19 Years Anniversary For SU Domain

September 19th marked the 19th Year Anniversary for the .SU (Soviet Union) domain. The SU extension was delegated to the USSR in 1990, one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union and 3.5 years before the creation of the Russian ccTLD RU.

“Domain SU was not delegated to the Soviet Union (although technically it was so). At that time, when the Soviet Union began to collapse, delegation meant the birth of new Internet community. So in fact, domain SU was like a guide and even a symbol of democratic development”, – says Alexei Platonov, Director of Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN), which is still playing the role of the Technical Center of domain SU.

According to Stat.nic.ru there have been 82,373 SU domain registrations, compared to 2,372,636 RU registrations. The SU domain demonstrated a 600% increase in 2008 but sales in 2009 have tailed off slightly. The overwhelming majority of SU domain names are registered in Moscow (nearly 52%), Moscow Region (10%) and St. Petersburg (8%). The largest number of .SU names (92%) are registered by Russian residents with the remaining 8% by foreign persons or entities.

This year the registry in charge of the domain opened up to SU IDN registrations. It can be registered the symbols of 250 national languages. About 18,000 IDN SU domains have already been registered. The majority have been in Russian (14,500), as to be expected. Next in popularity have been those registered in Greek, Arabic and Hebrew character sets.

At GlobusDomains, we can provide RU and SU domain registrations for our clients.