EURid: on average, 80% of .eu domain names were renewed in 2012

.eu gathers loyal customers

Brussels, 14-3-2013 — /europawire.eu/ — On average, 80% of .eu domain names were renewed in 2012, according to the latest progress report from the .eu registry EURid. This is the sixth year running that .eu has maintained such a high renewal rate, indicating that .eu domain name holders are a loyal group.

The top-level domain finished the quarter, and the year, with 3.7 million registrations – an annual growth of 5.4%.

“I consider a growth rate that is comparable to 2011 (5.5%) to be a notable achievement, particularly in light of the on-going global economic crisis,” commented EURid General Manager, Marc Van Wesemael.

During Q4 2012, there were 230 752 new .eu registrations. Of these, 7 184, or 3%, were multiyear registrations (registrations for two years or more). Compared with Q3 2012, the number of multiyear registrations increased by 46%, signifying that a growing number domain name holders plan to hold onto their .eu domains for the foreseeable future.

The total number of .eu registrations increased in 22 of the 27 EU Member States. Bulgaria, Belgium, Slovenia, Lithuania and Finland all saw growth of more than 5%.

Also in the report

EURid-UNESCO Insights report
In collaboration with UNESCO, EURid published a new Insights report titled, “The EURid-UNESCO world report on Internationalised Domain Names deployment 2012″. The report, which analyses the growth of multilingualism on the Internet and the factors that contribute towards that growth, including the use of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), can be downloaded at link.eurid.eu/insights.

Business continuity exercise
To test its crisis management capabilities, EURid successfully ran an unannounced Business Continuity Plan (BCP) exercise in December 2012. The exercise focused on switching the EPP, Registrar Extranet, Registrar DAS and Registrar WHOIS services from one data centre to another and back again. The impact on the registrar infrastructure was minimal – a temporary interruption of approximately 15 minutes.

The full report for Q4 2012 is available for download at http://link.eurid.eu/reports.