South Africa now has more than 1.2 million registered .za domains. Across the co.za, web.za, net.za and org.za domains, the number is on track to exceed 1.5 million, the ZA Central Registry (ZACR) said on Monday.

ZACR is the administrator of South Africa’s presence on the Web.

.za is one of the world’s most popular Internet namespaces, with the co.za second-level domain alone having more than 1.1 million registrations, ZACR CEO Lucky Masilela said.

“South Africa, a country of 57 million people, is the leading domain name market on the continent with over 1.2 million registrations of domain names. By way of comparison, Nigeria, a country of 190 million people, has notched up 102 000 registrations within its .ng country code domain name,” he said.

Masilela said the success of .za is based on the separation of functions and responsibilities by the regulator, the registry operator and the registrar.

“Our current model is the reason South Africa boasts the highest number of Africa’s domain name registrations, coupled with our intention to keep the domain costs as low as possible on the continent,” he said.

.africa

“The ZACR as the central registry responsible for the technical well-being of South Africa’s presence on the Web, the dozens of registrars that interface with domain name registrants, and the ZA Domain Name Authority (Zadna) as the government-appointed industry regulator, have created a local domain name system (DNS) industry that is the envy of much of the world.”

The ZACR was recently awarded the rights to administer the African continent’s presence on the Web in the form of the .africa geographic top-level domain. It has also registered three South African cities’ geographic top-level domains, namely .joburg, .capetown and .durban. — © 2018 NewsCentral Media