The report added domain name registrations increased by 4.3 million or 1.2% year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of 174.4 million domain name registrations in the domain name base at the end of the second quarter of 2023, a decrease of 0.3 million domain name registrations, or 0.2%, compared to the first quarter of 2023.

The .com and .net TLDs had a combined increase of 0.1 million domain name registrations, or 0.1% year over year. As of 30 June 2023, the .com domain name base totalled 161.3 million domain name registrations and the .net domain name base totalled 13.1 million domain name registrations.

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New .com and .net domain name registrations totalled 10.2 million at the end of the second quarter of 2023, compared to 10.1 million domain name registrations at the end of the second quarter of 2022.

Total country-code TLD (ccTLD) domain name registrations were 137 million at the end of the second quarter of 2023, an increase of 1.1 million domain name registrations, or 0.8%, compared to the first quarter of 2023.

ccTLDs increased by 2.7 million domain name registrations, or 2.0%, year over year. The top 10 ccTLDs, as of June 30, 2023, were .cn, .de, .uk, .nl, .ru, .br, .au, .fr, .eu, and .it.

Kenn Anthony Mendoza

Peakhour offers a global content delivery network (CDN) along with website acceleration, cloud security and other services.

Thanks to Peakhour's CDN+ service, Kitchen Warehouse's website now runs nearly 80% faster, and is protected from many thousands of cyberattacks each day.

This contributed to the retailer's ability to cope with more than double the amount of online business during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

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Kitchen Warehouse uses US-hosted NetSuite for its e-commerce site, and web page load times were approaching 10 seconds. The company tried using Cloudflare, but "While we were able to get page load times down to around six seconds, our goals were loftier," said Kitchen Warehouse technology consultant Luke Matthews.

A switch to Peakhour's CDN+ gave immediate performance improvements.

Approximately 85% of traffic was served directly from Peakhour's global cache, reducing page load times to three seconds and removing more than 1.5TB of traffic from Kitchen Warehouse's network.

Furthermore, Peakhour blocks around 10,000 cyber-attacks each day.

"Our online business accounts for around 50 per cent of our total revenue, and every month since COVID has been bigger than Christmas and Black Friday in previous years," said Matthews.

"Suddenly we were seeing unprecedented monthly web traffic with pageviews in excess of six million and orders up over 150 per cent year on year. We have an ageing e-commerce platform which never would have been able to withstand the sudden influx of traffic during the pandemic, if it wasn't for Peakhour's CDN+ solution."

He added "The results achieved with Peakhour directly reflect the care and attention its team took to understand our IT environment, our technical and business challenges, and our performance goals."

The importance of rapid page loading is highlighted by research by Deloitte and Google that found an improvement of just 0.1s resulted in a 10% increase in spending, and 8% greater user engagement on product pages.

Load time is one of the signals used by Google to determine search results, and the increased speed of Kitchen Warehouse's site has led to an improvement in the company's ranking.

Part of the speed improvement came from Peakhour's ability to block bot traffic. As much as 60% of Kitchen Warehouse's web traffic was previously generated by bots that exist only to scrape pricing data for the benefit of competing retailers.

"As the COVID pandemic spread across the globe, everyone was locked down and global internet traffic grew exponentially. Almost all business shifted online, and retail traffic went through the roof," said Peakhour co-founder Adam Cassar.

"Like many other businesses, Kitchen Warehouse had to close their physical stores but by using our service, they were able to not only survive, but thrive during the COVID era."

Brisbane is the third office that has been opened outside the US, following the first in London in 2015 and a second in Limerick, Ireland, last year.

WP Engine hosts more than half a million WordPress sites across 130 countries It has more than 70,000 customers ranging from individuals and start-ups to multinational corporations and global agencies.

Some well-known names that use WP Engine are AMD, Bauer Media, Brickworks, Carsales.com.au, Casella Family Brands, , Elephant Room, iSelect, Metcash, New Relic, Penguin Random House Australia, Under Armour and XERO.

{loadposition sam08}“Today, we are embarking on an exciting new chapter in WP Engine’s international expansion,“ said Mary Ellen Dugan, the company's chief marketing officer.

WP Engine ANZ chief Mark Randall (extreme left) with his team.

“Brisbane is the perfect place for us to continue to build out our global footprint and be closer to our customers. We are energised by the opportunity to partner with the community, government and business leaders to build local talent and advance the local tech ecosystem.”

