One Million .site Domains Registered!
Radix, one of the world’s largest domain registries, recently announced that their domain extension .site has recently hit one million registered domains. Learn more about how this gTLD made it to this momentous milestone.
One million and counting
Joining .ONLINE in the one million registrations club, .site has become a favourite for domain owners. Due to its versatility, affordable price, and reputability, .site is one of the top three fastest-growing new top-level domains.
According to CircleID, .site has “a YoY growth rate of 111% in 2018” and is currently “the sixth largest nTLD (new Top-Level Domain) by domain registrations.” Suffice to say, .site is a domain worth considering the next time the .com you are looking for is already registered.
Originally released in June 2015, .site was released among the original new top-level domains approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Since 2015, many alternative web address endings like .site have continued to rise in popularity and registrations. Sandeep Ramchandani, Radix CEO, told CircleID, “We are extremely delighted to have reached this milestone for .site. We have consistently received positive feedback from our partners that .site is a preferred TLD among small and medium businesses (SMBs).”
What are new Top-Level Domains?
New TLDs, or nTLDs, are web addresses that do not use the original web address endings (.com, .org, .net, .edu, and .gov) released in 1992 by ICANN, the body responsible for the coordination and oversight of domains throughout the internet.
As the internet became more crowded, it was getting harder and more expensive to register domains. ICANN decided to create additional TLDs, or web address endings, to boost the availability of domains for the average user. In 2000, seven gTLDs were released to the public: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro. From this point, ICANN began to add additional web address endings each year. There are currently more than 1,200 gTLDs to choose from.
New TLDs, worth the risk?
Many domain registers are concerned about the reputation of generic top-level domains and with good reason. Some experts have estimated that it can take up to ten years for a TLD to become reputable. Additionally, TLDs like .sucks and .xxx can taint the rest of the available domain extensions. However, many of the current TLDs have spread like wildfire. For example, .top currently has almost four million domains. Just below .top, .xyz currently holds over two million domains. Also in the running are .club, .loan, .online, and, of course, .site.
Geographic domains, like .uk, .london, .newyork, etc. have also been hitting high marks with domain registrations. For example, .de, the country TLD for Germany, has over 14 million domain registrations. The .uk geographic domain has over ten million domain registrations. The wonderful thing about the continuously growing list of gTLDs is that there is a domain specifically for you. No matter what type of website you are trying to build, a domain is available at an affordable price to suit your purpose.