We are currently an accredited registrar of .CZ, .EU, .SK and .PL domains. We have been considering becoming an accredited registrar ourselves for other extensions for some time. We would be able to help our customers faster and better in many ways. It would also open up new marketing opportunities for us and of course better prices. We recently took the first big step – we started the ICANN accreditation process.
How it works now
Now when you buy a .com domain from us, our system sends the request to our business partner who is an accredited registrar. If nothing prevents the registration, they will register the domain and send a successful registration message to our system. It’s simple and straightforward, but…
Mistakes happen. Occasionally, an anomaly, just a non-standard condition, occurs and the problem needs to be solved manually. In some cases, the solution can take several working days on our partner’s side, which is not pleasant. If we had direct access to the registry, we could fix it ourselves, and we believe in many ways in minutes.
In addition, ICANN requires accredited registrars (our partner) to oversee and, where appropriate, verify the accuracy of the data. This leads to unpleasant situations where messages written in English are sent on our behalf to our customers’ email addresses. At first glance, they often look like phishing. Some customers ignore these emails, others urge our customer support. It costs everyone time and sometimes nerves. We would like to do all this ourselves and in the language our customers use. We can personalize the messages, link them to our knowledge base and significantly reduce the risk of someone having their domain blocked due to a misunderstanding.
At the moment we are completely dependent on the pricing policy of our business partner. And it is gradually getting more expensive. As you know, we register and renew domains at purchase prices, which we guarantee with a public promise. Unfortunately, when our business partner makes it more expensive, we have to make it more expensive too. If we are an accredited registrar, we will have the prices that the registry gives us, and in most cases the registry has the same prices for everyone. One unnecessary intermediate link that makes domains unnecessarily expensive for all of us will be removed.
Lately, our middlemen have also been having quite a few problems. There are more and more proles. These are personnel or technical problems. We even encountered an attempt to seize one domain (after expiration) (although it was against the rules, so it was returned).
But that’s not all
If we become an accredited registrar, we will gain a number of benefits that will mainly benefit you – our customers.
Finally, you will be able to transfer your domains to us. You won’t have to have them at a competitor, pay more than absolutely necessary and often it’s really a lot of extra money. All in one place. In addition, our system will monitor your domain for you.
We wrote above about the fact that we will be able to solve a number of technical problems. But there are also frequent legal problems. There is hardly a day that someone doesn’t “ask” us to shut down a website or even a domain. These are not requests from the police. These come about once a week and we only comply with those that the law requires us to. These are “requests” from individuals, lawyers, organisations, companies and often authorities, who do not forget to remind us how powerful and important they are. All these “requests” are urgent. Often nicely legally written and sometimes containing literally paragraphs of threats. However, they lack one important thing – they have no support in Czech law.
We always refer such people to the police or directly to the court. It is worth remembering that prosecutors are on non-stop alert and we know that they can issue a preliminary injunction within an hour if necessary. However, these are legitimate cases, not allegations that some website wrote bad things about local politicians and the like.
However, this is a matter of Czech law. Our business partner is not based in the Czech Republic, so it is governed by the laws of another country. We don’t exactly like that. We are very familiar with the laws here because we have to deal with them every week and we have been through everything. Although never say never lawmakers in the Czech Republic can be a nasty surprise🙂
If we become an accredited registrar, all disputes will be resolved in the Czech Republic – in Czech courts or arbitration (if the terms of the specific domain allow it).
Another big advantage for everyone is joint marketing campaigns. As the number one web host on the Czech market, we have a very good negotiating position. When one of the registries found out that we were working on accreditation, they immediately sent us a very nice offer of cooperation. We are currently cooperating with CZ.NIC, EURid and SK-NIC. Together we can come up with not only discount promotions, but also joint giveaways and competitions. Those who have been following us for a long time will remember the competitions for cars, 111 laptops or jerseys for sports clubs. We can organize similar events with anyone who wants to. It’s not only an advertisement for us, but also for the registry and we know you customers like it too 😉
So where are we with the accreditation now
In order to apply for accreditation with the individual registries that sell domains, we must first get accredited by ICANN, the organization that “oversees the Internet.” This process requires us to demonstrate that we are both technically and humanly capable of looking after our customers’ domains. With nearly 340,000 domains in our system, our DNS servers handling an average of 400 to 500 million requests per day, and customer and technical support taking care of over 533,000 active services, we dare say this will be a mere formality. We have been doing everything honestly and properly from the beginning, as evidenced by our ISO certifications, which we regularly have done.
We applied for ICANN accreditation in November 2019 and are now in probably the most important third phase of the eight. This phase is officially called “Detailed Review”, which indicates that ICANN is reviewing each point of the application in detail. A few points out of the dozens were returned to us for clarification due to their strict conditions. Additional answers will be sent during the weekend.
In the next phase we will have to obtain accreditation from the individual registries. We are already negotiating specific conditions with some of them, others are rather feeling us out with general information. We want to focus mainly on the domains that our customers use and then we have selected a few other interesting ones that we consider to be beneficial. In general, we don’t oppose anything. For example, we have successfully used .online or .cloud domains ourselves. We haven’t encountered any problems with them.
What else?
We’re just getting started. Our system is ready for all first order domains. We can host them and with a few modifications even register them. Now it will be mainly up to the sales department to even get the accreditations, conditions, price lists and texts on the web. And of course, come up with enticing events and competitions 😉
In the long term, we are still toying with the idea of maybe having our own first order domain in the future 🙂