WP Engine Australia expects to quadruple its employees from 5 to 20 people and customers from roughly 3000 to more than 12,000 in the next three years.

WP Engine's Brisbane office which is located at River City Labs.

The company has its headquarters in Austin, Texas, and also has offices in San Francisco and San Antonio.

Photos: courtesy WP Engine

GoDaddy is the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small independent business. It has launched a website builder that allows those 71% of small-and-micro-businesses to have a basic site up and running in a few minutes.

The website builder is the result of extensive research into small business, many of which employ one person who is managing director, sales/marketing, chief cook and bottle washer. The website builder requires no knowledge of HTML or programming.

It is almost “wizard driven” from a smartphone. Type in your name and details, what you do, and it will bring up suggested templated containing a huge library of royalty-free photo and fonts. After setting up a basic site, it will recommend a domain name as well if one does not own one.

{loadposition ray}At a demonstration today, Andrew Low Ah Kee, executive vice-president international, asked the audience to nominate a business they would like to run. Childcare was selected and within a few minutes, a credible site was up and running.

One can easily add search engine optimisation, email marketing, e-commerce and other features.

The sites are fully responsive and format for mobile or desktop

Tara Commerford, managing director, Australia and New Zealand, said, “GoDaddy’s new Website Builder marks an exciting new era of smart website creation and management for Australian entrepreneurs and small businesses by giving them real control of their digital identities.

"This new approach is unique as it helps customers reach their audiences and drive strong business results and customer insights, all from the convenience of their mobile phone.”

Present was a “typical” small business owner, Shaan Tahu, chief executive of ICU Signage Solutions. He said, “As a small business owner my time is precious, and while I knew I needed to improve my online footprint, it felt like a daunting task.

"With Website Builder, I could create a great looking website in less than an hour that suited my business perfectly. As many of my customers are also on the go, I like that it’s mobile-friendly and integrated with my social pages so it can be viewed anywhere, anytime. Since launching my new website, I have seen more inquiries through the website and have received some great feedback too.”

Kee concluded, “As a global organisation, GoDaddy is passionate about empowering SMBs to manage their business needs. Small businesses see a website as a crucial tool for driving awareness for a brand, meaning Website Builder’s flexibility and the smart-learning system can help customers reach their audiences further supporting the thriving Australian SMB landscape.”

A notice released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Sunday said that all special cable and VPN services in China required prior government approval – a move effectively making consumer “cross-border” VPN service providers illegal. “China’s Internet connection service market ... has signs of ­disordered development that ­require urgent regulation and governance.”

The “clean-up” of the nation’s Internet connections would start immediately and run until 31 March 2018, the notice said.

The edict is part of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) clean-up, which regulates the Internet and acts as an online censorship office. Its existence reflects China’s realisation that the Internet can provide access to unfiltered media and the outside world. Its first crackdown was to insist that all Internet users be identified by full name, address etc.

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Greatfire.org, an organisation that monitors online censorship, says China currently blocks access to 173 out of the world’s top 1000 websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But more importantly are the 6993 blocked domains, 893 blocked Google-affiliated sites and 22,993 search terms. Not even Wikipedia escapes, with 876 references blocked.

Consequently, many Internet users have used VPN services to access blocked sites and services. But as China controls all outward connections to the Internet, it is easy to block access not only to the outside world but to identify encrypted content and the off-shore VPN servers to which they connect.

The CAC is not backwards in introducing tough rules to control cyberspace. It is now mandating that any website hosted in China has a .cn domain extension, regardless of whether it is a foreign company or not. That allows it to easily block the rest of the world, while leaving China’s Internet alone.

It has also forced local app stores to register and agree to government censorship of the apps they can serve. China has more than 650 million registered Internet users and its app stores are larger than many global ones.

The deal will see the Sydney-based company merge with Crucial but each company will continue to trade separately under their own brands.

In a statement today, Digital Pacific said the merger brings together two customer-focused, high performance hosting companies, generating significant benefits for the customers of both businesses.

Digital Pacific Founder and CEO, Andrew Koloadin, said the announcement is great news for the Australian hosting market. “Our team is very excited for the two businesses to come together. Our stories are quite similar, both starting in small Bondi apartments over 12 years ago growing to the established brands we are today. This has fostered very similar, customer-focused cultures at both organisations.”

