Late last year we embarked on our own ICANN accreditation and successfully completed it in March this year. Nothing prevented us from starting negotiations with the individual domain registries and start preparing everything technically.
Negotiations
We were in a very good position in the negotiations. The vast majority of registries even approached us first. We are the number one on the Czech market in terms of the number of registered domains and hosting and we are still growing. We are constantly working to improve our service and to be seen everywhere as much as possible.
Who wouldn’t want to work with someone with results like that 😉
It was these results that put us in a great position from which, after several weeks of negotiations full of dramatic twists and turns and sending “illustrative” photos, several very promising long-term cooperation agreements emerged. We didn’t get bribed with quick money, promises and bonuses. On the contrary, we have won unique conditions that no one else has. And we’re proud of it, we’re just never allowed to talk about it 🙂
You – our customers – will benefit the most from our efforts. This has been our primary goal from the beginning. You can look forward not only to the best prices in the long term, but also to a lot of advertising and promotions. We have shown registries how we compete for cars, laptops, apple phones, etc., what kind of promotional items we do and how they can benefit from it. We have the numbers to fall back on. A lot of them really liked it.
Hyundai i10 Skoda Rapid
We are expecting similar and new events, where the only thing that will be enough to purchase or renew is one of our services or domains. Of course, the conditions may be different for different events. But we would love it if these contests were such a bonus just for having our services 🙂
Phase 1. – Test operation
While negotiations were still ongoing, our developers told us that they were ready for a small test run. We managed to get everything done by September 16, 2020, which is the day the free registration of .gay domain was launched.
We quickly finished a few business things and at 18:00 we started the registration. The .gay domain had passed the registration period for trademark holders and pre-registration. In total, just under 500 domains were registered. Of the Czech words, just about everything we tried was free.
Since we didn’t want to push too much for test traffic, we opted for just a small social media promotion(Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). The Facebook algorithm liked our post. From the start, it had many times the reach and number of interactions than our regular posts. This raised the reach beyond our fans to people who felt the need to “advertise for us” 🙂 At one point we even had so much traffic on the domain page that our average speed for that page dropped to 2 seconds.
Within 24 hours of the launch, we registered several dozen .gay domains and units of other domains we have on offer.
In the following days, we gradually added another batch of new endings and started to gradually edit the site. We are already trying out special prices for the first year.
Yesterday 21. 9. 2020, i.e. 5 days after the launch, we have surpassed the first 100 registered new domains.
Phase 2. – stable offer
The next phase that is yet to come is a stable supply. Not all contracts have been signed yet. We have chosen a few domains to focus on and so far we don’t have them all on the terms we would like.
As an accredited registrar, some of our costs have increased. Domains will also have to be handled by more people. We are also concerned about exchange rate risk, higher transaction costs and more fraud. We’ll have to factor all that into the price.
If all goes according to plan, these risks will only be factored into the cost of registering and re-registering the domain. Ironically, we may be the first company to have some registrations more expensive than domain renewals 🙂
Even so, we believe we will end up being the cheapest as always, whether you have one domain with us or you want to register, renew and manage thousands of domains for your clients(we have WAPI and full automation for sub-registrars).
At this stage, we will also gradually start to roll out individual actions. We have several kinds of them ready. Some of it will require adjustments to our system, so it won’t be right away.
Phase 3. – promotion
Of course, we can’t just sell new domain extensions without proper promotion. Unlike most of our competitors who only have them on offer because there are nice margins on them ;,) we’ve been actively using them for a long time.
- wedos.online – Our monitoring of website availability, functionality and correct settings, DNS, blacklists and many other things 🙂
- wedos.website – Our online website builder that can help anyone create a website.
- wedos.hosting – On this domain, or subdomain status.wedos.hosting, you will find the output from our monitoring and automatic problem detection.
We have tried them out to see what their pros and cons are. If we are going to recommend them to you, it is from our own experience.
The third phase of promotion will include pages presenting the selected domain extensions and if everything goes according to plan, you will have the opportunity as our customer to send us your successful project on these selected new domains and we will add them to the successful references. You will be able to be pioneers in the Czech Republic.
I’m sure it will also be used for promotions and promotional items. For new domains, we are in a different position. Moreover, new domain registries are much more accessible for this kind of promotion. They want to achieve the best possible numbers in a highly competitive environment.
And what’s next
Over the last two months, many of us have spent a lot of time on domains. It’s not so easy to be an ICANN accredited registrar. The conditions are strict and the demands are high, which only pushes us forward 🙂
In order to prepare everything, we also did market research, looked at statistics and the requirements of our customers. They interviewed colleagues from customer support “What domain holders want” and found out that we still have quite a few gaps in domains, what we could offer.
We are gradually working it out for developers and commercially. We are preparing a comprehensive list of services, tasks we can help with and other domain enhancements. For example, hiding personal data in whois, assisted domain transfer, including the analogy of notary escrow and securing contractual documents, domain protection, etc. It’s a lot and we’ll be rolling it out gradually.