Annual Report 2011
In 2011 REG.RU has confirmed its leading position in the Russian domain name market, ranking number one with respect to the volume of registrations in national domains. Today the company maintains more than 1,000,000 domains, which amounts to almost a quarter of the Russian market volume; provided that, every third domain in Russia is registered with REG.RU. The Company has secured the title of an active participant of the process of development of the national Internet due to the implementation of efficient communication and marketing programs.
The Russian domain and hosting market is actively developing. One of the main factors of the growth is the interest the general public has been showing in the website creation sphere, which in the past was only accessible to professionals working in this industry. That is exactly why development and offer of ready solutions designed for creation, support and promotion of websites, accessible to mass consumers both financially and technically, has become the company's priority in 2011. Such services include a unique website builder Parallels Web Presence Builder, which enables a user to create a fully functional working website or online store without any special technical training. In the beginning of the next year the company is going to start up a service of ready website templates from TemplateMonster, the global leader in this field.
Today REG.RU supports hosting for more than 60,000 domains and is among the top 10 hosting providers in Russia. The Company is actively mastering this business line, offering optimized rates for servers. Specialists of the company believe that such approach, combined with gradual reduction of the cost of the hosting services, in the long run will help bring the Russian customer back from foreign companies, which today account for over 10% of the Russian hosting market. In order to make its services even more accessible, REG.RU keeps developing the network of official representative offices in the Russian regions and CIS countries. In 2011 the company has extended business hours of its offices, introduced 24-hour customer support via the ticket system, developed the Interactive Online Help service.
REG.RU is also actively improving solutions for professional participants of the industry. In 2011 a solution for the secondary domain name market, the Domain Shop, which is a site where domain sellers meet their buyers, has played a big role. The last year has also seen significant improvements in the expiring domain service. The main principle of REG.RU is clear customer focus, that's why the company pays particular attention to the customer service. In 2011 the registrar was the first in the Russian domain and hosting market to open a privilege club for regular customers, the Privilege Club, whose members can use unique services, have discounts and service privileges.
The registrar pays particular attention to ensuring security of its customers. In 2011 REG.RU has received the status of a personal data operator and extended a professional liability insurance contract with Ingosstrakh totaling to $1,000,000. In addition to internal security systems, REG.RU offers its customers services designed for protection against external threats; such services include Advanced Spam Protection, absolute privacy ensured by the WHOIS service, SSL certificates and so on.
In 2011 programs and projects designed to develop national domain extensions and the Russian cyberspace have been one of the focal points of the company's activity. The company's most popular projects has included website birthday cards 17-let.ru and с-днем-рождения.рф, a series of gadgets Simaphone4.РФ dedicated to the Cyrillic domain, and a logo of the .РФ domain. An annual interactive rating game RU-Голос has been started for the first time; using this game users create a map of the most popular and sought after RuNet websites. REG.RU has been among the first to support the New gTLD program designed to create first level domain names, and has been the first in the Russian market to offer the service of full maintenance of a request to ICANN for own domain extensions.