eNom Grabs 320,000 More .info Names

Domain registrar eNom has once again made a major landgrab of .info domains, registering 320,000 names in June, giving it the largest net gain in this month's Hosting Provider Switching Analysis with an increase of more than 287K hostnames.

There were several significant percentage gains in this month's analysis as well, including a large switching gain for Las Vegas hosting provider Powerpulse.cc/Colocation Gateway, which had more than 84K sites transfer from Rackspace. NR Software was also among the leaders for percentage gains with a net increase of 90.7K sites, driven by 133K new sites and a pickup of 2K hostnames from MCI.

The eNom strategy takes advantage of favorable pricing for registrars by .info registry operator Afilias, an approach designed to put a large number of .info names in circulation, which would then generate fees upon renewal. As of last summer, Afilias had registered 1.5 million .info names in three years. That number has jumped to 3.6 million, making .info nearly as common as the much older .org TLD. Registrars have accounted for 1.76 million names - 84 percent of the increase - through three huge bulk registrations.

The eNom affiliate Sipence used the Afilias offer last year as an opportunity to bulk register 1 million .info domains for customers who owned the same name in .com or .net. In January Dotster bulk-registered 343,000 .info domains, followed by eNom's acquisition of 320K domains this month. A large number of .info domains are currently parked at the registrars and displaying pay-per-click ads.

Netcraft's Hosting Provider Switching Analysis identifies movements of sites from one hosting provider to another on a monthly basis. Netcraft compares the hosting location of each site found by the Web Server Survey as indicated by the DNS with the equivalent information for the same site in the previous month. Analyzing this information presents a unique bird’s eye view of the hosting industry, identifying winners who are able to take sites from other hosting companies, and persuade people developing new sites to host those sites with them.