.uk domains see surge in sales

Nominet, the organisation which controls .uk domain names, says that over 150 web addresses ending in .uk are created every hour, daily.

Separate research for Nominet also showed that 47% of web users are more confident dealing online with companies that have a .uk address.

Lesley Cowley, Nominet’s chief executive said: “The combination of greater broadband take-up and the established popularity of .uk domain names demonstrates that the UK internet industry is more buoyant than ever.”

The majority of web addresses are still registered with the .com domain. Verisign, which manages the .com domain, said it represented 47% of all registered domain names.

Verisign said the total number of .com and .net domain names increased to 44.2 million by the end of the second quarter of 2005. Country code names such as .de, .uk and .br collectively accounted for 35% of all domain names.

In total, four million .uk web addresses have been registered and 110,000 are created every month.

Nominet found that people preferred to buy from sites with .uk addresses because they were more confident they would be able to contact the company by phone, or via a UK mailing address and believed that such companies would be bound by British trade laws.