Domains & Hosting News

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.