The united company Ru-Center and Reg.ru announced the peak of domain transfers in the .ru zone

The number of domains transferred to the Russian registrars Ru-Center and Reg.ru at the end of 2023 exceeded the peak value since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. The company attributes this to the departure of the world’s largest registrar GoDaddy and the tightening of the rules for hosting providers in the Russian Federation. Russian hosters confirm the growth in the number of new clients. Hetzner will stop working in the country in February, which may prompt a new redistribution of domains. Experts believe these changes could lead to a restructuring of the market as a whole, including “a flurry of mergers and acquisitions.”

The combined company Ru-Center and Reg.ru (together manage 67% of domains in the .ru zone) in December 2023 processed twice as many applications for the transfer of domains previously placed with other registrars than in December 2022, Kommersant was told in companies. In general, hosters accepted more than 8 thousand domains in a month. This is more than the peak reached immediately after the start of Russian military operations in Ukraine: in March 2022, 6,450 domains were transferred to hosters.

About 1 thousand applications for domain transfers were received from clients of the American registrar GoDaddy, the largest in terms of the number of administered domains in the world (more than 84 million). In mid-December, the company announced that it would stop serving customers from Russia as of January 1. Two-thirds of applications for domain transfers serviced through GoDaddy came from individuals, the rest from legal entities, Ru-Сenter and Reg.ru clarified to Kommersant.

GoDaddy, which also provides hosting services, announced its withdrawal from Russia amid expanding requirements for hosting providers: from February 1, only those companies that have joined the register formed by Roskomnadzor can operate in the country. Advocacy group Access Now called GoDaddy’s decision “a pure example of overcompliance (excessive compliance with regulatory requirements.” “Kommersant”)”.

In March 2022, the Namecheap registrar did a similar thing: then it gave clients a month to transfer domains and sites to other registrars. In February 2024, based on official announcements, hosting provider Hetzner will stop working with clients from Russia.

It was the new requirements for hosters operating in the Russian Federation that contributed to the increase in domain transfer activity at the end of the year, say Ru-Center and Reg.ru: “Clients of departing hosting companies are transferring all their Internet assets to the Russian registrar.”

The CEO of the hosting provider RUVDS, Nikita Tsaplin, confirmed that the company observed an increase in clients at the end of the year: “But it’s difficult to call it big. This is natural: the clients of hosters who left Russia are distributed evenly among Russian companies, and there is no need to talk about any one “winner” here.” Beget, which has the third largest share of domains within the .ru zone (6.5%), did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

Russians used GoDaddy services mainly to register gTLD domains like .com, .net, etc., says Karen Kazaryan, CEO of the Internet Research Institute: “Some clients probably transferred them to other foreign registrars or re-registered them to other persons.”

Domains in the .ru and .рф zones, previously administered through GoDaddy, are not counted as transferred to another registrar, explains domain investor Pavel Gross-Dneprov: “GoDaddy registered Russian domains through Ru-Center and was, in fact, a reseller of the latter. After GoDaddy left, domain owners began managing them from the Ru-Center account, where they had always been located.”

Owners of Internet assets, according to Mr. Gross-Dneprov, “seem to be safer buying hosting in the same place where they keep the domain.” Because of this, Ru-Center, in his opinion, significantly increased sales of hosting services. In the future, as Mr. Tsaplin adds, “it is possible that the market will face a series of mergers and acquisitions – the departure of Western players and new regulatory mechanisms will stimulate its redistribution.”

GoDaddy’s status as the world’s largest registrar could influence the dynamics of domain transfers, a Kommersant source in the telecommunications market believes: “Perhaps clients from the Russian Federation who use the services of other foreign registrars expected them to do the same.”

Yuri Litvinenko