Global Knowledge Group with his brother Taylor back in 1993, while the two were still finishing their engineering degrees at Texas A&M University. Soon after graduating, the twosome partnered with Texas A&M to establish a NAFTA Web site in Mexico.

According to Paul Marvin, now the company's chief operating offices, its ties to Latin America remain strong.

"Our company started down in Latin America—the US is our second home," he said. "We don't have an office down there, but that is where we started from."

By the time the company was ICANN-accredited in May 1999, it had already established a Web development, Web hosting and colocation business with resellers worldwide—and they've kept on growing.

"We're dealing with over 160 countries right now," Marvin said. "We have somewhere between 400 and 500 resellers, a large portion of them in Latin America."

Mix your own
It's hard to say exactly how many partnership options GKG.NET offers. Their web site lists three—the Affiliate, Partner and Partner Plus programs-but it's really two different setups, with enough options within each to count for at least a couple more.

The Affiliate Program is recommended for those ISPs that expect to register fewer than 100 domains a year. It's the simplest option, perfectly viable for a small ISP. A link is placed on the ISPs Web site for customers to click through, but they're not taken to GKG.NET's site—they're taken to a co-branded page which has both GKG.NET's and the ISPs names.

Customers pay GKG.NET's retail rate of $9.99 per domain per year, and the registrar processes all payments. The ISP then receives a commission of $1.00 per domain name registered and $0.50 per renewal—commission checks are mailed quarterly. There's no setup fee and few complications.

And according to Marvin, there's more than one way to use the Affiliate Program. "We have some ISPs who do everything for their own customers—it's fairly common," he said. "And a lot of times they won't link the page from their site—they'll just use it for themselves. They'll log in and register the domain for the customer."

If your ISP uses it as a click-through setup, though, that doesn't mean your customers will be wandering off into the unknown. The interface can be customized with whatever data the ISP wants to include. DNS information, technical contact, billing contact, etc. can be automatically entered—keeping the customer locked in to hosting with the ISP.

Kick it up a notch
The Partner and Partner Plus programs are essentially the same, and both are recommended for ISPs who expect to register more than 100 domains per year. Partner Plus just means the ISP is also taking advantage of another GKG.NET reseller program, such as hosting, design, or collocation deals.

Or, if that's too confusing, you can simply prepay for your domain name registration services according to GKG.NET's price schedule (above).

And if both of those options are just too much to deal with altogether, then GKG.NET offers a turnkey billing solution. The registrar charges the customer at the ISP's chosen rate, then pays the difference to the ISP on a monthly basis, minus a credit card transaction fee. Regardless of which of these options the ISP chooses, there's never a setup fee.

Domains are registered from the ISP's site using GKG.NET's Super SRS (Superior Shared Registration System) API. According to Marvin, it's a very straightforward process.

"We send you the specs, and you can build the system to work completely at your site," he said. "We've got a secured test bed where you come in and check to make sure everything's working, and we have a secure area where you tie in to do your domain registration business."

And it's all completely transparent. "Your customers never leave your web site," Marvin said. "The benefit is that you take the data, you collect it yourself, and you can do whatever you like with the data that you collect. And although you're also passing it to us, you can also maintain your own records."

Building a lasting relationship For a registrar that started out as a hosting company, GKG.NET is pretty conscientious about making sure the ISP gets to hold on to its customers. A whois search will show GKG.NET as the registrar, and a customer billed directly by the registrar will of course see GKG.NET on the credit card bill, but just about everything else is covered.

If the ISP wants to make sure they hold on to customers who renew their domain names, GKG.NET will notify the partner in advance of the renewal date, so the partner can bring the customer back to their site. And, of course, that customer will have the ISP's DNS and other information automatically entered for them when they renew.

For an ISP that wants all the bells and whistles, there is one catch—GKG.NET hasn't entered the market for multilingual domains or ccTLDs. Marvin just doesn't think they're ready.

"The multilinguals have not gone live yet," he said. "There's still a question as to what type of standard they're going to use."

And the same goes for ccTLDs. "We've been in talks with several of them, but we haven't put them out there yet," he said. "We're just not sure that that's going to add a lot to our business. We will at some point, but probably not in the next month or two."

But for an ISP seeking reseller options in other areas as well, GKG.NET does offer additional programs in hosting, design and colocation. "We have resellers programs for pretty much any service that we have," Marvin said.

And there's one more area of the business of which Marvin's particularly proud.

One of the reasons that we got in the domain business was because of the terrible service we got from 'the monopoly,' I won't mention the name," he said. "Every day, we get hundreds of emails from our customers that are just incredibly pleased with the service that we offer. Our service is really good—I challenge anybody to compare our service to any other registrar in the business."

— End