Have you ever experienced the situation that your preferred domain name is already taken? Or that the inspiration to create the perfect domain name will not come? No problem with the nic.at domainfinder - it will help you to find your .at domain! Developed by the nic.at R&D Team, it suggests domain alternatives for each domain search at www.nic.at. Try it out yourself!

On 29 October 1969 two computers communicated with each other for the first time over the US science network Arpanet. This marked the birth of the Internet. In 1988, the domestic Top Level Domain .at was added to the Domain Name System, the WWW was invented in 1989 and Austria was connected to the worldwide Internet in 1990. There are now more than 1.3 million .at domains and more than four billion Internet users worldwide. Here is a chronology of events, on the occasion of half a century of the Internet.

nic.at’s RcodeZero DNS service has just started supplying Anycast technology to the Polish domain extension .pl . This means that nic.at infrastructure provides supplementary hosting and security to the seventh biggest ccTLD in the EU with over 2.5 million domains. According DNSperf statistics, RcodeZero DNS is one of the fastest anycast providers worldwide.

At the beginning of 2018, the CENTR Member Security Maturity Model (CM-SMM for short) was introduced as a joint initiative of DENIC, DNS Belgium, nic.at and SWITCH under the direction of CENTR. The aim of the model is a regular, mutual evaluation of the current security status of domain registries by a so-called self-assessment scorecard. Based on common benchmarks, each registry can measure the development of its security measures, evaluate strengths and weaknesses and initiate improvements.

At the end of the 20th century the world of internet addresses was in the grips of gold fever. The basic premise: snap up domains on the cheap and sell them on for a fortune. The papers were full of headlines reporting million-dollar deals. But are things still the same today? What is the current state of play on the market? A glimpse behind the scenes at the world of domain trading.

In 1991 the British physicist, IT expert and HTML inventor Tim Berners-Lee laid the foundations for the world wide web with the first website. Four years later, the total had increased to 2,738 websites. Today there are 349 million domains. Websites are no longer the exclusive preserve of companies and organizations – numerous private individuals now in possession of their own sites, whether it’s a blog, an online portfolio or simply a place to publish images, videos and texts. To help find a way out of the maze we have put together a check list outlining the main points that need to be taken into consideration. 

For companies and more and more private individuals, having their own website has become a matter of course. But what is still not always clear is how to differentiate between the domain name, the website content and all the necessary services such as a name service, web space and email address. The following article is intended to explain what you can use your domain for, and what you need in order to register it.

The name of a domain is an important part of the way a company, organisation or private individual portrays itself online. Whether it is part of an e-mail address or the website address itself: the domain is ever-present – so it makes sense that it should be selected carefully. While there are various online tools that suggest domain names to help users arrive at the right domain for them, the suggestions are often unusable and are more likely to add to the frustration than lead to a solution. But what trips these tools up, how can they be optimised and how can a little creativity and some good tips help people on their way to that perfect domain name? And what does the development process look like?

nic.at is pleased to gain two important top level domains for its Anycast service RcodeZero DNS. EURid - the registry manager of the .eu and ею (Cyrillic script) country code top-level domains, and soon of the .ευ (Greek script) – extensively tested RcodeZero DNS. Convinced by the network’s reliability and performance, EURid will use the secondary Anycast service for its 3.6 million domains.

Alexander Mayrhofer has managed the R&D department since 2002 - this is, where the many innovative research projects, ideas and numbers that surround nic.at originate. Among other activities, he participates in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and often travels to speak at events, where both his talks and his eye-catching illustrations (see below) are always popular. In this interview, he also reveals on which projects he is currently working on, what awaits us in the future and how to keep yourself innovative.

Ever wondered where the many innovative research projects, ideas and numbers that surround our company originate? Or which tools inform our forecasts and strategic decisions? In this edition of the nic//report, we invite you to take a look behind the scenes at our R&D department and find out about the projects they are working on.

Domain holders will now receive a link to a survey at marketagent.com in the email confirmation of each of their domain registrations, terminations, or registrar transfers. Together with Austria's leading online market research institute, nic.at is asking current (and former) domain holders about their domain usage, as well as their satisfaction with the domain transaction and their domain provider.

In the first week of July, .at domains reached the 10,000 mark for DNSSEC-signed domains. Although the security extension DNSSEC has been available for .at domains since 2012, it has enjoyed only moderate popularity – in contrast to other countries. Arsen Stasic, who is jointly responsible for the operation of the .at zone at the Vienna University Computer Center, explains why this is now changing.

The DNSheads Vienna is an informal group of people who are responsible for the operation and the software development of recursive and authoritative DNS servers. Founded by Head of nic.at R&D Alexander Mayrhofer, the group has already met 6 times to discuss the changing landscape of DNS. A review.

Exciting political times not only bring unusual hit rates to media, they also inspire internet users‘ creativity when it comes to domain name registrations. Quotes, word creations and election speculations: A look into the .at zone is a mirror of current events in Austrian internal polictics.