The Domain Name and Hosting Market in 2009: Dynamic Growth, DDoS, Preparation for .UKR, Government Intervention

2009 was a challenging year for the Ukrainian internet domain industry, as was the country's economy. However, the economic crisis did not significantly hinder user activity, and domain registrars saw subscriber growth. In 2009, ICANN permitted the use of Cyrillic letters in domains, leading to lobbying for the launch of the .УКР domain. Furthermore, 2009 was marked by several major DDoS attacks on leading Ukrainian companies.

New services and company news

In the spring of 2009, the companyOnline Servicebeginningregistrationfree domain names in the zone.PP.UAFor the first time in Ukraine, free SMS confirmation was used for registration. In the first month since the launch of registration in this domain zone,registeredMore than 6,000 domain names. By the end of the year, the .PP.UA domain had almost 30,000 domain names. As a result, the .PP.UA domain became one of the fastest-growing domains in Ukraine in 2009. The domain administrator's announcement that the domain would remain free in the future also played a significant role in its growth.

This summer, the company Imena/MiroHostlaunchedGigaHost is a new hosting project. Its main distinguishing feature is its affordability: without phone support, hosting costs with this company are lower than the market average.

In April, the company Imena/MiroHostlaunchedThe domain parking service Parking.ua is a project designed for users who have a domain but don't yet have a website.

Both of these services were headed by Roman Ilyichev, who previously worked as the director of a hosting providerHosted, owned by the company "Service Online." It was with Roman Ilyichev's involvement at Service Online that the launch of "Ukrainian Domain Name Parking" was planned, based on the NIC.UA/HOSTED.UA projects. This indicates that the transfer to a competitor and the disclosure of commercial information was a premeditated, dishonest move.

Domain development conceptUA

In 2009, the Association of Ukraine (InAU) submitteddiscussiona new version of the document "Concept for the Development of the .UA Domain." Market participants,commentingThe document's new provisions stated that changes to the domain have become a requirement of the times, but that new rules must be introduced very carefully, so as not to harm either companies operating in the domain name registration market or users.

Domain .UA and the state

For several years now, the Ukrainian government has been seeking to control the .UA domain—to take it from a private individual, Dmytro Kokhmanyuk, who administers it. In early December, Ukraine submitted an application to the Internet Canal Network (ICANN), the global organization for assigning domain names. The letter was signed on behalf of the Ukrainian Network Information Center (UNIC), founded by the Cabinet of Ministers. Market participants have reacted differently to the government's proposal: transferring the domain to a government agency risks increasing censorship. Commenting on the government's attempt, Dmytro KokhmanyukreportedThe following: "I don't quite understand the goals USIC is pursuing, nor whose interests this is serving. If the stated goal were to improve the quality of domain performance and lower service prices, then that would be understandable. But when the goal is stated as 'we'll take it for ourselves, and then everything will be fine,' I don't think that's constructive. I don't rule out that USIC is planning to monopolize this market."

International domain names: Cyrillic domains.

In November, UkrainefiledThe Ukrainian Network Information Center (UNIC) has applied to ICANN to register the .УКР domain extension, which will allow the creation of websites with addresses in both Ukrainian and Russian. The application was submitted to ICANN. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Internet users and website owners aren't particularly enthusiastic about the idea of ​​Cyrillic domain names. The RuNet, which has already begun registering for the .РФ domain extension, is currently facing various problems, including those related to cybersquatting.

Litigation

In 2009, GooglewonThe court of first instance ruled against Oleg Bogatov, owner of the google.ua domain. Ukraine is one of the few countries where Google does not own a top-level domain. Currently, when visiting the google.ua page, visitors are redirected to the dating site kohaymos.com. The Whois domain registration system indicates that kohaymos.com is registered to a certain Oleg Bogatov. Bogatov is currently appealing this decision, so it's too early to speak of Google's final victory over Ukrainian cybersquatters.

In November, Service Online withdrew its lawsuit against Trifle, the administrator of the Dnipropetrovsk .DP.UA domain, which had unreasonably raised domain support prices in 2009 and pegged domain prices to the euro. The case against Trifle is still pending before the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine. The claims against Trifle concerned the registrar payment procedure, which had become less transparent to market participants.

DDOS attacks

In 2009, Uanet leaders experienced several major DDOS attacks. At the end of August, an attacksurvivedImena/MiroHost infrastructure – at the peak of the attack, the servers were experiencing a load of over 2 Gbps. Ukrainian websites were attacked by the Zeus botnet, whose physical servers are located in China. Imena/MiroHost CEO Alexander Olshansky noted that attacks on providers and website owners will only increase in the near future. Olshansky's prediction has already begun to come true this year.

At the end of November, a DDOS attackwas subjected toService Online. During peak loads, traffic to the company's servers exceeded 300 megabits per second. During the attack, domain name registration, change, and renewal requests were suspended for several hours, but the company managed to ensure uninterrupted processing of all DNS requests.

Just a month later, in the last week of December, the payment system was subjected to an even larger attack.LiqPay– a project of the Ukrainian PrivatBank. LiqPay's servers were unable to handle requests, forcing the project administration to turn to Amazon, the world's largest cloud hosting service. Even Amazon's Anycast DNS server system couldn't handle all the requests to LiqPay, and users reported problems accessing the website and online banking.

Law 404

This year, the state has made several attempts to assert its rights over the internet and its users' actions. The infamous "Law 404" is ostensibly aimed at combating child pornography. However, a closer look reveals that this is, in fact, blatant censorship. The law allowed Ukrainian ISPs to restrict access to any internet resources, while requiring ISPs to record all user activity and report any illegal activity by their clients to law enforcement. Users, in turn, were required to report any illegal content (information content) they encountered online, including child pornography, to law enforcement. During the second reading, some particularly controversial provisions were removed from the law, but overall, the bill remained too odious and controversial from both a common-sense and legal perspective.

Conferences and events

This September, the Slovenian city of Bled will hostThe Second International Conference of Administrators and Registrars of National Top-Level Domains of the CIS, Central and Eastern Europe. In the conferencetook partRepresentatives of the company "Service Online", and its director Andrey Khvetkevich gave a report "Identification of users using SMS service", in which he described the experience of implementing SMS user identification, which is used when registering domains in the PP.UA zone.

In December, Hostmaster held a seminar for Ukrainian domain name registrars. The goal of the seminar was not only to discuss current issues in the Ukrainian domain business but also to unite Ukrainian registrars and initiate a dialogue between the administrator and registrars. Representatives from over 30 companies—official registrars of Ukraine—attended the seminar.

The seminar presented the results of marketing research by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), based on indicators from more than 20 ccTLDs.

Registrar statistics

Internet edition ProITbegan regularly publishing ratings of Ukrainian registrars based on the company's statisticsHostmasterAs of November 2009, the number of Ukrainian domains reached 476,864.

The top 5 Ukrainian registrars based on the results of 2009 are as follows:

1. "Internet Invest (trademark Imena)

2. LLC "Service Online" (Registrar NIC.UA)

3. LLC "Elaid Standard Limited" (trademark Iname)

4. Hostpro LLC (Hosting provider Hostpro.ua)

5. LLC "DNS-Ukraine" (ua.dns)

As a result, NIC.UA confidently entered the Top 5 of the leading companies, and the hosting provider Hostpro displaced DNS-Ukraine LLC to 5th place.

In 2008, the Iname registrar was in second place, and DNS-Ukraine (ua.dns) was in third place.