I've been noticing slight variations in .eu figures over the past few days and overnight, approximately 3500 domains have dropped off the .eu active figure.
Regards...jmcc
[edited by: Webwork at 1:05 pm (utc) on April 6, 2007]
[edit reason] Tidying up. [/edit]
How long does it take for names to expire / delete / get released?
Also as there seems to be no expiry date in the WHOIS how do you know if a naughty registrar hasn't sent the money to Eurid but billed you anyway?
Reading at a few different places the .eu expiry / deletion process seems quite a bit different from other TLDs.It is based on the Belgian DNS.be system. Apparently EURid got this registry software from DNS.be along with most of its management.
This is the DNS.be process: [dns.be...]
Apparently the domains are supposed to expire at the end of the month. Some of the people who attended the Eurid presentation at the ICANN meeting in Lisbon were rather irritated that the deletion and transfer process wasn't based on the more effective and efficient system used by .com/net etc. The problem, apparently, is that the design has no proper concept of a "domain year" - a domain year being the time between the registration date and the renewal date. This lack of a "domain year" also means that multi-year registrations are not possible.
How long does it take for names to expire / delete / get released?Unless the domains are deleted by the registrars, apparently the domains enter a 40 day "quarantine" period during which they can be restored before being released.
Also as there seems to be no expiry date in the WHOIS how do you know if a naughty registrar hasn't sent the money to Eurid but billed you anyway?A lot of the questions that are being asked relate to the lack of expiration dates in the whois data. There is no real way to ascertain if a registrar has renewed a domain registration or if a renewal has even been processed. It is a seriously screwed up system
In the last 24 hours or so, almost 15K .eu domains have dropped from the active number. Given that such drops are probably down to registars manually deleting domains, the real figure might be closer to 18000 deleted domains as .eu has around 2500 new registrations a day - but even this has been falling off recently. As today is the anniversary of the .eu landrush massacre, the number of deletions will start to cascade.
Regards...jmcc
However, many registrars will actively go in and delete the name on the anniversary of registration, I was talking with Tucows last week and they say this is what they do.
The other frustrating thing is that the 'update' date shown on the whois doesn't always reflect when it is to expire. If a change of registrar or owner is done, the expiration is moved to a year after that - so it may be a year after the update. If, however, it was simply a change of nameservers - the update date would be no good.
I took a look at the number of names registered on Eurid last week, and it's done about 150,000 now.
Amos
If you can see the management side of the EURid system it simply states 'month of invoicing', the end of which the name will expire. So technically none of the names registered in the landrush lapse until 30th April with Eurid.This 'month of invoicing' thing seems to be a legacy from the era when ccTLD registries were run out of computer science departments in universities by people with very little grasp of business issues. Most registrars work on a day to day basis for accounts but these guys just weren't playing in the real world. The DNS.be system and a few other ccTLDs seem to use the same 'month of invoicing' approach.
However, many registrars will actively go in and delete the name on the anniversary of registration, I was talking with Tucows last week and they say this is what they do.This is what appears to be happening at the moment. The drops seem to be happening from countries with more active super registrars.
The other frustrating thing is that the 'update' date shown on the whois doesn't always reflect when it is to expire. If a change of registrar or owner is done, the expiration is moved to a year after that - so it may be a year after the update. If, however, it was simply a change of nameservers - the update date would be no good.How the European Commission and its "expert" advisors ever gave the .eu to such a registrar with such utterly borked software is beyond me and most of the industry. That lack of a historical record is a critical failure of the EURid software. There used to be a historical field in the whois data but I don't think that it was ever used. This all seems to point to a lack of interface between the billing database and the whois database.
I took a look at the number of names registered on Eurid last week, and it's done about 150,000 now.Updated/changed? I think that .eu registrations have been running at around 2000 a day or so for the last few months though I'd have to check the figures here to be certain.
Regards...jmcc
Austria 59531 - 60112
Belgium 71265 - 71564
Bulgaria 2080 - 2057
Cyprus 90570 - 90634
Czech Republic 52495 - 52443
Germany 784678 - 790984
Denmark 39018 - 39397
Estonia 5803 - 5936
Spain 53705 - 55350
Finland 11864 - 11884
France 170848 - 171002
United Kingdom 428053 - 441586
Gibraltar 1889 - 1883
Greece 18396 - 18786
Hungary 22917 - 22996
Ireland 30899 - 31613
Italy 150366 - 151269
Lithuania 4314 - 4314
Luxembourg 14634 - 14620
Latvia 7463 - 7535
Malta 16292 - 16298
Netherlands 319646 - 320836
Poland 82525 - 82558
Portugal 12331 - 12398
Romania 7071 - 6996
Sweden 93068 - 93162
Slovenia 3951 - 3985
Slovakia 11169 - 11189
The biggest movement is in the number of UK .eu domains being deleted. This is where most of the squatter/warehouser operations are using front companies for their activities. Though it could also be that registrars with a lot of UK clients are manually deleting the domains.
Regards...jmcc
