Alexander Schwertner of German domain registrar epag presents a Thursday afternoon session at WebhostingDay 2010.
The WHIR is reporting live from Germany at WebhostingDay 2010. Stay tuned to our news, features, blogs and WHIR tv for more updates from the event.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a bit of an extension of what was covered in the day’s last keynote – presented by InternetX – this somewhat more intimate hosting session covered business practices for hosting providers selling country-code domains, presented by Alexander Schwertner of epag, a domain registrar based in Germany.
He began by answering the question of why a hosting provider would broaden the scope of domains it offers at all. The answer had to do the number of domains registered in a list of countries, but more specifically with the rate of growth in those domains. The majority of the growth happening in the domain space actually happens in the cc domain space, with particularly high growth happening among Russia, Brazil, Poland, France and Australia. All of those are showing more than 20 percent growth, with Russia showing almost 40 percent.
Customers, he says, often identify with their local TLD, which provides them with a means of engaging a specific market more directly. Another motivator for registering a CC domain, and one that applies in almost any domain, is the impulse to protect a company’s brand by securing domains with a variety of extensions.
There are pitfalls too, he says. In many cases, certain CC domains (he uses France as an example) require additional contact info, they might be limited to local companies only (Finland has pretty strict rules here, he says), there might be specific forms and documents required and there is a risk of changing registry policies.
On the positive side, CC TLDs can be a sticky offering, since there is a bit of complexity to registering them. They’re also an up-sell opportunity for customers who might be registering a .com or .info domain with your company.
Nevertheles, there is an opportunity. And there are more than likely CC TLDs related to your business. The factors that would influence whether a domain is a good fit would depend on the nature of your business. If you’re focused on consumers, you should choose CC TLDs for which the processing is automated, that do not require forms or documents, only require standard domain data sets and can be registered by anybody (he includes a list of examples here, too long for me to copy). If you’re focused on corporate clients, choose the CC TLDs that are relevant to your clients, including those in their target markets, that would support global trademark protection or fulfill some other special purpose (another similarly long list here).
Obviously, you ought to include your local market (if you’re based in Russia, or serve Russian clients, you should offer the .ru domain), and if you’re based in Europe, he says, you should probably offer as many European CC TLDs as possible.
There may even, he says, be a boost to your image as a service provider if you offer a broader range of domains, even to those users who may not be registering them?
He also addressed the question of whether a service provider should spend the time becoming accredited by registries in order to become a registrar itself, or work through a wholesale provider. The answer to that question is generally associated with the size of the service provider – basically, small hosts should work with wholesalers, very large hosts and registrars can consider becoming accredited, and large and medium sized hosts could consider using a mixture of the two.
There is a lot of investment required in operating as an accredited registrar, of course, some of the major ones being the basic investment required to become accredited on most domains, as well as the ongoing cost of software development associated with the registration interface.
The benefits of outsourcing, well, those should be pretty self-evident to an outsourcing business like a web host – a single contact/contract and the simplicity of having the heavy lifting done for you. Basically the same argument you’d make to a hosting customer.
Advantages for becoming an accredited registrar basically boil down to the margins on individual domains, which becomes important if you’re working with a very significant scale.
To provide a good customer experience, he says, some good moves would include offering all the CC TLDs a customer might expect to find through your service, making it possible to add high-priced CC TLDs to hosting package purchases, training your customer support to deal with complex domain transactions, making sure the specific requirements of a given domain are clear to the customer before the order is finalized and collecting all the relevant domain data in the course of the ordering process.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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