New Zealand made award winning website builder Rocketspark is now also an official registrar for .nz domains, a pipe dream that the founders have had since starting out.
To warrant becoming a .nz domain reseller, Rocketspark needed a high number of domains to justify the development resource required to develop the systems that needed to be in place.
Rocketspark was originally a reseller of .nz web domains. To make this easy to understand, you can liken it to a clothing retailer who buys their clothes from a seamstress and then marks up the price and resells them. Now, Rocketspark can be likened to a seamstress who makes the clothes and sells them themselves.
It's a necessary step to register a domain for any business that wants a live website. Domain-related questions and issues can also be technical and cause headaches for our customers, and that's why it was so important for Rocketspark to be able to take over the control of domain support.
Founder & Developer, Richard King said this put Rocketspark in control of its destiny.
“We still have to pay the wholesale price from Internet NZ before we can sell domains to our customers, but we’ve cut out the go-between who we were buying from beforehand.
“We can now provide support for any domain issues that our customers might have without us having to go back to the go-between, like we had to before. It’s about controlling our destiny.” Richard said.
Richard said this made things faster too, because customers were no longer at the mercy of whether the go-between would do something about an issue they might be having.
“This allows us to create a better experience for our customers and reduce the underlying support issues,” he said.
Because a domain name is publicly listed, Richard said having it registered with Rocketspark, a trustworthy New Zealand company, would also increase the trust our customers place in us.
“It’s quite cool that we’ve got to this point where it makes financial sense and the timing is right.”
He said there was some infrastructure to put in place in the backend for Rocketspark to make it happen.
“Before we were relying on the other system to automate a lot of stuff for us. When we had our domain names hosted with another company, they also did the nameserver/DNS (Domain Name System) service.”
A nameserver service is a separate, yet integrated thing that sits alongside your domain name. Each nameserver service has a zone file, which has information about where your website and emails live on the internet, so if anyone on the internet tries to go to that domain name, the server tells them where to go because of the information sitting within the zone file.
“Late last year we built an integration into Route 53, an Amazon product which provides a nameserver service and Domain Name System (DNS) hosting. So, any .nz domain name that is purchased through Rocketspark, we automatically set up a zone for, unless they don’t want to move their DNS hosting to Rocketspark.
“It’s quite important that the name service is active, which is why we chose Route 53, because Amazon is a trusted global company and it comes with a large infrastructure and high availability.”
The way Rocketspark is set up means everything is automated and no one has to think about IP addresses or nameservers or anything like that because it’s automated in the background.
