Strato banks on .eu domain speculation

European hosting provider Strato is moving into domain-only hosting for the UK.
The company is only providing the service in the UK as elsewhere in Europe there is little market demand.

The UK is anomalous in that there appears to be plenty of people wanting to register domains as a speculative venture.

The best domains have already been snapped up, mainly during the dotcom boom. Business.com for example sold for $150,000 in 1997, to be subsequently sold on two years later for $7.5 million. But the most expensive remains hosting.com, which sold for $15 million in January 2005.

There have been precious little premium domains that have not yet been registered, but the introduction of the .eu TLD opened a green field of speculation possibilities.

Strato registered the very first commercial .eu domain and most recently registered the 2 millionth, demonstrating the level of interest in the TLD.

Even with .eu, many of the top domains have already gone, either to companies booking their trademark during the early doors 'sunrise period' or since .eu was offered publicly.

'Make it short, make it distinctive and make it phonetic,' they said. According to Strato's domain checker, this amounts to a three-letter minimum.

'No hyphenation,' they warned, before realising that they own www.strato-hosting.co.uk. However, they quickly added that they also own www.strato.de, .com and .eu.

'Yes, register your domain, and then get another one,' said Zorger. It's not only important to secure the domain you want, but also the variations and misspellings of that domain where possible. A valid point, but they would say that, wouldn't they?

'Be careful of registered trademarks,' they added. 'Even if its free, don't take a trademarked name.' This is of particular note in the case of Strato, whose iPhone Net calling service is being carefully scrutinised by Apple, which is attempting to register the iPhone name as a trademark.

Wienholtz warned that a domain-only service has security implications for Strato. He said that as well as UK residents wanting to register domains, there's also 'demand from Asian companies that want to register domains in the UK'.

These can be spamming operations or for other nefarious activities, so offering a domain-only service is a big responsibility. 'We take measures to find out when the customer orders - we call every customer to be sure that the phone line exists... We feel that a cheap domain only market in the UK should be secured against misuse.