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Renewal rates of .PL domains - up-to-date information.

June 9, 2009

Here you can find some up-to-date statistics of the renewal rate of .PL domain names. The main reason of this post is to give you better understanding of the Polish domain market. Here are the data:

Renewals - total .PL domains

Renewal rate (see NASK annual report) for last 3 years is as follows:

Renewals - one year old domains

If you look at the renewal rate of the domains that has been registered a year ago (so, the first ever renewal for a domain name), the data is completely different. The main reason is that customers are not so "bound" with a domain name; quite often domain is purchased as instant decision without any plans for the future development of such a domain name. After one year, the domain seems not to be so attractive to keep it further. Renewal rate for one year old domain names are as follows: See graph:


















Renewals - one year old domains: Year 2008

If you look at the renewal rates for domains registered in 2008 only, here you get the data for the first 4 months. The lower renewal rates for new domains (registered in 2008) shows much lower interest in domains registered almost for free in Registrars promotions. The total renewal rate has not dropped so much in 2009 (just below 70%), so the results are characteristics only for "promotional" domain names registered in Q1 2008. For more data we have to wait until the end of the current year to be able to see the 2008 registration results (renewals in 2009).


















All data presented in this post are availabe here and here
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Polish banks probably highly vulnerable to Cache Poisoning

April 24, 2009; update on May 4, 2009:

Cache Poisoning is an old story dated mid 1990s. In 2008 the renewed problem of Cache Poisoning called Cross-Pollination was broadly announced and patches and hints how to prevent such attack distributed. I have also participated in the process of informing .PL customers about the potential threats. We had publications explaining what the problem is and how to deal with it. After reading about Bradesco, I decided to check how the financial industry responded to that threat after one year...

What I have found?
Some banks in Poland are still vulnerable to Cross-Pollination, the most well known hole in DNS since last year... Let's take a look at the recent data...

Highly vulnerable

DNS servers of the banks and the financial institutions that are highly vulnerable:

Santander Consumer Bank name server PERSEUS.BANCOSANTANDER.ES NS is highly vulnerable.
KRD name server LUK.DEPT.PL NS is highly vulnerable
Bank Polskiej Spoldzielczosci name server NS1.ETELBANK.PL is highly vulnerable
Noble Bank status change, see below.

It's important that administrators of the IT infrastructure in the mentioned banks must act quickly to patch the hole.

Vulnerable

ING BANK: all servers "vulnerable"
AIG: status change on May 4, see below
DOMBANK: status change on May 4, see below
BPH PBK: just one server "vulnerable"

Banks that corrected their DNS after my blog was posted

NOBLE BANK name server NS3.EO.PL was highly vulnerable on April 24, 2009. After checking servers on May 4, 2009, all names servers are OK.
AIG: all servers were "vulnarable" on April 24, 2009. After checking on May 4, 2009, all name servers are OK.
DOMBANK: two servers were "vulnerable" on April 24, 2009. After checking on May 4, 2009, all name servers are OK.

Congratulations to IT staff of those banks - well done!

Safe

All other banks are safe at least in case of Cross Pollination threat.

How I did the checks? I have checked the Name Servers using recursive.IANA.org service. Checks were repeated to ensure about the results. Results are here. As you see, there is still a lot to do about security in financial sector.


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Changes in .PL registry: pre-paid goes live in Q3/Q4 of 2009

April 9, 2009:

NASK, .PL Registry with almost 1.4 million domains registered and 70% growth in 2008, plans to introduce important changes to the registration model. Changes are going to take place in Q3/Q4 of 2009. The official announcement of the new Agreement will take place during Future Business Trends in the Domain Industry conference organized by NASK in Warsaw on April 16th.

As announced during the ICANN Conference in Mexico, we plan to change our existing post-paid model, implementing pre-paid model for Registry-Registrar relationship. Thanks to the pre-paid model, NASK makes the process of signing agreements with the new Partners much easier, without any further need for security deposits, penalty fees etc. Thanks to such changes, we expect more new registrars to sign the agreement in 2010 and the signing process to become shorter and cheaper for both parties (NASK and Registrars).

