November is Here and Bringing with it Billions in Online Sales
Over the past five years, the number of people choosing to do their holiday shopping online has skyrocketed. With the boom of smart phones, tablets, netbooks and other internet devices, there have never been more ways for people to access their favorite online shopping destinations. So, is your website ready to capture the billions in sales that are out there for the taking?
Optimize Your Website for Speed, Performance and Conversions
Introducing: Real-Time Traffic Management on the Dynect Platform
The month of November holds some truly great holiday traditions, most importantly for retailers is Black Friday – the official kick off to holiday shopping. As we mentioned, online shoppers are on the rise, making it critical for your website to be optimized for speed and performance. Plain and simple, the faster and more efficient your website, the faster you can convert Web browsers into Web buyers.
Everyone wants to be be getting the biggest bang for their buck and while there are many ways to make incremental improvements to your Web speed (10 ways to be exact), rock-solid, reliable and redundant DNS is where Dyn can deliver big results through our advanced traffic management features on the Dynect Platform, including our latest release, Real-Time Traffic Management.
Customers have seen huge results with advanced Load Balancing features like Dynect’s Traffic Management (GSLB) that automatically routes your end users to your closest geographical datacenter, getting eyeballs to your website at lightning fast speeds, but the Real-Time Traffic Management (RTTM) feature manages to kick this efficiency up another notch. By incorporating Round Trip Time (RTT) monitoring, we are able to automatically calculate the fastest route for your Web end users. Now you never need to worry that your Web users will be delayed if one of your datacenters isn’t at peak performance.
Learn more about RTTM or, get it now!
Total Transparency – Freemium Models and Dyn
By Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO, Dyn Inc.
Over the past couple weeks, there have been a few great reads on freemium models. DynDNS.com has long been a freemium model and hopefully I can provide a bit of information about our experience in the freemium world and share what we might have in store. Or, as our user base, maybe you have some new ideas for us to try?
We have three services that are of interest under DynDNS.com which make up our freemium model. We have a free service where you can get ‘name.dyndns.org’ (DynDNS Free) to point to your computer, webserver, remote desktop, DVR, security camera, or whatever. There is a paid version of that same service (DynDNS Pro) and also a paid service for ‘domain.com (DynDNS Custom). This is different service from our enterprise, geo-targeting, and Load Balancing service called the Dynect Platform. Here is a good diagram of the cycle of how users go between services.
We started our freemium model unintentionally as a way to keep our userbase fresh. In the early 2000s, disc and database was not free. The concept of account freshness was introduced to keep our users engaged. If you aren’t using your resources after a certain time, we chose a month, they get returned to the pool for everyone else – you had to log in and click a link or send us a DNS update. This was a great driver for the first upgrade (from DynDNS Free to DynDNS Pro).
Aside from moving from a one-time fee to our subscription service in 2003, we haven’t really changed the model. Sometime in 2007, we made it easier for users by looking at accounts instead of hosts. As a result our net deletes went down. We’ve been doing a lot more with our cart and checkout process over the last 2-4 years. One change which was largely successful was to make the host creation process a checkout operation even though it was free. It didn’t really change the number of people who became aware of DynDNS Pro but the abandoned carts went down.
But enough of that…you probably just want to hear the numbers.
Our public numbers: we have 15 million users, 4 million of them are active. We have about 100k zones delegated to us and about 50k domains under management. Let’s say that 10% of those users use us just for domain registration and the rest have their services together. We see more than 10,000 new user accounts a day and about 2500 net user creates a day. About 200 net new paid accounts per day.
One place where we messed up: You can go from free to paid but our next tier up isn’t the easiest upgrade path (DynDNS Pro to DynDNS Custom means that you need a different name, it’s always rip and replace).
Most users choose to be free for the life of their time with us (average lifespan is years) within the first couple days or at the 30 day mark, when the account freshness is first active. After that, few people actually upgrade. I haven’t seen too much shared on length of account in the freemium model. To the left is a chart of what we see. While it’s great that we have pretty quick feedback of paid users versus unpaid users, what do you for the long tail of users who stay with you month after month? I’m sure a lot of them are happy but is there anything else we can provide for them?
Fraud is more costly for us than other industries or services. Since we provide Internet infrastructure for free, it is a target of bad activity. Many high-profile data breaches or targeted attacks involve some use of our services. We take an active stance, looking for bad stuff and collaborate with law enforcement (local, state, federal, and international). Frankly, the risk of bad stuff on the Internet really puts the future of free DDNS into question.
Our main services page shows the Free, Pro, and Custom options side-by-side. Here’s a screenshot:
Seven years later, a few years into a/b testing and optimization and we’re looking at what’s next for DynDNS.com and its services. Do we have the right feature set between free and paid, the right amount of time between touches, and the right price?
Over the next few months as we continue our Taking it to the Streets campaign we will be learning more about the models or customers use and where their pain points come from and how they overcome them. This is our story and experience with the fermium model. What is your opinion? Do you have a better use case?
DevOps GameDay at LISA ’10 in San Jose, CA
Are you ready for the next round of “Experiments in Uptime”? Dyn Inc. engineers are headed out to the 2010 USENIX: LISA conference next week to push the boundaries in uptime for Web applications. Along with OpsCode (with their configuration management tool Chef) and Zenoss (with their monitoring and alerting tools), we’ll be conducting our DevOps GameDay event on Monday, November 8th from 6:30pm to 10:00pm PST at the San Jose Convention Center.
Want in? You can learn more and watch a quick overview video or a register to attend for free.
Mashable Exclusive: Increasing Clicks with A/B Testing
If you need a simple, inexpensive way to figure out what’s going to make your website’s users click on that big, red button, you’ve come to the right place. A/B testing is one of the easiest ways to figure out whether one specific variable of your website is working. It could be a button color, a bit of web copy, an image — something extremely finite that may (or may not) have a measurable impact on desired actions, be they conversions or a simple click-through.
Read the full Mashable Exclusive Article
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