Technology Toolkit

If you are thinking of investing in domain names it’s important that you understand your market. Top Level Domains or TLDs are growing by the day, some would say that this is a great way for certain bodies to make even more cash and some would say that it opens up the domain name market to people who missed the boat on coms.

Which ever way you look at it the release of new TLDs is going to happen on a regular basis over the coming years and one such TLD that has just released is .me.

One of the newly released TLDs, that is causing a lot of interest is the .me. There are of course several reasons as to why this particular TLD is causing so much interest and we can go through them one by one.

Firstly for all English speaking nations the word “me” is commonly used and understood, this gives the TLD an advantage over certain other TLD domain releases in the sense that it can become part of your domain name or brand, for instance: call me, date me…etc. This makes it easier to remember and in some cased to brand. Secondly, due to the fact that the domain extension has a very broad appeal it naturally lends itself to individual or personal web pages and blogs.

You can see this in action already in the tv extension that is widely being used and accepted by media companies around the world as a good domain name extension for television companies and online tv channels. The explosion in social networking sites and the move to personal connection web sites lends itself perfectly to the .me tld and I’m sure you will see one or two big players in the area within the next couple of years.

Also if you take into account how ISPs and web hosting providers are simplifying the web development process and supplying packages that can have you up and running in no time at all, they are removing the barriers to entry in the market everyday. Another interesting point about the .me extension is that it is totally open and anyone can register a domain name.

Another success story in the domain names area is the European extension eu. It was first released a couple of years ago and has since steadily crawled up the charts of the most popular extensions. At the last count it had reached 3 million registered domain names and is growing at a steady pace.

The two other areas that should be mentioned and I would suggest to study them well is India and China. Although to market for cn has been very closely control by the Chinese government up to now we are finally seeing a little relaxing in the controls. This can be seen in the rapid growth of registrations.

This is also thrue of India and their in CC. They are finally waking up to the value of their national CC. There are 2 billion people in these two markets, alone they dwarf the entire domain and is only a matter of time before most of the people in these countries are online.

Taking all of the above into consideration if you are thinking of starting your own web site, blog or even your own business, don’t overlook the possibilities of the .me extension.

Eu domain names were launched in December 2005 as a country code top level domain for European union which was made available to the citizens and organizations of the EU member states. This Top Level Domain is taken care by EURid, an organization comprising of national registry operators from many European Union states. Full-fledged registration process started in April 2006.

The early phase of operation was termed as the sunrise period. This was further broken into 2 phases. The first phase began in December 2005, which was to check and allot domain names to registrants with existing rights based on geographic names and trademarks. The second phase was carried out from February 2006 which covered personal names, trade and company registrations.

In April 2006, registrations became possible for people without trademarks. Most people who were requesting domain names had already asked their registrars to have their requested domains pre-registered by putting them in a queue, not to miss a chance to register a domain. More than 700k domain names were registered even before first few hours of operation. Large registrars like Dotster and Go Daddy began to suffer from unresponsiveness and long queues of operation, allowing people to register through a person who has already bought a domain. Till August 2006, approximately 2 Million domain names had been registered. Now, .eu is the forth largest registered domain in Europe and holds the ninth position internationally. This process of grabbing domains by registrars was commonly known as the land rush process.

Many companies and individuals criticized this land rush process. They said that such a process created hundreds of phantom registrars, creating an unhealthy way of doing business. These “phantom” registrars had many opportunities and ways of registering a domain whereas genuine registrars had only one opportunity to register the same domain.

These domain names had also been brought to use by many European Union institutions by registering the second-level domain .europa.eu. Institutions and agencies made a switch from previous .eu.int to .europa.eu domain names in May 2006. However, the European Central Bank still uses the domain ECB.eu, unaffected by the shift.

.eu has its main users as websites with European or cross-border audiences and traffic, as known in the technical terms. .eu is more commonly used to emphasize that the website has a European Identity, as opposed to a website which has a strictly national country top-level domain or a global .com nature.

In most countries of European Union, national top-level domains have a major share in the market. The remaining share is spread over .com/.net/.org/.info/.biz in sequential order. Due to this, this young extension has had to work a lot to gain a significant share of these national markets.

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for Ireland is .ie. This ccTLD is managed by a not for profit organization in Dublin, Ireland know as the Irish Domain Registry or IEDR. The IEDR is not a regulatory body and provides the service to the public and internet community. The registry is responsible for the provision of IE names and the rules relating to their registration. The IEDR implements a dispute resolution policy for domains through the WIPO and unlike other registries operates Monday to Friday during business hours.

Requirements to register

The IE domain itself is a restricted domain in that only applicants who meet certain criteria may register this name. The two main requirements are: Being based in Ireland or having a strong link to Ireland (both northern and southern Ireland). Where the applicant is not based in Ireland information showing this connection must be provided. Secondly the entity registering the domain must have a connection to the name and where this connection is not obvious, must provide evidence of this connection.

