On 6 September 2011, REG.RU, a domain names registrar, and Masterhost, a hosting provider, co-hosted a press conference at the RIA Novosti press center. The press conference addressed new trends of the Russian domains and hosting market development.
A new online resource “Domains of Russia”, which was co-launched by Openstat, Coordination Center and Technical Center of Internet, was introduced at the press conference. “The resource gets from both Coordination Center and Technical Center of Internet the updated and most complete data across all Russian domains’ indicators, and then processes it by using Openstat services, and subsequently we jointly post for users a comprehensive statistics about domains .RU and .РФ growth, hosting, mobile operators market, among others,” – described this resource Matvey Alexeev, Openstat’s marketing director.
Mr. Alexeev briefed the press conference participants on the latest statistics, which demonstrated that the growth rate in domain names in domain .RU over the last year amounted to almost 15%. Domain .РФ has demonstrated high growth rates for less than a year of its operation – it boasts of a nearly 2% growth rate in domain names a month. More than 80% of domains in .RU have been delegated already, and most domain names in both ccTLDs .RU and .РФ have been registered by residents of the Russian Federation.
At the press conference, REG.RU and Masterhost announced their merger in order to jointly address challenges currently facing the domain industry. Alexey Korolyuk, REG.RU’s CEO, stressed that owing to this merger, the companies would be able to ensure an international level of service, while maintaining an adequate for Russian customers price-quality ratio. REG.RU estimates that already this year their customers will be able to benefit from the merger.
