Ukrainian domains slide as war becomes the new normal

Ukraine’s ccTLD is starting to see a decline in its total domains under management as emergency policies related to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 are relaxed.

According to local registry Hostmaster, .ua’s total was down 1.5% at the end of the first quarter at 612,778 domains, due to the fact that expiring domains that were frozen in 2022 have now started to drop.

Hostmaster said the effect will become more noticeable in coming quarters. Stats show a decline of about a thousand domains since the end of June.

When the war started, .ua had about 558,000 domains. It peaked at around 614,000 in early June.

Early in the conflict, Hostmaster had said that expired domains would be held in a redemption period status. Many registrants were assumed to have been drafted into the military or refugees.

Since then, the registry says a “significant number” of expired domains have been restored.

However, the policy was rolled back this June; expired domains now have the antebellum standard 30 days to be restored. Domains that were not renewed in 2022 still have a November deletion date, Hostmaster said.

Meanwhile, WIPO has recently restarted its UDRP services for Ukraine, having paused them in May 2022 in response to the war. Decisions that were paused in early 2022 have now been executed and published.

Registry launches Ukrainian domains for Russian-occupied region

A Ukrainian registry has started offering domains in a second-level Ukrainian transliteration of a Russia-occupied region.

Southern Ukrainian Network Information Center started offering residents of the Mykolaiv oblast domains at the third-level under mykolaiv.ua at the start of October, according to the registry’s web site.

Mykolaiv is the Ukrainian version of the original Cyrillic name. Previously, domains were only available under the Russian transliteration, .nikolaev.ua. SUNIC also offers the shorter .mk.ua domain.

Mykolaiv, in the battle-scarred south of the country, is also the name of the region’s capital city. While the city has resisted Russian capture, much of the region has been under the invading force’s control since early in the war.

SUNIC, which also offers odessa.ua (Russian) and odesa.ua (Ukrainian) names for the Odesa region and city, is encouraging .nikolaev.ua registrants to acquire their matching mykolaiv.ua names.

Adopting Ukrainian transliterations of Cyrillic place names has been seen as a symbolic act of defiance against Russian ambitions.

Ukrainians urged to “de-Russify” their domains

There’s reportedly a push in Ukraine to get registrants of Russian-transliterated TLDs to switch to their matching Ukrainian versions.

Ukraine’s .ua offers domains in dozens of second-level domains, many of which correspond to the names of cities, such as kyiv.ua and .kharkiv.ua.

But while pretty much everyone in the Anglophone world and elsewhere has started using the Ukrainian transliterations as standard in the six months since Russia invaded, Ukrainian domain registrants have been slow to follow.

According to local registry Hostmaster, today there are 38,564 names registered in the Russian .kiev.ua, but only 1,965 in the Ukrainian .kyiv.ua.

Now local hosting company and registrar HOSTiQ is now reportedly offering customers the chance to swap their Russian domains for the Ukrainian equivalents for free.

.ua as a whole has over 580,000 registered names.

Ukraine won’t delete domains until war is over

Hostmaster, the Ukrainian ccTLD registry, has indefinitely paused domain deletions due to the ongoing war with Russian.

The company said its domain redemption period, which usually lasts 30 days after a registration expires, will now run until the end of martial law, which was brought in by the government shortly after the invasion.

The registry had previously, and perhaps optimistically, extended the window to 60 days. But the war continues, and many registrants are still unable to renew their names.

Since the first extension, registrars have already recovered over 300 names that were not renewed in time, Hostmaster said.

The price to restore an expired .ua name is the same as a renewal, the registry said.

War fails to stop .ua domains selling

Ukraine’s ccTLD has maintained what appears to be a healthy level of new registrations, despite the Russian invasion.

The company today reported that between February 24 and March 25, it saw over 3,000 new .ua domain regs, over 2,000 of which were in .com.ua. The ccTLD offers names in a few dozen third-level spaces.

February 24 was the day Russia invaded, and the day Ukraine went into martial law.

“The com.ua domain is mostly used by commercial organizations. Therefore, the presence of registrations shows that Ukrainian business continues to operate under martial law,” Hostmaster wrote (via Google Translate).

.ua had a total of 534,162 domains under all 2LDs today, according to the registry’s web site.

While Hostmaster has not yet published its end-of-month stats for March, it appears that the new adds suggest an improvement on typical monthly performance, or at least business as usual.

The registry has come under denial-of-service attack dozens of times since the war started, but says it has so far continued to operate without interruption.

Ukraine registry hit by 57 attacks in a week

Ukrainian ccTLD registry Hostmaster today said its infrastructure was hit by 57 distributed denial of service attacks last week.

On its web site, which has continued to function during the now month-long Russian invasion, the company said it recorded the attacks between March 14 and 20, which a top strength of 10Gbps.

“All attacks were extinguished. The infrastructure of the .UA domain worked normally,” the company, usually based in Kyiv, said.

Hostmaster took the initiative in the first days of the war to move much of its infrastructure out-of-country, to protect .ua from physical damage, and to sign up to DDoS protection services.

As Russia advances on Kyiv, .ua moves out-of-country

Ukraine’s ccTLD registry has moved its servers out of the country to avoid disruption due to the Russian invasion.

Hostmaster said that servers responsible for “the operability of the .ua domain” have been moved to other European countries, seemingly with the assistance of other registry operators.

The company’s technical operations were based in Kyiv, which is currently under threat from advancing Russian troops.

Hostmaster announced the news on Saturday, the third day of the invasion.

A day earlier, it said it had signed up to Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service to protect its two largest zones — .com.ua and .kiev.ua — from distributed denial of service attacks.

It had suffered one such attack earlier this month, before the invasion, with traffic at some points exceeding 150Gbps.

The company says it runs more than 550,000 .ua domains in total. This morning, all .ua web sites I tested from the UK were resolving normally.