{loadposition peter}Koloadin said both businesses entered the Australian market at similar times, starting with a few servers in their bedrooms and now, combined, the two businesses has 70 employees and many years of experience and strong leadership teams firmly establishing themselves as leading service providers in the Australian hosting market.

He said the two businesses, under the Digital Pacific leadership plan to continue to grow within the Australian hosting market.

CEO of Crucial, David Murray, said he is looking forward to joining the Digital Pacific team. “Digital Pacific is one of the oldest and most respected hosting companies in Australia. The standard its team sets for the community is exceptional, and the Crucial team has a similar culture and ethos.  

“I am looking forward to our teams combining. It will present a great opportunity for our customers with additional resources, fantastic support and high performance infrastructure.”

Koloadin said there are no planned changes to operations and both businesses will continue to operate without disruption to both Crucial and Digital Pacific customers.

Noction Intelligent Routing Platform is used to make routing decisions based on real-time network performance data across multiple IP network connections, automatically optimising routes over multiple internet transit providers to achieve major improvements in latency and packet loss, resulting in higher quality of service.

Digital Pacific operates services in five data centres around the globe, with primary services hosted in Sydney, and redundant infrastructure services in other locations.

Digital Pacific founder Andrew Koloadin said that within the first month of deploying Noction IRP, the company achieved an average of 22% reduction in network latency and 90% improvement in packet loss for almost a quarter of its total traffic volume.

{loadposition peter}"Over the past few years our network has grown at a phenomenal rate and we are always looking for ways to ensure our network performance is optimal.

“The best networking hardware alone is not good enough to maintain a reliable network as there can be issues with routes that are out of our control. Noction’s Intelligent Routing Platform (IRP) allows us to select the best route possible from our bandwidth providers, maintaining our high standards and ultimately keeping our customers happy."

Digital Pacific says the Noction real-time internet route optimisation platform, with its built-in reporting, enables easy comparisons between the company’s pool of transit providers “which gives it valuable information to consider when transit contracts are up for renewal.

According to Digital Pacific’s network engineer, Shane Goulden, - beside performance enhancement, Noction IRP generates massive cost savings by intelligently leveraging traffic across the available providers.

“With transit pricing in Australia being one of the most expensive in the world, Noction’s Commit Control feature allows us to utilise each provider as cost-effectively as possible while still maintaining the best routes possible out of our network.

As a result, says Roshan K. Thomas of Chennai, India, his products are now no longer visible on the web and he will have to arrange for a domain name similar to that which expired — orangepale.com — before he can go online again.

But Melbourne IT denies it is in any way responsible, with the company's chief customer officer Brett Fenton telling iTWire: "We dispute the customer’s claim that he was not given prior notice of expiry of his domain name or that we failed to contact him through the attempted renewal process."

Thomas, whose company also manufactures speaker systems that utilise a technology called ACE (Audio & Control over Ethernet) that solves the problem of reverberation in big auditoriums, said he had first registered orangepale.com in 2007, through Yahoo! which was acting as a reseller for Melbourne IT.

{loadposition sam08}"The first renewal, in 2009, took place as it should," he said. "But in 2011, it was a different story. We only received a notice about renewal on December 19, even though the expiry date was December 5. The email sent to us said that it would be deactivated on December 22."

The email said: "As a result of this pending deactivation, your domain is no longer managed by our reseller Yahoo Inc., and is directly managed by us."

Thomas (seen in his office in Chennai below) said he had then renewed the domain for a year. After that when it fell due for renewal in 2012, he renewed it for two years, until almost the end of 2014. And he was planning to keep renewing it, but having received no information about the date of renewal, he forgot about it and then had the domain swept out from under his feet.

Melbourne IT's Fenton said orangepale.com was part of Melbourne IT's auto-renewal program. "This means that we send a number of notices before we try and renew the domain in a simple hassle-free process on behalf of the client," he said. "Most of our clients value this program as it's one less thing they have to worry about in managing their online presence."

He said company records indicated that two notices had been sent to the customer in October 2014 advising that the domain name was about to expire and stating that renewal of the domain would be attempted on their behalf.

Thomas cast doubts on this, questioning how he had received emails from the company in 2011 and not in 2014. "I presume that there is only one Melbourne IT in Australia?" he asked.

Fenton added: "In November we attempted to renew the domain, however the credit card transaction was declined. We notified the customer of this via email within 72 hours, and outlined the next steps they needed to take to renew their domain name. At this stage there was still approximately one month before the domain expired.

