10 million reasons why .UK is a great place to be

This month the 10 millionth .UK web domain was registered, underlining the growth of the internet economy in the UK.

.co.uk is the go-to domain for businesses in the UK and has been growing strongly with around a million new registrations in the last year.

A .UK domain says you do business in the UK and 4 in 5 internet users prefer .UK results when searching on-line, a great indication of trust in the domain – it really has never been a better time to get your business on-line and .UK is great place for it to be.

To celebrate this milestone, the folks at .UK are giving away a new iPAD daily to one lucky person who registers or renews their .UK domain name between 28th March and 26th April 2012.

You can view Nominet promotion terms and conditions here.

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Web domains to get customised suffixes

As of last Thursday, companies and individuals were able to apply to customise their web address suffix. This means that rather than using the traditional .com, .co.uk or .net suffices, they can create their own suffices, e.g. .bbc, .bt, .london.

Such customised suffices have both benefits and disadvantages. On the plus side, if companies are able to provide memorable URLs to consumers, there will be a lesser need to spend larger sums of money on paid search advertising. Also, if companies have previously missed out on specific .com or .co. uk domains they would be now to use new and more memorable suffices, such as .web.

On the other hand, such applications for a new web address suffix do not come cheaply as companies will have to pay approximately £120,000 to apply, and the whole process from applying to finally getting the new suffix could take up to a year and a half. The high costs could be seen as too high for many SMEs and non-for-profit organisations. Additionally, such organisations may fear that cyber squatters may try to obtain such suffices in order to commit fraud.

Plum can already provide customers with low cost hosting services, including domain name hosting, domain name registration (co.uk, .ltd.uk, .gov.uk, .sch.uk, .ac.uk, .com), domain name renewal, and email hosting. If you would like more information or advice on Plum’s hosting services, please contact us via email or phone (01616223500).

Related links:

• · BBC - Web domains to get major overhaul with custom names
• · The Guardian - Generic top-level domain sale begins on web
• · The Telegraph - Radical web address shake-up begins

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