Category: Industry News

The Web Hosting and Domains industry is dynamic in nature with new policies, mergers & acquisitions, important ICANN announcements, New gTLD updates, cyber attacks, etc. creating a stir from time to time. To give you a quick lowdown on all these fresh industry updates and trends that matter to you through, we collate all major newsworthy events into simple 2-minute long reads.

Industry News, Registries

Afilias Announces Spanish Names for .INFO

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Company enhances the non-English speaking Internet by allowing individuals to register web site names with native Spanish characters.

Afilias, a registry services provider, announced that Internet users can now register .INFO domain names that include the Spanish characters á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú, and ü. The introduction of these new domain names, termed Internationalized Domain Names, now enables Spanish-speakers to establish Web sites using words commonly used in Spanish such as película.info, teléfono-móvil.info, Ídolo.info, Piñata.info, and others.

The registry states that this set of Spanish characters adds to their broad support of IDNs, bringing the total number of languages supported to ten. IT also states that these include scripts for Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian and Korean.

Industry News, Registries

“.Asia Celebrity Pioneers Program” Launched

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DotAsia Organisation announced the launch of its groundbreaking Celebrity Pioneer Program, offering celebrities worldwide the priority to register their name with .Asia before the public “landrush” launch on February 20, 2008. Early adopters announced included the latest major motion picture release from the director of Kung Fu Hustle, CJ7. The movie will start to utilize “www.cj7.asia” to promote its release in the next few months.

Under the program, celebrities from entertainment, art, culture, sports, business, politics, academia, are invited to participate as Celebrity Pioneers. Celebrity names are often neglected in the startup of a new domain registry. Yet they are often highly vulnerable to cyber-squatting. Through the Celebrity Pioneers Program, renowned individuals can utilize their .Asia domain to reach fans all over Asia for their next concert, movie or tour, while protecting their personal brand online.

Industry News, Registries

Nominet Establishes Charitable Foundation

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Nominet today announces the creation of the Nominet Foundation, a charitable organisation that will fund education, research and development initiatives in the UK Internet industry.

Nominet Board and membership give go-ahead for Foundation to be launched in Summer 2008

First year donation of £5 million will fund education, research and development.

Nominet today announces the creation of the Nominet Foundation, a charitable organisation that will fund education, research and development initiatives in the UK Internet industry.

Having received backing of the Nominet board and broad support from the Nominet membership, The Foundation will aim to launch in Summer 2008 with a first year donation of £5 million.

Industry News

Netcraft December 2007 Web Server Survey sees ongoing record Growth

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In Netcraft’s December 2007 survey they received responses from 155,230,051 sites. This was an increase of 5.4 million sites since November, continuing the very strong growth seen during this year. Netcraft point out the web has grown by nearly 50 million sites since December 2006.

This once again breaks the record for growth of the web in one year. The previous highest growth was 30 million sites in 2006. The growth is also impressive in percentage terms, with the web growing by 48% since last December — although this remains far less than the runaway growth of 160% seen back in 2000.

Traditionally hosted websites continue to grow strongly, however the most dramatic increase in the number of websites comes from blogging sites, with the three largest – MySpace, Live Spaces and Blogger – accounting for around 25 million sites in the survey.

Netcraft’s report also includes graphs and tables including Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 – December 2007 and Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 – December 2007. To see their report, please click here.

Industry News

Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief reports 146 Million Registrations

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The latest issue of the VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief reports that the third quarter of 2007 ended with a total base of 146 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). This represents a six percent growth over the second quarter and 31 percent growth over the same quarter last year. The total base of ccTLD registrations was 54.6 million, a six percent increase quarter over quarter and a 38 percent increase year over year. Reviewing the total base of registrations in both global TLDs and ccTLDs, .COM has the highest base with the next two spots remaining unchanged with .DE (Germany) and .NET rounding out the top three. This quarter, .CN (China) moved solidly to the fourth spot. This leaves the fifth spot to be shared by .UK (United Kingdom) and .ORG with approximately the same number of total domain name registrations.