.cc domain. What the heck is it?

[salewit]

I have a client who sent me an e-mail from enic which I guess is also Verisign reminding them of renewal of their .cc domain names.

They asked me if they thought they should renew. To be honest, this is the first time I ever heard of a .cc domain. Sounds like a waste of money to me, but I wanted to check.

By the way, I entered their domain.cc and it went right to their domain.com site. Weird.

What should I tell them?

[jason]

CC is the ISO country code for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a small country in the Indian Ocean off the cost of Indonesia (Google's a wonderful tool). Like many small nations, they saw a chance at making some aditional revenue by opening up their TLD to registrants world wide. (Basically, they sold out to Verisign...)

cc domain names are marketed as an alternative to com's. With .com availability at barely nothing, smaller countries are trying to capatilize on the domain market by attracting companies that are having trouble finding good .coms. Of course, most cc registrants also grab the .com version of their name, too, since that's what most customers will try first when searching for a company. In these cases (such as with your client), both the com name and any other TLD's (including cc) generally all point to the same website.

Should they renew? That depends on their business. Are they using the cc name anywhere? It it printed on any of their documents? Do they get any traffic or email from it? If not, then its safe to let it lapse, but if there is any chance of a visitor stumbling on to that address, then they need to think about it.

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

Originally posted by jason
...(Google's a wonderful tool)...

Hahahaha! You oughta know!