February 2012 marked the end of the period of removal of vacated domains in zone .РФ, which were registered in November-December 2010 and not extended by their administrators after a year upon registration. The fall in the overall number of registered domains accounted for 18%, which proved significantly less than experts had predicted. In October-November 2011, many leading experts believed that the “exodus” of domain names in domain .РФ would hit 25-30% by the end of 2011.
Since the launch of the open registration, domain .РФ reached its peak on 28 December 2011 when it hit a mark of 954,012 registered domain names, followed by a decline due to removal of domain names registered in the first two months of the open registration period and not renewed on time.
That said, a significant number of domains were reregistered straight away after being removed while new registrations were well in progress. During the period of removal of vacated domains, domain .РФ hit its record low of 779,264 registered domain names on 15 February 2012. As a result, the gap between the peak and the bottom extremes of the IDN TLD for Russia made up 174,748 domain names, or 18%.
To date, domain .РФ boasts 783,832 registered domain names. Now domain names growth rate has flattened out. One can compare the number of domain names in zone .РФ in 2011 and in 2012: on 1 March 2011 zone .РФ hit a mark of 769,185 domain names, and on 1 March 2012 – 783,832 domain names.
Moreover, throughout 2011 zone .РФ posted a steady increase in the number of delegated domain names: from 50.56% on 1 January 2011 to 70.28% on 1 January 2012. And this number is growing – today 70.76% of domain names have been delegated. Judging by the growth rate of delegated domains in zone .РФ, we should also expect an increase in the number of hostings of sites in zone .РФ.
All data are available on the website http://statdom.ru/.
