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OVH to give away 50,000 new gTLD names for free

Kevin Murphy, October 1, 2014, 20:53:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

France-based registrar OVH is to make up to 50,000 domain names in its new gTLD .ovh available for free.
According to its web site and a bulletin send to customers today, the regular price of £2.69 ($4.35) will be waived for the first year and renewal pricing will be discounted.
The first 20,000 names registered will renew at £1.01 ($1.63), the remaining 30,000 names will renew at £2.03 ($3.29). There will be a limit of five domains per customer.
While “free” is not an unusual business model in the new gTLD round, .ovh is noteworthy for several other reasons.
It’s the first “dot-brand” new gTLD to accept registrations from third parties, for starters.
It’s also the only live dot-brand belonging to an accredited domain name registrar.
The restrictions on the gTLD also raise eyebrows — in order to register a name in .ovh, you need an OVH customer number.
So while the .ovh names should in theory be available via third-party registrars, such registrars would have to capture the OVH customer number of their own customers — or encourage their own customers to become OVH customers — in order to process the registration.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of any approved third-party registrars on the official .ovh web site.
General availability begins at 1000 UTC Wednesday October 2.
Thanks to Andrew Bennett for the tip.

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Comments (7)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    ICANN doesn’t list .ovh as a brand-TLD or having requested brand-TLD categorization still being evaluated, so it seems OVH itself is considering .ovh as generic.

    • Michele says:

      It’s an interesting move.
      I’d heard rumours that this was what they’d been planning to do – or a variant of this, so it doesn’t surprise me.

  2. anony (eroyalmail) says:

    To be honest I only see a sponsorship use and low cost short domain name. In the former, there is a cause, for example, Vegetarian, and this cause wants some actual or conceptual or perceived or self-confidence support from giant techie internet site hosting business.

  3. anony (eroyalmail) says:

    typo (extra): This is a first time a .companyname suffix is giving away their company name to anyone without qualification. Google if you remember had a website service: https://googlepages.com/yourcompanyname – smoothie url and they changed it to http://sites.google.com/site/yourcompanyname – slashings url. Just suppose Google-like marketing modification happens at .ovh, so what happens then?

  4. Domain Racer says:

    should it beneficial for website owner to use .ovh domain which is not listed in ICANN

  5. Ashok Chavan says:

    Please remove comment of [Domain Racer]
    http://domainincite.com/17453-ovh-to-give-away-50000-new-gtld-names-for-free
    Thanks in advance..

  6. Ashok Chavan says:

    Please remove comment of [Domain Racer]
    http://domainincite.com/17453-ovh-to-give-away-50000-new-gtld-names-for-free
    Thanks in advance..
    Ashok C

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