.RU Domains Names Available on OrderBox

Registrars and partners will now be able to use sell .RU domains from OrderBox.

Apart from second level .RU domains, third level domains under .COM.RU, .NET.RU and .ORG.RU are also available for registration.

To give you a perspective of the size of the ccTLD, since its inception in 1994 , .RU has amassed about 3.6 Million+ Domain Registrations so far.

Total number of domain names in .RU (2003-2011)

Pic Courtesy: .RU Co-ordination Center

Registrars: If you need any help in marketing this ccTLD, please contact your respective Account Managers.

VeriSign’s Registry Fee Hike – In Retrospect

The Registry fee for .COM and .NET will increase 2 days from now. The fee for .COM domain names have increased from $7.34 to $7.85 and the fees for .NET domain names have increased from $5.40 to $5.86.

This is the last of the 4 price hikes that Verisign is entitled to, under contract with ICANN.

Here’s a quick summary of the price changes so far:

Why does Verisign keep increasing .COM/.NET fees?

According to them; in the last five years, the volume of DNS queries on Verisign’s global Internet infrastructure has more than doubled, increasing to an average daily query load of 57 billion in the first quarter of 2011. This daily number was ~30 billion queries on average in 2007 and was a miniscule of 1 billion queries per day back in 1999.

The additional fees help the company bolster and scale infrastructure and platforms to ensure smooth functioning of these systems.

* Data sourced from Verisign.com

New Branding Interfaces on OrderBox

We’ve revamped the ‘Branding Settings’ interfaces on the Registrar and Reseller Control Panels.

Earlier text-heavy pages have been given a cleaner, crisper and lighter look. With this new design, we’ve clubbed all branding-related tasks under one central section. Further sub-sections can be easily accessed by a navigation bar on the left.

We have clubbed these existing branding-related sections into one global space:

• SuperSite and PartnerSite Branding
• Control Panel Branding
• Control Panel – Shopping Cart Integration Settings
• Name Server Branding
• URL Branding

Ed’s note: Yes, OrderBox is very customizable

Our main focus has been on simplifying the branding tasks by:

• Providing visually descriptive screenshots/icons to explain branding functions
• Revamping architecture of pages for Registrars and Resellers so that they can easily navigate to all branding tasks
• Simplifying and organizing functions into short easy steps
• Creating no-frills interfaces, with only necessary information to perform tasks
• Providing descriptive help information for better guidance

This is now live in OrderBox!