November 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of November 2006.
The .eu ccTLD is facing a typical post-landrush fall off in registrations. While registrations have not stopped, they are kept high by the numbers of Sunrise domains being activated. The real crunch comes when these Sunrise activations finish and the stream of rejected Sunrise domains being released into the market fades out.
The figures below are the monthly changes sampled at the beginning and end day of each month since May. (The November figure is only as far 17/November/2006). The Active delta is the change in the number of active .eu domains. The Accepted delta is the change in number of Sunrise applications accepted. The Rejected delta is the change in number of Sunrise applications rejected.
Delta Active Accepted Rej Exp Daily Avg
May-06 147311 24783 10345 8890 4910
Jun-06 155432 7119 9744 9744 5181
Jul-06 -2352 8586 5016 7 2373
Aug-06 78283 12446 4266 4 2525
Sep-06 68348 6317 14945 3 2278
Oct-06 150278 4537 11417 0 2399
Nov-06 39844 38 19 1 2344
The July figures were skewed by EURid putting approximately 75922 domains ON HOLD. The majority of these are believed to be the Ovidio syndicate domains. The domains were reactivated by EURid after Ovidio won a legal action against EURid in October.
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on November 17th, 2006 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
EURid is to cut the registration costs of .eu domains to 5 Euros from January 1st 2007 in the wake of collapsing .eu sales. The price reduction is presented as being a response to the success of the .eu ccTLD. However the reality is that EURid has made a complete mess of .eu ccTLD and the credibility of .eu has been destroyed by cyberwarehousing, cybersquatting and the staggering incompetence of EURid.
EURid claimed that this substantial reduction was possible due to the huge interest in .eu and the high number of registrations. The reality is that cyberwarehousers and cybersquatters account for a very large proportion of .eu ccTLD and they were aided by the sheer incompetence of EURid in handling bogus registrars and the massive amount of cybersquatting and cyberwarehousing that this caused.
The incompetents in EURid management seem to think that cutting prices will enhance renewal rates. The reality is that .eu domains are on sale on domainer websites for around 5 Euros each and they are not being bought. All viable TLDs have some element of domain trading but the way that .eu domains are not being traded shows how utterly devalued the .eu ccTLD has become.
The funniest quote in the EURid press release is this:
“EURid is now following up on its promise to reduce the fees after one year of operation. We hope this will stimulate more users to see the advantage of having a true European Internet presence by choosing a .eu domain name,” says Marc Van Wesemael, managing Director of EURid.
I don’t know if this guy realises that European people no longer trust or own .eu - it is mainly in the hands of US and Canadian cyberwarehousers and cybersquatters and it is the incompetence of his organisation that sold out the .eu ccTLD. Europe has one response to EURid - Screw .eu!
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, Internet Statistics, Eurid, Cyberwarehousing, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on November 17th, 2006 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
WhoisIreland.com will be listing Irish owned/operated .com/net/org/biz/info/eu/co.uk sites and domains within the next week. Since the site started monitoring .ie registrations and sites in 2000, it has been continually tracking the ebb and flow of com/net/org/biz/info/eu/co.uk registrations as well. These are used to produce a monthly statistics report on the Irish Hosting Market for hosters.
As part of the expanded service, the registration and deletion dates for domains will be shown as part of each .ie domain record. Since 2000, the Irish hosting market has grown dramatically. The 2000 market was dominated by the ISPs who had the majority of Irish registrations. Now the ISPs account for less than 20% of the Irish hosting market.
Tags: Irishblogs,.eu Statistics, Domains, Webhoster Stats, IEDR, Eurid, WhoisIreland,
Written by John McCormac on November 14th, 2006 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.
Netcraft’s latest survey claims that it has detected over 100 Million websites on the net. The pattern of growth has been dramatic. In April 2003 it detected 40 million sites. By May 2004 it detected 50 million. By March 2005 it detected 60 million. By August 2005 it was at 70 million. In April 2006 it was 80 million and 90 million by August 2006. The November survey puts the figure at just over 100 million. It is an amazing growth pattern but it is not a natural one.