Pre-paid is not the only change to our systems. We change the registration process, implementing small fees (0,10 PLN) for each unsuccessful registration attempt. As of today, we have many requests to our Registry system for the expired domain names. You might be surprised, but the dropcatching market in Poland is very matured due to many services provided by NASK in the recent years. We have as follows:

The above mentioned services facilitated competition in the dropcatching, resulting in extreme competition between Partners. Competition means race who is the first to get a domain name. The race without rules... Most of the requests come even before domain becomes available for registration. As the result we observe the heavy load to our infrastructure which interfere with all other requests. Due to competetive dropcatching market plus availability of the aftermarket dedicated services offered by NASK (see below), some drop-catchers created even few companies (especially in Delaware state...) each, just to have better access to the Registry system to register expired names. This may become even a bigger problem whan pre-paid model is implemented allowing much more companies to sign contract with NASK. This makes the competition unhealthy, requiring more and more unfounded investments from dropcatchers and NASK's side, the same time not expanding a market. Instead of investing in the aftermarket expansion, companies have to pay more for the same market share. That's why NASK decided to implement direct economical factor in this competition to make sure that the resources are not spend on (more) lawyers, (more) administration and (more) new servers/infrastructure, but on the core business.

For the details of the proposed changes, please take a look at from presentations from ICANN conference and Future Business Trends in the Domain Industry conference.

You can also find information about .PL services offered by NASK (Domain Name Tasting, expiration time/date in WHOIS, Wait List Service, NX domains list, expired names list) here.

There is also a good press article in "Puls Bisnesu" entitled "NASK teraz stawia na przedplaty" (April 8, 2009). [Link]

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A few arguments why DNSSEC is a very bad idea.

February 5, 2009:

A short list of arguments why DNSSEC shouldn't be implemented in DNS.
1. NSEC3 hasn't been tested enough, it's fresh product from 2008. It requires more real life tests of the software supporting NSEC3 before we say, it can go to production.
2. There is no standardized procedure for key management at root level and signing the root. Explanations from IETF why root signing is not standardized are not satisfactory. Signing the root is technical solution, not political, and that's why should be subject to the RFC process but it isn't and it's not going to be in the future at all.
It's like having all standards for the plane manufacturing but there are no standards for engines... Or having standards for a car manufacturing... except air bags.
3. Trust Anchor Repository is just fixing a problem in not the proper way - can you imagine that standardization process took 15+ years, but everybody "forgot" to think about the root?
4. If the central repository (Trust Anchor Repository) is not accessible, than validation cannot be executed, even if the signed zone is signed properly. Results: you can't use the Web for signed domains.
5. DNSSEC doesn't secure all the way from DNS to end-user- no Operating Systems support DNSSEC as of now (Jan.2009)
6. No interest from the end-users.
7. Business failure in the countries that implemented it.
8. Complicated process of signing and key management which will lead into the situation where Registrar or Name Server operator is managing all the signing process for end-user - this is a big break in the security. You can't hire somebody to sign documents for you with your personal signature.
9. In case of European Commission, EC must be technically neutral - supporting DNSSEC breaks this rule.
and many more to go...

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Concentration factor in domain names worldwide

February 3, 2009:

I conducted analysis on the Subscribers' concentration factor in ccTLDs. I was interested to find out the average value of domain names registered by one, single Subscriber.
In Poland we have 2.6, but it looks, some TLDs have even higer values. Generally higher value, more domains are concentrated around smaller number of subscribers.
I expected that TLDs which are popular among domainers will be high in the chart, but it was not true. For example NL is quite low, but this is domainers friendly TLD...
Another example are PL and ES - I would expect that ES is placed much lower than PL, but in reality PL and ES are one the same level...

Of course this subject requires more advanced statistical tools to make proper analysis, at least to find the distibuton, variation etc.
but unfortunately it is almost impossible to gather very detailed data from differnet ccTLD and conduct full analysis... But now, you have to live with this chart only ;)






























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Annual Report 2008 - executive summary

January 13, 2009:

2008 Annual .PL Domain Names Report

NASK has published the Annual Report. Here you can find most important details of the situation in the Polish, fastest growing, domain market in the recent year(s).
Annual Report has been widely discussed in Poland, with many press releases including Stock Market newspapers (PARKIET), business daily newspapers (Puls Biznesu),
all national most popular daily newspapers (gazeta, Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik).

