Radix, who have applied for several domain extensions, announced today the launch of the .host pioneer program.
The .host domain is pretty self-explanatory and is aimed at companies operating in the hosting sector.
They’ve been doing quite a bit of targeted marketing over the last year with them exhibiting at industry events worldwide such as HostingCon and World Hosting Days.
Today’s announcement isn’t surprising. Many of the new TLD registries have launched some form of “pioneer” program with the idea being to get some “anchor tenants” using the new domain extension actively and thus help promote it. However many of the other pioneer programs are firmly aimed at “big brands” ie. companies with very deep pockets that can afford to make very large investments. In the case of .paris, for example, many of the “ambassadors” are household names and as part of the program they had to make significant financial commitments.
In the case of .host, however, it looks like the program will be more accessible to smaller companies:
Except for .Host Premium Names (a).Host Pioneers shall not be required to pay a
domain name registration fee for the Approved Domain Name for the License Term
and (b) .Host Pioneer may thereafter register any available previously Approved
Domain name through a Registrar of their choice at the then current registration
fee set by the Registrar.
Of course they’ll have to commit to actively using the domain name, but the terms of the program don’t appear to be horrendous.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of domain names get used during this program. Will existing companies opt for brand.host or go for something more generic like hostingservice.host or region.host ?
Here’s the timeline Radix have published today:
Interestingly Uniregistry’s .hosting will be launching about a month later. While there might be an overlap between the two in terms of target market I personally haven’t seen as much marketing activity for .hosting.
Related articles
- Marketing Done Right – Hats Off To Radix Registry (michele.me)
