At the recent Domain Pulse conference in Vienna, there were discussions on how domain name registration growth rates for ccTLDs has been rather stagnant for a few years. One of the issues raised was what opportunities were there for ccTLD registries to look outside their own market for business opportunities.
SIDN, the .nl registry, has expanded by co-creating a DNS billing service in the Netherlands and taking over an e-identity company with 12 million users. Others, such as the Austrian country code Top Level Domain registry nic.at, have set up as new generic Top Level Domain registries.
And DENIC, the German ccTLD manager, has also been expanding. This week the .de registry announced it has won the contract to provide shared use of its global anycast mesh for the .eu and Cyrillic script .ею (xn--e1a4c) TLDs. DENIC now provides DNS slave services covering some 6.5m domains for seven TLD clients, in addition to running its own .de nameservice for more than 16.1m domains under management (DUM). Providing the service for EURid more than doubles the provision of this service to other TLDs and increases its contribution to the security and stability of the internet as a whole. The provision of the services to EURid is to date DENIC’s largest customer.
The improved network performance achieved by anycast routing eventually benefits every user of the Internet: via reduced processing times of DNS queries, multiplied back-up capacities to deal with load peaks, and enhanced resilience for optimum DDoS mitigation.
Third-party TLD operators running ccTLDs, gTLDs or Brand TLDs can benefit from DENIC’s DNS anycast slave services since 2010, under a cost-sharing scheme, using either the full set of DENIC’s authoritative global name servers, as a primary service, or picking dedicated ones as a supplement to their own network, in order to enlarge its footprint, resilience, and robustness. Growing numbers of customers and DUM also result in economies of scale for all connected TLD users which makes the shared use of DENIC’s network even more attractive.
Next to providing global anycast network presence, DENIC’s DNS slave service includes 24/7 monitoring and support as well as customised web APIs for advanced monitoring and statistics to meet clients’ operational needs.
Presently, the shared global anycast mesh run by DENIC includes 12 locations spread across the EMEA region (Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Moscow, Stockholm, Vienna), Asia Pacific (Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul) and the Americas (Los Angeles, Miami, São Paulo). These locations are pooled in one IPv6 and two IPv4 anycast clouds, respectively.
Sited close to leading Internet exchange points, all network locations use high bandwidths, support IPv6 and are fully DNSSEC-enabled.