In all cases both paper and electronic versions covered this event (for details, check the links - all publications are in Polish):
  • ONET: Over 1.3 million domains under .pl. [Link]
  • Puls Biznesu: 1.3 million domains under .pl in 2008. [Link]
  • Parkiet (Stock Exchange newspaper): 0.5 mln domains in 2009. [Link]
  • Wyborcza: 1.3 million domains under .pl in 2008. [Link]
  • e-biznes: 1.3 million domains under .pl in 2008. [Link]
  • IDG: 500 000 domain names in NetArt. [Link]
  • iName: Domain name business in 2008. [Link]
  • Rzeczpospolita: Two million .pl domains in 2009 [Link]
  • Webhosting: Annual NASK Report [Link]

    • Number of .pl domains

    2008 was the best ever year for domain names market in Poland. The yearly growth was 73.5% with more than 1 300 000 domains registered as of the end of 2008.
















    Renewal rate in the past years

    Y2Y renewal rate decreases over time. It's expected that renewal rate will stay stable just above 70%, as in most ccTLDs with open policies.













    Domain names growth: dynamics in the past two years

    This graph shows Q2Q nett growth. The highest growth took place in Q1 of 2008, due to the high number of newly registered domains.
    January 2008 was the first month of the new, low registartion prices (10 PLN for registration of .pl domain and 7.5 PLN for .com.pl domain)


















    Market share of the TOP 10 registrars

    Two leading Registrars: Home with 27% of the market share and NetArt (nazwa.pl) with 24%.
    With 131 000 unique Subscribers, NetArt is the leading Registrar as of the number of served Registrants.















    Daily registrations, average

    This graph shows the number of newly registered domain names every day.

















    DNT (Domain Name Tasting) results

    NASK introduced DNT in September 2008. DNT for .PL names is different than DNT for .com: in Poland, domain name can be tasted for 2 weeks and the wholesale price is 1 PLN (0.33 USD)
    Thanks to Domain Name Tasting (DNT) service every Registrant can check profits and possibilities which an own domain gives as well to test the traffic before registration.

















    DNT - market shares

    DNT market is monopolized by two companies - AZ.PL from Poland and Michau Enterprises from USA.
    AZ.PL share of the market increases over time and has reached 64% in the end of 2008.

















    WLS (Wait List Service) results

    Waiting List Service called Option started on the 1st of July 2004. WLS provides the ability to option a domain name that is already registered.
    The option-holder has the ability to be the first in a queue to the registration of the domain name, if the current registrant cancel renewal (or delete domain name for any other reason).
    There is possibility only of one option per domain name. This service can be provided for one period which runs 3 years.
    WLS can be registered by Registrars only. Wholesale fee for the option for the registration of .pl domain name is 30 PLN


















    For the source document, please visit: Report
    For more about .PL Registrar Program go here

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    Positive changes in the Aftermarket

    December 04, 2008:

    As of December 1, 2008, parking share of the total .pl market raised to 5.63%, 21 basis points higher if compared to October.

    Market share of the biggest player, NameDrive, rose to 61% (from 60%).

    As of parking techniques, URL redirection is still less popular with only 9% of the sites parked using URL.

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    Internet addresses space: Poland on 5th place in EU

    December 02, 2008:

    Poland has reached the 6th position in Europe and the 5th position in European Union in the ranking of the country code (national) Top Level domain names (ccTLD).

    As of December 1st, 2008, NASK with 1.289.763 domain names had 1505 more addresses than AFNIC, French ccTLD Registry.

    Top 6 ccTLD registries in Europe are as follows: Germany with over 12 million names, UK with over 7 million names, Netherlands with more than 3 million names, Russia with 1.750 million names and finally Italy with slightly more than 1.5 million names. It's worth to mention that on May 6th, 2008 NASK celebrated registration of 1.000.000th domain name. Since than we managed to overtake a few ccTLDs including CIRA (.ca domains) and SWITCH (.ch domains). For more statistics click here.

