We just got back from Hosting Talk Global in Turkey and it was a great experience being at the event for the 2nd year in a row! Spread over two days in Istanbul, the event had an excellent line up of 30 speakers. Those who attended the event as participants were thus able to gather new ideas about the hosting industry, attend workshops conducted by experts, and grow their network.  What started as a small event in 2018 has now been scaled up and all credit goes to Hosting Talk’s founder, Burkay Yapağcıoğlu. Among Hosting Talk’s sponsors this year were Radix and Flock, two of the many companies founded by serial entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia.  In fact, Bhavin gave a phenomenal talk at the event in which he intricately laid out a SWOT analysis of the hosting industry.    Radix’s very own Divya Bakshi, Channel Manager for Asia and Turkey, was also at the event and had the opportunity to address the audience with some interesting insights from the domains industry. Since domain names are the entry path to everything on the world wide web, Divya spoke about all the opportunities that new domains offer to hosting service providers.  Divya highlighted the popularity of generic nTLDs (new Top Level Domains) stating that numerically they tick all checkboxes:
  • 8 of 10 largest nTLDs are generics
  • 8 out of 10 most developed nTLDs are generics
  • 9 out of 10 nTLDs with most MX records are generics
  • Maximum domains with SSL installed are on generic  nTLDs
Based on the current trends and numbers, nTLDs that have a global appeal in terms of their meaning are more successful in comparison to nTLDs that cater to a specific niche. For instance, the keywords “online”, “site”, “website” are understood well even in non-English speaking geographies. This makes .ONLINE, .SITE, .WEBSITE popular nTLDs all over the world as well as across industries and verticals:
  • SMBs drive 70-80% domain registrations for generics such as .ONLINE and .SITE; both nTLDs with 1M+ domains in registration.
  • Large corporates use nTLDs for  primary websites, marketing tools, eCommerce pages:
      • Google: business.site sub-domain for Google My Business
      • Viacom: viacom.tech for its tech-focused portal
      • Emirates: emirates.store for its official merchandise store
      • Asgardia: asgardia.space for its primary website
  • Start-ups register new domains for websites, blogs, eCommerce pages etc. As per an internal study by Radix, 25+ startups on Radix nTLDs have raised $1.2B+ in funding. 
The insights shared by Divya helped the attendees understand the business value of offering domains on generic nTLDs to their customers. Hosting Talk 2019 was a good playfield for the domain industry to connect with the booming hosting industry. Special thanks to Burkay Yapağcıoğlu for making this event a reality. We are hopeful that Hosting Talk 2020 will be even bigger and offer even more opportunities for businesses from hosting, Cloud and domains to interact with each other.