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Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
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September 4, 2002 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Directory infrastructure service provider UltraDNS Corporation (UltraDNS.com) said this week that it has been selected to provide managed domain name services by global registry service provider Afilias Limited (Afilias.info).
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UltraDNS will provide managed DNS service for Afilias?s global registry solution for generic and country code top-level domains, including its flagship product .info. UltraDNS says it will enhance the registration-to-resolutions speed of .info domains to less than five minutes.
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The announcement follows a long period of scrutiny by ICANN, says UltraDNS, which required a great deal of assurance about the reliability of the important top-level domain.
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“The relationship with Afilias for .info has actually been a while in the making,” says Rodney Joffe, chairman and CIO of UltraDNS. “There were a number of steps we had to go through with ICANN, who did due diligence first. They tested us quite extensively before giving us the go-ahead to do something as significant as .info.”
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Following the collaboration, the two companies commissioned third party performance measurement company Catbird Networks to evaluate the registration-to-resolution time. The .info domain was tested against .biz and .org domains, managed by NeuStar and VeriSign, respectively. The study found that .info names resolved in a median time of about two minutes, significantly faster than .biz, which took six minutes, and .org, which had a median time of almost 12.5 hours.
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Out of the relationship formed around the .info domain, says Joffe, UltraDNS also joined Afilias?s bid, in cooperation with the Internet Society, to take over the management of the .org registry. The ISOC/Afilias bid was recently rated first among 11 such bids in a number of ICANN staff recommendations.
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While many of the criticisms of the staff recommendations of the ISOC/Afilias proposal focus on the fact that the recommendations were made based on the proposal rather than any real technical due diligence, in fact both ICANN and Afilias are very familiar with UltraDNS’s system because of the screening process for the management of the .info domain.
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While the transfer of the .info domain to UltraDNS?s infrastructure was some time in development, this week?s announcement marked the completion of the process.
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“The final move across just took place in the last few weeks,” says Joffe. “With top-level domains, there are a lot of legacy systems around the world that hard-code these things because they really don’t change very often. So there was quite a process involved in making sure that the entire world was able to change any settings they had hard coded to point to UltraDNS.”
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In addition to the .info domain, Afilias is working to transition the country code .vc to UltraDNS, which also provides management for the .cx and .nu country codes.