    Such impressive result is due to the 70% growth of .pl names Y2Y and stable 72.5% renewal rate Y2Y. Such high growth rate NASK managed to achieve by reducing registration/renewal prices and introduction of the new services.
    The new services are like:

    Of course the role of our Partners (Registrars) is fundamental and NASK could do nothing without Home, NetArt, AZ.PL and many more...

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    AFTERMARKET: .pl Domain Parking recent statistics

    November 13, 2008:

    Recent statistics on parking shows that 5,42% of registered names under .pl are parked. Previous statistics showing market share of the parking sites were based on the data collected from the parking companies and included also domains that were parked in the past but than removed.

    NASK recent data shows, that as of October 31st, 2008, the real percentage of the parked names is 5,42%.

    9% of such names is parked using URL redirection and 91% is parked using Name Servers delegation.

    Two companies dominated parking market in Poland: SEDO with 41% market and Name Drive with 59% of the total paring market in Poland.










    Aftermarket includes not only parked names but also domain names for sale and sites that are developed for future sales. Rough estimation of this part of the market is 2-5 percentage points.
    As of today, the whole aftermarket in Poland should be estimated for 8-9%

    Polish version of the blog is here.

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    Aftermarket: top ccTLDs sales

    September 11, 2008:

    Aftermarket is growing in surprising directions. I'm astonished by the high position of .fr names. French TLD was a "closed" registry with many restrictions. Today .fr names are frequent guests in secondary market auctions and the prices are following .nl or .de. I was rather convinced that the main factors of ccTLD aftermarket success are: number of domain names already registered and level of restrictions (more restrictions --> less attractive aftermarket). Now we can see boom of .fr names sold by domainers - it changes my perception of what makes aftermarket successful. But let's see the data.

    The top 2008 ccTLD sales:

    Cruises.co.uk $1 099 798
    Casino.de $625 060
    Jobs.ca $600 000
    Phones.co.uk $344 710
    Auto.es $173 682
    Relatiegeschenk.nl $111 347
    Deals.de $102 182
    Apotheke.eu $81 070
    Voitures.fr $78 935


    Last week top ccTLD sales:
    Domain.pl $45 000
    Electromenager.fr $25 380


    And the most interesting: last 3 months top ccTLD sales.
    Phones.co.uk$344 710
    Auto.es$173 682
    Relatiegeschenk.nl$111 347
    Deals.de$102 182
    Apotheke.eu$81 070
    Voitures.fr$78 935
    Shoppen.nl$69 750
    Nepal.de$59 153
    CV.ca$54 977
    Annonces.fr$47 361
    Domain.pl$45 000
    LegalJobs.co.uk$39 392
    Taxi.us$35 000
    Deser.pl$34 736
    GMX.ca$31 200
    Interview.ca$30 933
    CFDS.de$27 341
    Ideescadeaux.fr$27 242
    Ideescadeau.fr$27 242
    Income.ca$26 242
    Electromenager.fr$25 380
    Baseball.us$25 000
    2in1.at$23 681
    Core.de$23 500
    FlirtExpress.de$20 280
    ClassicCars.co.uk$19 897
    Lotteria.it$18 800
    Investimento.it$18 705
    Fight.tv$18 000
    FreeStuff.com.au$18 000
    Diploma.ca$17 999
    Open-Office.de$17 520
    18.no$17 150
    PetrolPrices.co.uk$17 028
    Kinderwagens.nl$15 940
    Monier.be$15 896
    Flugmarkt.de$15 793
    Charme.fr$15 667
    Pharmacies.ca$15 663
    Bingo.us$15 000
    Series.eu$13 539
    Jurist.de$13 388
    TopModels.de$13 106
    Planten.nl$11 676
    Eyeglasses.ca$11 410
    Snows.co.uk$10 890
    Deals.de$10 218

    If you look at the list of top ccTLD sales from the last three months, the most popular TLDs are .fr (France) .uk (United Kingdom) .nl (Netherlands) .de (Germany) and .ca (Canada). Names from .it .pl and .eu can be seen on the list too. I'm not surprised with populatity of .UK .DE .NL, registires with high number of registered domain names (more than few millions) and no restrictions for many years now. But I'm (very) surprised with .CA and (especially) .FR - registries with slighty more than 1 milion registrations and already mentioned restrictions in case of .fr. I'm also surprised (but in other way) with .EU - I expected much more .eu names to be sold due to the popularity of .eu (almost 3 million registrations). It's worth to notice that .es .at and .no domain names are on the list too.

