The choice of domain depends on how the audience will perceive the site and the business structure that owns this web resource. Therefore, the search for a good address sometimes takes weeks — it is preceded by an analysis of the target audience and a study of the domain market.
Ukrainian domains are the best option for sites operating on the territory of Ukraine and thematically related to the region.
For example, if you are a publisher of books in the Ukrainian language, you can show this through a domain with the .UA extension, and then it will be immediately clear for which audience the literature is intended.
On Ukrainian domains, you can host:
online stores;
business card sites of enterprises that provide services in a certain region;
travel blogs dedicated to Ukraine;
educational projects;
local mass media;
sites uniting Ukrainian professional communities.
The list can be continued for a long time. The main thing is that visitors to the site with a national domain are exactly Ukrainian consumers of goods, services or information.
In this article, you will learn which Ukrainian domain zones are the most popular among webmasters according to the statistics of the company "Hostmeister" , and for what purposes it is better to register them.
National top-level domain .UA
The .UA domain was officially registered on December 1, 1992. The first domains in it were registered in 1995.
It was created and administered by enthusiasts on a public basis. In 2001, they got together to found the company "Hostmeister". This event was a turning point for the Ukrainian Internet: a centralized infrastructure appeared in the country, which is still engaged in technical and administrative support of the Ukrainian domain network and the creation of address registration regulations on a regular basis. "Hostmaster" is the official administrator of the .UA national zone.
The zone has its own characteristics — only the owner of a trademark whose name completely matches the name of the selected address can register a .UA domain . For example, if you are the owner of TM "Automobil", you have the right to register the domain avtomobil.ua. There is also an option to register a domain with the official permission of the trademark owner. In this case, a license agreement should be concluded and registered accordingly.
Such an address can be used by business structures, mass media and show business stars who register their own names as TM.
Due to the mentioned restrictions, there are relatively few addresses in the zone, despite the prestige and brevity of the name. At the end of 2021, there are a little more than 25 thousand of them.
But at the same time, .UA is the parent domain zone, which includes all the others that we will talk about today. They are also called second-level domain zones because they consist of two parts.
The COM.UA zone is the most popular in Ukraine
The second-level zone appeared in 1995 and was one of the first non-geographic (not tied to cities) zones together with GOV.UA.
Any individual or legal entity, both citizens of Ukraine and foreigners, can register the COM.UA domain .
At the end of December 2021, there are more than 328,000 domains in this zone. This popularity is due to the fact that this sweet-sounding national domain with a neutral content does not require document verification.
COM.UA combines the advantages of the world's most common domain .COM and national .UA. There are quite a lot of addresses formed according to this combining principle, and we will meet them again in this article. They allow you to solve two tasks at once — to build customer loyalty with the help of familiar extensions and to simultaneously inform about nationality.
The address in this domain zone is suitable for business, mass media, and private projects, for example, local history, tourist, or historical blogs.
Mirror domains KYIV.UA and KIEV.UA for Kyiv
Technically, these are two mirror domains that reflect the name of the capital of Ukraine. They are used to indicate the geographic component of the project — businesses that work for the people of Kyiv, mass media that cover the capital's news, and other web sites conceptually connected to Kyiv.
When registering one of the domains for the client, the second one is automatically reserved, the owner receives a priority right of redemption. This also applies to long-standing KIEV.UA domains. Their tenants can register the KYIV.UA domain and configure redirection from one to another so that customers get to the site regardless of what name they entered in the address bar.
There is a backstory to this dual situation. The fact is that both in Ukraine and in other countries, until recently, the Latin spelling of the name of our capital was used, based on the Russian-language name Kiev (Kiev), which was established during the USSR. But at the same time, the correct spelling in the state language, approved by the Ukrainian government back in 1995, is Kyiv (Kyiv).
Previously, we wrote an article about why you urgently need to transfer the site to the kyiv.ua domain and how to do it .
In 2015, the "Hostmeister" company developed regulations for the registration of mirror domains, but the development of the KYIV.UA zone was extremely slow.
The correct English transliteration was finally introduced as part of the "KyivNotKiev" campaign, which began in 2018 at the initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. This affected not only domain addresses, but also the name of the city in airports, on world maps and in the media.
Over the past two years, the number of sites in the KYIV.UA zone has grown significantly. So, in January 2019, there were only four hundred domains in it, and as of December 24, 2021, there were more than fifteen thousand. Compared to other zones, this is not much, but thanks to the campaign, the zone is constantly increasing.
KIEV.UA has almost 38 thousand domains, the domain zone was created in 1997. Today, this is the second largest national domain in our country.
IN.UA is a domain zone with an Eastern history
The domain zone of the second level has more than 37 thousand addresses, IN.UA is open for free registration for sites of any subject.
It is also formed by combining the names of the popular general zone .IN and Ukrainian .UA. The interesting history behind the .IN extension itself is that it is India's national domain name zone created in 1992, which initially had many registration restrictions. But in 2005, the restriction was lifted, and since then it has been a neutral zone in which sites of various directions are hosted, regardless of the country.
Such a transformation did not occur with all geographic domains. The case with the Indian zone can be explained by several reasons. First of all, by sound, it can be perceived as an abbreviation of Internet and a number of other words related to business and technology (industry, international, install, income). And secondly, over the past few years, India has unexpectedly become an IT giant. Now it is called an information miracle and a world IT hub. The country is catching up with even Silicon Valley in the number of digital services, so it is not surprising that its national domain has become a byword for the Internet.
Now .IN and its derivative .IN.UA are popular generic domains, the origin of which is rarely mentioned.
By the way, the process of losing the primary meaning is quite common for old domain zones - for example, .COM was once intended for commercial sites, and .ORG - for non-profit organizations.
ORG.UA is a domain for public organizations and not only
The domain zone .ORG.UA was created according to the same combining principle that we talked about. The .ORG extension was one of the first on the Internet, and it was assumed that the addresses of non-profit organizations - charitable foundations, public organizations, various amateur communities - would be registered with it. Therefore, if you choose an address for an animal shelter or a volunteer movement in Ukraine, you should buy the .ORG.UA domain .
This is a fairly large zone, in which 22,809 domains operate as of December 24, 2021.
But since it has no restrictions and conditions, in fact the domain can be registered for any site. The zone name .ORG.UA does not carry any thematic load, so it is suitable for projects of any direction.
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These are the most popular Ukrainian domains for the site, but in fact there are many more of them. Each regional center has its own zone (and some even have several), there are other general domains of the second level, such as NET.UA. In short, there is plenty to choose from.
Domains in a regional zone are a great tool for business promotion. They help customers understand where you are and who you work for before they even open your site.
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