Resellers and registration process

Domains are registered through approved domain resellers and are passed to the domain registry directly for approval. The approval process is carried out by a team of people known as IEDR Hostmasters. It is their responsibility to ensure the registration requirements are adhered to. Communication is passed to the approved reseller in the case where more information is required. This thorough process of vetting has led to both positive and negative effects on the domain names reputation.

Positive and negative aspects to the domain

On the positive side the domain was recently voted the second safest domain in the world after the Finnish ccTLD. Generally speaking IE domains are held in high regard by Irish based internet surfers. It is seen as a mark of quality or authenticity when doing business online and as a result .ie based websites are trusted over their .com cousins. Very rarely are large spam attacks initiated through an IE domain and the rate of hacks and other internet attacks from IE hostnames is quite low.

The price of .ie domain names are higher than the average TLD or ccTLD, but this price has been significantly reduced over the past 2 years, from an average of around 65 to as low as 19 today. This is due to the traditionally large human input required to approve and manage a domain portfolio. Recently the domain registry themselves have implemented an API mechanism to fast track registration, billing and modifications of domain names. This was carried out by liaising with the reseller community to assess their needs on a day to day basis. Because of the successful implementation of this API amongst the community the price of registering IE domains has fallen with some suppliers leading the way in the price reduction.

Future of the domain

The future of the .ie is bright. New technical advancements in the API as well as the continued reduction in the Irish domain price mean the number of registrations is increasing constantly. Increased promotion of the domain brand by the domain registry and reseller community alike has also led to increased registrations.

Expired domains offer you a great opportunity and a wonderful chance to earn handsome online income. It has been a decade and a half, since the first of the most enterprising entrepreneurs made a foray into the emerging market. Though this promising industry faced its first visible downfall during the early parts of the new century, a sign of stability and evenness is starting to appear in the later half of the first decade of the new millennium. If you are looking forward to capitalize and use the incoming earning opportunities of the internet, you can definitely choose this industry. Though this emerging industry poses stiff competition, you can still be a major player provided you know how to use the opportunity to the maximum.

Expired domain industry is a curious and special type of industry. It is almost off beat and unusual in its nature, as most of the people do not know what it is and how one can make so much money from a basketful of junk domain names! It is also an industry that displays unconventional business and marketing principles. Though similar to stock market business ventures, domain industry has a number of variables and imponderables that always pose great challenges to anyone, who is carrying out business operations.

In simple terms, a trader is the one, who buys and sells expired domains and later makes decent profits from this buying and selling activity. The essential aspect of this industry is to buy them at very low prices and sell them later at high market prices. Nevertheless, it is not that easy to conduct this business operation, as there a number of other factors that influence the quality and price of the domain that you wish to sell.

Creating domain gains always poses a great challenge to you, because of its occasional uncertain and unstable nature. As they are, domain names may never be useful and profitable, unless they form those top of the line, premium and great sounding domain names. Thus, the overall strategy of this unusual and promising business is to seek, detect and buy great domain names at comparatively low prices and sell them later at higher prices. Smart entrepreneurs also make it a point to nurture and raise good expired domain names (domain flipping, as they call this process) into traffic enriched web portals and later offer them as a great sales package to interested parties.

Finally, what will be the perceived scope and promises for this great business? One sweet aspect of this business is its business format and design that is rather simple and straightforward. On the other hand, expired domain trading business could offer you potentially money-spinning opportunities, especially when you grab great domains. Now that the industry is gradually stabilizing, one can really hope for better moneymaking opportunities in the near future.

The main use and intention of .info domain names is not restricted. Yet, there is a common procedure noticed everywhere in internet, where .info domain names are being used by websites providing information from various areas to users.

The use of this domain name for informative websites was done as a part of an announcement made in late 2000, when a public release regarding the top domain names was made. In this announcement, .info came as the leading domain name with around 5.2 million users in its registry as of April 2008. Apart from this, there was another 1.6 million websites with .info domain name, which are active and dedicated for informative purposes in internet.

Since .info domain name is a generic and unrestricted domain name, this could be used by any user, for any purpose. In fact, this is the only top level domain name which was created and used for general purposes without much restrictions and limitations. .info stands for information and hence the name of the websites, using .info domain name clearly reveals that, they are used for such purposes.
Ever after its release and creation, .info domain name was under the maintenance and control of Affilias. This was considered to be the first domain name that supported the IETF standards-based domain name.

The launch of .info domain name was a sunrise period for the trademark owners. This was a rush when this was opened to all. In fact, .info was the first domain name of this kind to be opened in this manner. In the initial stages, a large number of false registrations were made under this domain name. Later this could be identified and this weeded several of those registrations.

Some of the online domain registration services provide free .info registrations. Users will be asked to follow the simple and easy to understand domain registration processes. They could check for the availability of the domain names they require and later get their websites popularized under this name.

If the purpose of the website or the information being conveyed could be used as the first part of the domain name, an extension with .info will clearly reveal the main idea of the website. This will directly help in marketing and popularization of the website. .info is more generic in use, yet users generally take it for granted that all domain names with extension .info carry informative content. This has in a way helped when such websites try for marketing their site.