    The question is if this is a new trend - new European ccTLD visible in aftermarket with more than $ 20,000 sales.

    Data on top sales are based on the DNJournal 2008 magazine(s)

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    300 billion (300 000 000 000) queries handled by .PL DNS servers

    September 8, 2008:

    .PL DNS servers handled more than 300 billion queries in last 12 months (September 2007 - August 2008).

    Despite the high number of handled queries, .PL servers are ready to handle much higher load than average today. Unfortunately, for security reasons I can not disclose information of the maximum capacity of the DNS servers.

    It's important to add that thanks to .PL Registry investments in the DNS infrastructure, our "computing resurces" are spread across 23 geographic locations in Poland and abroad. If you are interested in the details, please take a look at the map of the (approximated) existing locations of our Secondary Names Servers.

    The main reason NASK invests in the infrastructure is the protection against Distributed Denial of Service attacks. For more about DDoS attack, please take a look here. Increasing the computational resources (bandwidth, "processor time" etc.) is the easiest and most efficient method to counteract DDoS.

    Thanks to the excess of the computing power and available bandwidth plus geographical disperse of the servers, hipothetical DDoS attack against one or few .PL DNS servers do not cause the overall failure of the DNS and queries still can be handled uninterrupted.

    Polish version of the blog is here.

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    VeriSign: double digit growth of .PL

    September 7, 2008:

    It's a pleasure to inform that VeriSign published recently the The Domain Name Industry Brief (September 2008) mentioning .PL domain as one of the fastes growing ccTLD regardless of the fact that domain market delicned in Q2 2008.

    VeriSign says: "The number of new domain name registrations across all TLDs in the second quarter of 2008 was 11.7 million. This represented a decline of new registrations by 18 percent from a very strong first quarter and eight percent from second quarter 2007, driven largely by a decline in ccTLD growth. The number of new domain name registrations reflects seasonal slowing historically seen in the second quarter."

    Despite this general slow down, "In addition to .au and .br, the overall ccTLD growth was also driven by double digit growth quarter over quarter for .ru (Russian Federation) and .pl (Poland)"

    It's also important to remind that .PL was mentioned in previous VeriSign Industry Brief (June 2008): "few ccTLDs that experienced remarkable double digit growth quarter over quarter, including .pl (Poland), .cn, .es (Spain), .ru (Russian Federation) and .fr (France)."

    VeriSign Q1 report can be dowloaded here.
    VeriSign Q2 (recent) report can be dowloaded here.

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    AFTERMARKET: 85% of expired .PL names are registered in first 24 hours...

    August 21, 2008:

    NASK did some analysis on how fast expired names under .PL are registered back.

    In June 2008, 63% of such names were taken* in first 24 hours... In July 2008, 85% names are taken in first 24 hours.

    What is more important, in first 2 seconds, 45% of names are already taken. It's amazing!

    In the 1st minute, 60% names are taken.

    There are few reasons why we have such good "performance" of .PL and particularly our domainers today and why we made such progress in the last few months:
    1. NASK started publication of the list of expired names (three times a day),
    2. exact expiration time is visible to everybody in WHOIS service,
    3. Aftermarket in Poland is mature enough and we have tens of well qualified Domainers in our country,
    4. "Registry" system is very stable, efficient and is able to handle hundreds of requests per second,


    *) under .pl, domain that is available for registration, can be: registered, booked or tasted; in my calculations, by saying "domain is taken", I assume that domain is registered OR booked OR tasted.

    Statistics on how fast domains are taken, were also discussed on tvn CNBC interview on August 20, 2008. To download recording go to tvnCNBC.pl , login to your account and search for "nask".

    You can see the statistics in Polish language version on my Blog on Webhosting.pl

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