Posted on by WEDOS

We have signed an agreement with the largest registry Donuts Inc. and we are significantly expanding our offer of new domain extensions

[gtranslate]

Donuts Inc. is the largest registry in terms of new domain extensions. In total, they take care of more than 240 nTLDs (over 4.6 million registered in total). Many of them are also popular among Czechs and Slovaks and are hosted by us. Now our customers can also transfer them to us.

We are going slowly and carefully on new domain extensions. There’s a lot of them. Although they have existed on the Czech and Slovak market for a long time, they are not well known yet. We did not want to overwhelm our customers with a plethora of offers. We knew that not only promotion would be needed, but also an accompanying campaign explaining what the new domain extensions are and why they can be a good alternative to popular and established extensions for customers’ websites.

Part of the whole process was to monitor how the domains are liked, whether websites are created on them, e-mail boxes, which services from our portfolio they are most often used for, what problems customers solve in connection with them and, of course, how they react to higher prices compared to the dominant .cz and .sk domains.

That’s why we started modestly last September, when we started registering new domain extensions. We tested everything for a few months with a limited number of new domain extensions. We found out what customers like, how to optimize the offer and adjust the promotion.

In December we evaluated the data and decided to gradually add more new domain extensions. At the same time, we made a plan which registries would be worth approaching, according to the domains they have on offer. Donuts was planned for later (second half of 2021), but the situation called for quick action…

We established cooperation with Donuts faster than we originally planned

In our offer we had .realty and .observer domains. They were there more out of curiosity, so we didn’t have many registered.

These domains went under the Donuts registry, which we didn’t have a contract with at the time, and we had to decide quickly what to do next. We didn’t receive the original warning in December 2020 and we didn’t receive another one until March 2021 stating that the deadline for transferring these 2 domains is the 30th. March 2021.

We tried to deal with Donuts directly and they told us that if we wanted to, we could get the whole process – becoming a registrar – sorted out quickly. There was nothing technically or legally preventing it. Because we are anICANN accredited registrar as of March 2020 , we can register domains directly without an intermediary and negotiate with registries directly.

Thanks to the automation, our own universal system that we manage and develop ourselves and the willingness of Donuts, we managed to get everything technically and legally done within 3 weeks, which was enough. Even 1. April our developers have already reported full integration of Donuts registry into our system, with the added bonus that we are waiting for the sales department to add prices for 230 new domain extensions to the price lists 🙂

Of course, this also required further modifications to our website. For example, our price list has grown and the classic Elementor price list blocks didn’t give us much more. So we had to switch to classic tables.

We are still planning to make some pages or a system to distribute individual new domain extensions for customers who are looking for thematic domains for their future website.

What new domain extensions we offer

There’s a lot of them. For example, the popular .live, .bike, .email, .agency, .life, .group, .digital, .guru or .zone. We will add more as Donuts launches them.

In this case, the priority was not to negotiate the best possible promotional prices. However, if Donuts takes any action on its domains, we will try to facilitate it for you.

Conclusion

We sweated a bit, but we are glad that it turned out this way. We have expanded our offer of new domain extensions and gained another important business partner.