"In situations like this, the most common issue is that the customers’ credit card details on file are out of date; for example, the card may have expired. We invite customers to update the details and our process then tries to complete auto-renewal a week before expiry. We tried to process payment and renew the domain three times in late November, however these were all declined and the domain wasn't renewed."

Thomas said this was ludicrous. "We never allow our credit card details to be stored online – that is something I have never done and never will," he said. "I have been on the net far too long to do something foolish like that. How then did these good folk obtain credit card details to try and renew our domain?"

Fenton said the company had then sent a final notice when the domain expired in early December, "to let them know the domain had expired and advising that they should act quickly if he still wished to renew his domain name. At this time the global .com registry removes the domain from global DNS meaning that all services on the domain such as emails and website would stop working."

He said at this time the domain was in the normal deletion cycle as mandated by ICANN, the global domain authority.

"A customer has 45 days to renew the domain in the standard way from the date that the domain expires. After this initial period passes, if the domain hasn't been renewed the domain enters the 'redemption grace period' (RGP). The RGP lasts for 30 days during which the customer can renew the domain, however it is a manual process for the Registrar, and there is an additional fee that is paid to the Registry during renewal."

In order to obtain the domain now, Thomas will have to pay a fee of $155, which Fenton said went mostly to VeriSign. He said the fee was $US100 and the balance was administration costs. Asked whether the original owner would have any preference when it came to re-selling the domain, he said it was a case of first come, first served.

Fenton did not comment when asked whether these issues had anything to do with the problems which have been dogging Melbourne IT recently. The company has faced both software and hardware problems.

Thomas said he did not want to have anything more to do with Melbourne IT. "They seem to be the most expensive domain registrar around and the service they offer is not commensurate with that," he said. "Additionally, they often seem to be in the news for reasons that should not be talked about with regard to a domain registrar."

He was referring to incidents in 2005 and 2013. Ten years ago, the domain name of Panix, the oldest commercial ISP in New York, was hijacked from Melbourne IT which was hosting it. And more recently, the Melbourne IT website came under attack from a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army; as that time, iTWire's senior associate editor Graeme Philipson reported that some security analysts had criticised the company for not having more secure systems, with no system in place to automatically lock access to its DNS registry, relying instead on its customers to implement such a system.

There's an obvious connection between web hosting and domain registration: if you have a web site, you need a domain name.

So it comes as no surprise that Crucial has chosen to acquire domain registration and hosting business AVS Networks.

AVS customers will be migrated to Crucial's platform this month, which will provide them with better availability and speed, a Crucial spokesperson said.

{loadposition stephen08}AVS CEO and founder Nigel Burke will join Crucial, but there was no indication that other staff will go with him.

"Nigel brings a huge amount of capability to the Crucial team, having achieved a great deal in his 17 years at AVS," said Kruizinga.

"His experience will be invaluable to us as we push forward in 2015."

Burke said "Crucial sets an excellent standard for quality Australian hosting, with a similar culture and ethos to AVS.

"The acquisition will benefit AVS customers with added resources, fantastic support and high performance infrastructure - it's a win-win."

Coopers, Australia’s largest locally owned brewer, says online traffic has increased, with its DIY Beer online store, which supplies brewing products Australia wide, experiencing an increase of 53% since this time last year.

“Diybeer.com gives brewers a chance to access the entire Coopers DIY Beer Product range directly, even if they live rurally and don’t have a major shopping centre or brewing specialist store nearby,” said Scott Harris, Marketing Manager for Coopers DIY Beer.

“We need a reliable hosting company that can successfully reach this target market, as well as manage the increase in traffic and any website niggles – challenges that we have faced in the past. Hostworks works with big-name websites already and as another local company, they were even more appealing.”

{loadposition peter}Hostworks CEO Will Berryman said the company is working behind the scenes on all Coopers' websites.

“Hostworks is honoured to be chosen by Coopers’ to support this iconic Australian brand in facilitating 53% increase in traffic the site has experienced since 2014.

“As an Adelaide born and bred company ourselves, this kind of partnership makes us very proud to be South Australian. Coopers are in an exciting and independent stage of their business journey, supporting them to host the only major DIY Beer website in Australia is something we are privileged to be a part of.”

Berryman says Hostworks works for the leading online media companies including Ticketek, Carsales, SBS, Event Cinemas and Rydges Hotels.