Six million dot-uk domains and counting
Posted 19 July 2007 at 8:31AM by Simon Dickson in Managing your website
July 2007 saw the registration of the six millionth domain name ending in dot-uk, with the honour going to a Merseyside builder, Tony Hunt. Nominet, the non-profit company which handles the registration of all UK domains, registers well over 100,000 new UK-based domains each month - the vast majority of which are .co.uk. This comes to an annual growth rate of 17%.
To mark the occasion, they published a study which noted that 'users were six times more likely to choose a .uk rather than .com address when looking for information via an Internet search engine.' It's an interesting turn-around from the early days of the web, where everyone wanted to register a dot-com address, to make themselves look bigger. Nowadays, with the internet ubiquitous, there's a real value in being perceived as local.
Plus, as silicon.com notes, .co.uk addresses are often cheaper to register than dot-com or dot-net equivalents. A company like 123-reg, for example, will sell you a .co.uk address for less than the price of a pint. I'm often surprised how many small businesses are quoting Hotmail email addresses, for example, when the added credibility of a 'proper' address comes so cheaply.
Tags: BT Business Email, domain names, hotmail, nominet, uk domains
New feature: Rate this post!
Average rating: 3.3/5
Comments
Post a comment
As 14 days have passed, comments are now closed for this entry.
1. At July 19, 2007 12:51 PM, John Tilley wrote: