National domain marks 20th anniversary
By Nigar Orujova
The Azerbaijani national domain .az is celebrating its 20th anniversary on August 23.
Baku hosted a conference dedicated to the date and joined by international experts, including heads and representatives of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and national domain administrators from Ukraine and Russia on the same day.
The .az domain began operating in August 1993. The cost of registration on the domain is 20 manats ($25). Annual cost of technical support costs the same amount.
Intrans, the first Internet service provider in Azerbaijan, was established in 1991 and is the first company in the country which started rendering high-quality services of Internet access. The company's website, www.az, was the first site on the national segment of the World Wide Web.
Azerbaijan was the second country in CIS -- next to Ukraine -- to have registered its national domain.
Intrans, the administrator of the .az domain, has established cooperation with 5 local and 7 foreign registrars.
At the same time, the company managed to carry out projects to implement a multilingual system on internationalized domain names (IDN), the creation of the unified national service system WHOIS, bringing the cost of registration and technical support to international standards, the launch of L-root DNS server in Azerbaijan, and the development of an automated system of the registration of domains.
As a result, some 20,000 domains have been registered in the national domain zone, with 39 percent (7,760 domains) accounting for various organizations and the rest for private individuals.
According to the WHOIS website, 16,899 sites registered in the national domain zone are of the top level. The most popular second-level domain is com.az, which includes 710 registered websites. The third most popular domain is edu.az with 167 sites.
Over the past ten years, the number of national domains increased almost fivefold, and there has been a rapid growth in the number of domains since 2009.
Next, the company plans to launch several services, including the service of sending SMS and e-mail notifications to users to prevent the occurrence of the loss of domains, activation of the WHOIS service via SMS, and the creation of a "personal office" for the owners of domain names, designed to manage their domains and notification settings and the system of "control domain time".