Domains & Hosting News

The Australian Domain Name Administrator board ( auNA) has approved a change in the new transfers policy which will be relaxed to allow a registrant to transfer their domain name licence to another eligible registrant.

Registrants will not be allowed to register domain names for the sole purpose of resale and transfer and wont be able to transfer their domain name for the first 6 months after the initial registration.

Transfers will be processed by the registrar of record using a standard transfer form, and they may charge a transfer fee. Parties to a transfer will be asked to voluntarily disclose the sale method and price, for statistical reasons.

The new domain name transfer policy takes effect from 1st June 2008

The Domain Name registration industry is still growing at a huge rate.  At the end of 2007 in excess of 153 million domain names are registered worldwide across the Top Level Domain Names, with an increase of around 33 million registrations during the 12 moinths.

In the last quarter of 2007, Domain name registrations were 27 percent higher in last quarter compared to 2006 .

This growth rate is slightly below other quarters of 2007 but is in line with the traditional seasonal slowdown for that season.

The number of registered Country Code Top Level Domain Names was 58 million, a 33 percent increase year on year and a 6 percent increase quarter on quarter.

Across all domain extensions .com has the highest base followed by.de (Germany), .net and .cn (China). Fifth place is shared by .uk (United Kingdom) and .org.

One of the first .asia domain names released was purchased just minutes after the official opening on 26th March and the owners who began launching it immediately with a prepared set of pages on the same day, believe it would be one of the first properly developed .asia websites completed and launched.

The site is www.home-equity-loan.asia specialising in information on home equity loans, loan refinancing and those new reverse mortgages that seem so popular. The site is fully monetised for Adsense and already offers a good deal of interesting and original information on the topic. It will be interesting to see how long it takes a new .asia domain to get indexed by Google and then how long to get out of the so called Google sandbox and get a PageRank from Google.

Owners report that the Google Webmasters site may already have a DNS problem with the new .asia domains as although Google Webmasters can create a line to the verify url as part of its error message, which open that page and works fine, google webmasters  still says it can not verify the site due to a server time out, which it attributes to a possible DNS problem?

Domain name registration for the new .asia domains went live at 11pm last night Australian time with a big rush to register as expected. Many internet investors buy domain names that they think are commercially valuable for their own later use or for resale at a profit, so Australian internet content publishers were burning the candle last night and in the wee hours of today to get the best names registered first.

There are now over a hundred .ASIA Accredited Registrars where these domain names can be registered. Feedback from some registrars is that some domain names were registered that could have been registered as a .com so either participants got carried away with the rush or they prefer the .asia extension.

Major US domain name registrars Enom and Godaddy who are accredited registrars for .asia came under criticism as their systems struggled to cope with registrations. Enom also for being too expensive and Godaddy for being so slow with really slow glitches coping with the volume and also for the annoying number of steps needed to register whilst you reject their multitude of add-ons that Godaddy try to sell with every single registration. Both of these registrars were criticised for not having the huge number or reserved .asia names filtered out. (Their search system says the domain is available, and then you go through the long process of registration only to find it was never available). This was considered especially annoying when time was critical for speed of registrations competing for the best domain names.

Hopefully DotAsia Organization (dotasia.org), the Hong Kong based not for profit group that owns the registration rights, is making a huge killing. Their landrush phase commenced in February with 266,663 registrations on the first day and closed with over 500,000 applications. Duplicate requests from their landrush phase will result in an interesting series of auctions between those participants which is still to come and is expected to start early to mid April.

Internet Statistics Company hitwise believed that Social network companies may need to develop widgets that are compatible for multiple social networks, or applications that draw in data from the full spectrum of a user’s social graph. Other potential avenues for marketers include targeting websites that facilitate management of user data sources, such as Plaxo.

Their statistics show that of the traffic that MySpace, Facebook and Bebo send to other Social Networks, more than 89% of their downstream traffic is sent to second-tier players. While the major players hold concentrated market share of visits to the Social Networks custom category, there is significant referral traffic to minor networks.

Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyse website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.