Twitter and the .ES ccTLD...

HEXONET has been using Twitter for a couple of years now and we are amazed to see the international scope of our followers. One of our recent followers hails from Spain. His name is Jaime Echeverry (Twitter handle: japersonal) and it turns out that he is the founder and operator of Spain's largest web hosting forum called CommunidadHosting. We have reached out to Jaime and he has kindly provided us with some of his thoughts and knowledge on Spain's country-code top-level domain .ES.  Before we start HEXONET wants to thank Jaime for his time and his valuable insights.

Quick Snapshot of the .ES ccTLD:

• Originally created in 1989, managed by Red.es since 2000
• There are currently 1,247,978 .ES domains registered
• Approximately 90% of .ES domains are registered directly under .ES (remaining 10% under second-level domains like .com.es etc)
• .ES and .COM are the main players in the Spanish domain market (.ES with approximately 47% and .COM with 40%)
• .ES was liberalized in 2005 meaning that anyone worldwide can now register a .ES domain
• .ES domains are also available in IDNs
• Apple is now using .ES as a link shortener.

.ES Domain Registration Growth:

Questions & Answers:

HEXONET: We noticed that you are using a .COM for your website Communidadhosting.com. And it looks like other domain name companies in Spain are also using .COM. For example, Nicline.com, Domibay.com, Domisfera.com and Dinahosting.com. Also, the 20 most popular sites in Spain nearly all use .COM. Is .COM the most popular domain extension in Spain? What are other popular domain extensions?

Jaime Echeverry: Dinahosting and Nicline are accredited with both ICANN and Red.es. Domibay provides a marketplace and escrow services for domain names, while Domisfera is one of the main blogs in Spanish dedicated to domain names. I believe .COM and .ES are the most predominant extensions in Spain with each having roughly the same number of registrations, depending on the information source. For instance, Webhosting.info counts 1,083,865 .COM domains as of November 2010. Red.es counts 1,257,239 .ES domains for the same period. With regards to popularity, again it also depends on the source. If you compare the Alexa ranking and the Netcraft Toolbar's rank, you will not necessarily obtain the same results. According to Netcraft, the second most popular site is Elmundo.es In Spain many popular sites choose to redirect their .ES domain to the .COM version. For instance, www.elpais.es and www.marca.es, or www.tuenti.es which is the number one in Netcraft's rank.

HEXONET: How active is the domainer market in Spain? I understand that a Domaining conference was recently held this past September in Valencia.

Jaime Echeverry: There are a couple of large players with Grupo ITnet being one of them. According to Webhosting.info, they manage close to 10,000 domains, although I bet the figure is larger as .ES domains are not counted there.

HEXONET: What are Spain's the most popular domain service and aftermarket companies?

Jaime Echeverry: Although I do not have access to the figures, I would guess that SEDO is the leader here. There are a handful of players including Domibay and Domobay.

HEXONET: What are some of the trends regarding the .ES ccTLD?

Jaime Echeverry: In my opinion, the .ES domain will continue to grow at a slow pace, at least during 2011 and perhaps into 2012. From December 2009 to December 2010 the total active domains count increased by just 3.32%, a little more than 40,000, reaching 1.247,978 domains according to the stats provided by Red.es.

HEXONET: What do you see as the challenges / obstacles for .ES moving forward?

Jaime Echeverry: The .ES registry will face quite a challenge with the upcoming new gTLDs, as many regions and cities in Spain are applying for their own TLD like .GAL, .EUS, .AND, .VAL and .MADRID. Although some registrants would like to keep both .ES and their own local gTLD, many would prefer the latter so we may end up with less .ES registrations. Hopefully, the team behind .ES is prepared to face this challenge and will continue to position .ES as one of the largest ccTLDs in the world.