EurID, the .EU (European Union) Registry operator, just reported a great July for new registrations with a total of 66,129 new .EU domains registered. That’s up 15% from July 2008 and is a 12-month high for the Registry.

EURid also reported strong a strong renewal rate of 81%, higher than the industry norm and a good indication that buyers are using and holding on to .EU domains. For more on .EU, you should take a look at Heather’s .EU profile in the “Registries” series.

ccTLDs Looking Strong

It’s not just .EU, either. We’re continuing to see some nice growth amongst ccTLDs (Country-code Top-Level Domains) and while many Resellers are already selling ccTLDs in addition to COM/NET/ORG, some are not. There’s lots of opportunity here for sales, either for individuals or business looking to identify with a country or region, or as an add-on in addition to a .COM domain. Make sure you’re offering ccTLDs both ways.

For example, a Canadian-based webhost should be offering the .CA (Canada) when it’s available (either as the first result, or as an add-on option). Same goes for other countries and regions. You’d be surprised how many people will take the ccTLD instead of the .COM, or even in addition to the .COM when you present them with the option.

Worldwide, .CN (China) and .DE (Germany) continue to battle it out for top spot amongst ccTLDs. .DE recently retook the lead from .CN. Rounding out the top five according to the VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief are .UK (United Kingdom), .NL (Netherlands) and .EU.

We’ve mentioned that VeriSign report in the past, but it bears repeating here: it’s must read material for anyone in the domain industry. There’s lots to learn there, specifically about stats and trends that can help you grow your business.

At HostingCon 2009 a few weeks back, Adam Eisner, our Director of Domain Services highlighted ccTLDs as one of his “20 Ways to Outsmart Your Competitors”. The slides for the presentation are available as a PDF download for those that missed it. Adam noted that the real growth in the domain industry is taking place in ccTLDs and web hosts who ignore the market are risking missing out.

We’re actively working on adding more ccTLDs to the list here at OpenSRS and we’ll have some news to report on that front in the next couple of months.

A full list of the various domains available through OpenSRS, including list pricing, is available here.