Domain Names for the New Internet: How Radix Helps Websites Stand Out With Meaningful, Descriptive Domains

TL; DR: Boasting more than 5 million domains under its management, Radix gives website owners and brands several vibrant, refreshing ways to craft an online presence. The company maintains exclusive global control over nine new top-level domains (nTLDs) perfectly poised to serve tech startups, online stores, small businesses, solopreneurs, and any customer looking to break the norms of traditional TLDs. Describing the changing roles of domain registries and registrars, CEO Sandeep Ramchandani told us how Radix is building user engagement and competing with the dominant forces in the industry.

Already used by innovative organizations like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES®), Viacom, and Intel, .TECH domains lend similar credibility and energy to forward-thinking new startups — to the tune of $2 billion in venture capital funding.

Radix, the registry operator overseeing the new top-level domain (nTLD), recently announced that, between 2017 and 2019, more than 170 companies leveraged the domain into the lofty funding amount to grow their business and speed up development.

Of the nine domain registries under Radix management, five rank among the top 25 most popular nTLDs and collectively tally roughly 4 million registrations. On its own, .TECH spans nearly 250,000 domains and more than 41,000 active websites.

One of those, Nimest.tech, is building excitement for an upcoming mobile app that pairs storytelling with 3D and augmented reality to enable users to talk and interact with historical characters as they walk through important landmarks. When it came time to establish a website, Executive Director Carlos Morales chose to stray from the standard, traditional domain extensions in favor of something new.

“The .TECH domain is communicative, as it tells our users what our startup is about,” Executive Director Carlos Morais said in a testimonial. “It gives a strong first impression of what they will learn about when they land on our website. Technology is what makes us move, and technology should be the first thing people think about when they see our URL or logo.”

When ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced a new slate of top-level domain extensions in 2012, Radix invested more than $30 million in applications to become the registry operator for 31 new domains, ranging from .ONLINE to .FUN. Before Radix, brothers Bhavin and Divyank Turakhia founded and ran the Directi Group, the first ICANN-accredited registrar in India. At the time, the successful web hosting and domain registration company housed big hosting brands like ResellerClub, LogicBoxes, and BigRock.

With the introduction of new and more colorful generic top-level domains (gTLDs), capping a seven-year process, ICANN aimed to enhance innovation, competition, and consumer choice.

“It was a historic moment for the internet and opened a big opportunity to make internet addresses shorter, meaningful, and distinguishable,” said Radix CEO Sandeep Ramchandani.

Radix gained exclusive rights to seven domains and has since acquired two new extensions. The company’s portfolio:

In addition to the successes of companies using the .TECH domain, the .ONLINE and .SITE extensions have both exceeded 1 million domain registrations each, Sandeep said.

“These domain extensions give an opportunity to users to get a domain name that is descriptive, keyword-rich, brandable, and meaningful,” he said. “Radix is thus making the internet addresses more organized, specific, and available.

Before ICANN and the nTLDs of 2012, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority oversaw just seven gTLDs: .COM, .ORG, .NET, .INT, .EDU, .GOV, and .MIL, with only three domains available for anyone to register.

Once .COM emerged as the dominant primary domain for organizations’ websites, all types of organizations, from nonprofits and large corporations to schools and individual site owners, began clamoring to register the new commodity.

“When we first launched, registries were investing next to nothing towards marketing and sales, relying fully on registrars for business growth,” Sandeep said. “It was a time when registries had no direct engagement with its end customers. However, the market dynamics have changed since then.”

With the domains becoming increasingly crowded and ubiquitous, ICANN launched a bevy of nTLDs specific to various industries, occupations, hobbies, and objects meant to inject some vibrancy and creativity into the domain registration realm.

Resulting in what Sandeep called “tremendous evolution” over the past seven years, the domain registry space has been reinvigorated with increased competition, renewed energy, and clever imagination. With all of that, however, comes added pressure for registry operators to invest considerable time and resources into engaging customers, marketing new domains, and building awareness.

As such, Radix has taken tremendous strides to build strengths in brand management, channel partnerships, and business development, according to Sandeep.

“Our focus is to grow the awareness, and eventually the demand, for our extensions through active outreach in various forms to domain-buying businesses,” he said.

“The number one reason why Radix even exists is to make it easy for individuals and new business owners to get their first-choice domain name without having to include fillers, like hyphens and numbers, while also adding specificity to their online identity with relevant domain extensions.”

In an industry dominated by the likes of Verisign, which has a stranglehold on more than 156 million domain registrations, Radix more than holds its own thanks to a youthful team spirit and innovative, customer-centric ideas.

“We are a young and lean team that has been able to make a serious dent in the domain registry space, and that’s my favorite aspect about Radix,” Sandeep said. “I can proudly say that our team is passionate about disrupting a space that is dominated by mammoth incumbents with substantially higher resources. Radix, despite being completely bootstrapped, is taking ambitious strides and steadily moving ahead.”

Headquartered in Dubai, roughly 50 employees market the nTLDs, build partnerships with registrars and resellers, and help customers gain momentum by leveraging business development opportunities and Radix’s strong technologies.

Radix domains are backed by two DNS solutions: CentralNic, which also provides the backend registry platform, and Dyn, the leading service behind companies like Twitter, Netflix, and LinkedIn. All told, Radix processes more than 300 million DNS queries each week.

“I feel proud of the enterprising attitude of our team and a workplace culture that encourages taking risks to make breakthroughs and set newer benchmarks,” Sandeep said. “The entire Radix team is primed to make data-backed business and marketing decisions and that continues to be the reason behind our success story so far. And we have only just scratched the surface.”