Information technology and society: Domain zone .ru celebrates its 18th birthday

April 7, 2012 held an official opening of the national domain zone .RU. An active registration of domain names of the commercial purposes began back in 1996, but today the domain-of-old times are almost gone – the main part of registrations (almost 40%) consists of domains, registered in the zone .RU less than a year ago. The oldest existing domain in the national zone .RU is admitted to be the site nostalgie.ru, which today is on the service of the company Reg.ru.

In 2011 the Russian national zone confidently entered the TOP 5 of world leaders in zone .RU. Currently in the zone .RU is registered more than 3 700 000 of domains and every day this number increases by 5 000.

The progressive development of the zone .RU has led to the significant expansion of the geographical location of the domain names’ owners. In Russia, Moscow is the leader by number of registrations (1 170 014 of domains), the Moscow region (276 470) and Saint-Petersburg (237 491) of domains). In the world the second place after Russia by number of registrations takes the Central American state Belize – 192 737 of domains that is 5% from the total amount in the zone .RU. The number of the registered domain names, belonging to citizens and organizations of the CIS countries, is less than 3%.

Today the domain .RU is the fourth largest number of registered domain names among all national zones in the world: it is only ahead by .DE (Germany), .UK (Great Britain), and .NL (Netherlands).

The development of mobile technologies significantly influenced on formation of the domain zone. Since 2009 devices which allow to operatively using Internet get an active distribution. Today the most popular gadgets on the number of site visitors in the zone .RU are Apple (35, 92%), Nokia (29, 85%), Samsung (14, 16%), SonyEricsson (6, 15%), HTC (5, 62%), LG (2, 24%) and Acer (1, 40%). Every day about 50% of Russian people are turning to the World Wide Web services, 22% of which prefer mobile Internet.

“During 18 years of existence of the domain zone .RU not only Russia won the Internet-users’ trust but the whole world as well. The stable growth of the number of registrations, which began in 2008, will be actively continued. You do not have to miss “the younger brother” of the zone .RU – the Cyrillic domain .РФ, which popularity is also growing. The national zone exists just for 2 years, but it already has more than 700 000 of domains, and at many of them are registered interesting and colorful projects which reflect philosophy of the Cyrillic alphabet”, says Director General of the company Reg.ru Alexey Korolyuk.