UK firms risk losing .eu business

British companies could miss out on business in Europe if they ignore the new .eu top-level domain, says the boss of one of Germany’s top web-hosting companies.

Damian Schmidt, chief executive of Strato, says UK registrations for the domain represent only 19 per cent of the total, compared with 33 per cent of Germany, a disparity out of line with their relative strength in e-commerce.

The problem is that the UK is less Europe-oriented than mainland because of its language and historic links with the USA. In Britain both companies and users are as likely to use a .com site as a .co.uk because they know the main language of either will be English.

But in Germany the .de domain dominates because users know the site will be in German, and the .eu domain is already the second most used in the country just three months after becoming available.

‘People know that if it is an .eu domain there will be no problems about currency and transactions, and it is likely to support European languages,’ Schmidt said.

So UK companies should be aware that, where British people might go for a .com site if they can’t find what they want on the national domain, mainland Europe is swinging to .eu.

The domain had 1.5 million registrations within a week of becoming generally available on 7 April, making it the fourth largest in Europe after the national domains of Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.

Scmidt agreed that many initial registrations were by companies registering a .eu version of existing sites to protect their brand.

Strato, a division of giant German service provider Freenet, is making a push into the UK market, targeting small businesses with web-hosting and domain registration packages starting at £3.49 a month.

Facilities include site backup and restore, and an online tool to enable DIY site creation.

Schmidt claimed that .eu sites can be quicker in Europe than .com ones, many of which are hosted in the US, even if their owners reside in the UK.

He said the response from Strato’s servers averaged 4ms compared with 80ms in the US, because each web page involved several transactions between the server and the user's machine, this could add up to a couple of seconds delay per page.