Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

Work on starting online registration of websites on Azerbaijan's .az domain is in the final stage, Faiq Farmanov, executive director of the Intrans company, which registers web-pages on the national domain, told the local press on Tuesday. He added that launching online registration on .az is expected in the near future.

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 Web.

Software for remote registration was developed by Intrans, which was the project initiator and started implementation of the online registration system at the end of 2011.

After the project is launched, users will have a chance to place an order for a domain and pay the cost through Intrans.

Online registration will have positive effect on the domestic market, will be more convenient for Internet users in the country's regions and thus will enlarge the national segment of the network.

Legal regulations are the aspect that slows down the project's implementation. Domains are not provided to foreigners or foreign companies' representations based in Azerbaijan.

According to the WHOIS website, about 16,310 Internet resources are registered in Azerbaijan at present, which marks 24.5 growth in comparison with January 2011.

15,165 of them are the websites of the first level; the most popular domain of the second level is .com.az with 665 websites, and the third most popular domain is .edu.az with 156 Internet resources.

According to the world statistics, the total number of active domain names in the world as of January 6 is over 143 million. The most populated Internet domain is .com, which has up to 106 million Internet resources. The second most popular one is .net with 14.9 million names, and the third one is .org with up to 10.1 million websites.

The .az domain began operation in August 1993. The cost of registration on the domain is 20 manats ($25). Annual cost of technical support is of the same amount.