Thorsten Enig of OpenSRS delivers an afternoon session at WHD.Local in London
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — One of the short afternoon sessions at Tuesday’s World Hosting Days London Local event was Thorsten Enig of OpenSRS (www.opensrs.com) in Europe, who set out to provide hosting companies with some insight into what kinds of opportunities new TLDs might represent for their businesses.
The opportunity is close, he says. The new TLDs will be live at the root server starting in November of 2012, and those will include brands like .facebook or .adidas, but also more general domains like .shop.
The .brand domains can be sold, used to create web-facing pieces of a web presence, or used to anchor internally-facing components. So there’s a chance a web host might want to create its own .brand, although that option is probably the less likely.
OpenSRS is planning to provide a few services around new TLDs. It is currently helping companies who want to set up their own .brand domains to build their pitches. It is also planning to offer whatever of the many new TLDs it deems most valuable for customers wholesale.
But there is already a big and less than fully tapped opportunity in the domain market, he says – most of it represented in the ccTLD space. Tucows plans to increase its portfolio of domains by 200 in the near future, one of the big reasons for the company’s recent acquisition of the ccTLD-focused European firm ePag.
The company is also offering a few new services that aren’t domains, specifically, the Truste and Sitelock trust tools, as well as the GoMobi site building tool, all of which can provide additional revenue and value to hosting services and add to the bottom line.
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
No related posts.