The problem of domain tasting, where a registrar will register a domain and point it to a PPC advertising page for five days and then let the registration lapse if it does not make enough revenue is the blight of the web. Millions of domains are registered each day only to be dropped five days later. And many ICANN registrars are just clones, set up for the purpose of domain tasting. The bozos in ICANN aren’t even bothered with this pollution of the web.
Filtering out the domain noise of domain tasting is a difficult thing to do with domain statistics. Some hosters are easily identifiable and many of these websites are parked on a limited set of IPs. Removing all these PPC, “coming soon” , parked and “direct navigation network” websites from a web survey would show the web to be a lot smaller than people think. But it almost gets down to the philosophical question of what constitutes a website.
So how much of the growth is natural? It is difficult to tell. But one thing is certain - a lot of it is down to domain tasting rather than the growth of real websites.
Tags: Irishblogs,netcraft, Domains, Webhosting, Internet Statistics, Irish Webhosters, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on November 4th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and Irish Tech News.
Many of the business bills sent out by Eircom this month have an advertising brochure included. The brochure, the current edition is the Autumn 2006, is the first bit of joined up thinking from Eircom’s marketing department in a long time. The days of the Eircom rat are well gone and it seems that Eircom wants to get back in the business. The key areas of interest to the Irish hosting business are the domains and hosting offers.
The prices on domains are on page 13. Billed as “eircom’s great domain name sale”, they are not exactly groundbreaking prices. The .com is being pitched at 10 Euros a year. The .eu is priced at 20 Euros a year. (Eircom.net is a .eu registrar so it pays 10 Euros per .eu to EURid.) The .ie is priced at 67 Euros per year. All three are bundled at a price of 85 Euros per year. How long this “sale” will last is not known. However Eircom will have to maintain or even lower these prices to maintain marketshare.
One of the strangest inclusions in the brochure is this:
“Want to develop a website?
eircom can develop a professional website tailored to your needs. Call us for advice”
Does this mean that Eircom is getting into web development too? Other ISPs have done so in the past and Esat has its own web development section that is actually more successful than its hosting section.
The data hosting pitch in Eircom’s brochure is weak on facts. It is targeted at businesses so it pitches three products: managed e-mail services; managed web services and online server backup. The Managed E-mail service is priced at 6.50 Euros per user per month. With Google making moves in the same marketspace this is a bit overpriced.
The managed webservice is low priced at 8.99 Euros per month but the quality of the package is even lower than the yellow pack hosting offers that are common in the Irish hosting market. The diskspace is only 250 MBs and it includes a .com domain. However trying to order any hosting product on the Eircom.ie website shows that Eircom has a long way to go to get back into the market - the site design is banjaxed.
Hosting, especially shared hosting and domain name registration is almost an impulse purchase now. It has become totally commoditised The market has moved on since Eircom topped the Irish hosting business. People generally do not want to ring up or be contacted about hosting after filling in a form. They want to be able to order the product and get it - immediately. They don’t want some click and drool flash advert insults potential purchasers.
Perhaps it may not have occurred to the Eircom marketing people that those in business tend to do research and probably have an understanding of hosting and domains. Eircom commits the cardinal sin of sales - it makes it difficult to purchase anything.
Eircom’s mistake is one that the Hosting Service Providers (HSPs) like Hosting365, Novara and Blacknight do not make. Ordering hosting and domains is easy - the HSPs made it easy and that’s why they have more marketshare than the ISPs. Perhaps Eircom should have their marketing department try to purchase Eircom domain and hosting products online to see what they are missing.
Tags: Irishblogs,eircom, Domains, Webhosting, Internet Statistics, Irish Webhosters, domainnames
Written by John McCormac on November 1st, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and Irish Tech News.