Russia’s ccTLD .RU has shown steady growth for two consecutive months, adding 31,936 domains in October. In September.RU topped the list of fastest growing ccTLDs with 22,207 newly registered domains, followed by .FR with 21,908 new domains and .DE with 21,346 domains. Registries with free domain registration are not included in the rating.
In addition, by the end of October, .RU once again crossed the 5 million threshold. The ccTLD reached 5 million registrations for the first time on November 5, 2015. The record of 5.5 million .RU domains was set in March 2017, followed by a slow decline, primarily due to increased .RU and .РФ fees for accredited registrars in July 2017.
At the time, many experts predicted a 15-20 percent (and even a 40-50 percent) decrease in the number of Russian domains, which did not happen. .RU showed a decline of less than 10 percent and eventually stabilized and then continued to grow.
“Five million domains in .RU is an important mental threshold that we have been waiting for. In the past four years, the situation has completely stabilized and now we know that the decline was caused by a shrinking domain investor portfolio. In 2017, we had more than 40,000 registrants managing 11 to 50,000 domain names. Today, this number is closer to 33,500 registrants,” commented Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev.
.RU is currently the sixth largest ccTLD and the tenth largest TLD in the world. Almost 97 percent of .RU domains are delegated; 22 percent are registered by legal entities and 78 percent by individuals. Websites are active on 63 percent of domains while 5 percent of domains are redirecting to other websites.
.RU was assigned to Russia by ICANN on April 7, 1994. The ccTLD reached its first million in 2007, doubling in size only 18 months later and reaching 3 million by September 2010. In September 2021, the ccTLD had 4 million registered domains.
