National domain zone of Belarus: version 2023

beCloud summed up the development of the national domain zone of Belarus for 2023.

Optimistic – this is how we can generally characterize 2023 for the national domain zone of Belarus. First of all, because last year, after a two-year decline, the country’s domain space began to grow.

As a reminder, the national domain zone of Belarus includes two zones – “.by” and “.bel”. Since the beginning of 2023, more than 26,560 new domains have been registered in them: in the “.by” domain zone – 22,733 domains, in “.bel” – 3,827 domains. As you can see, the main “locomotive” of growth in 2023, as in previous years, was domains in the “.by” zone.

There were 23,487 domains excluded from the database over the past year (“.by” – 21,240; “.bel” – 2,247).

As a result, the growth of the national domain zone in 2023 amounted to more than 3,000 second-level domains or 2%.

Registration of new domain names in the .by and .bel zones in 2022 and 2023

And as of December 31, 2023, the total number of active second-level domains reached 149,589 (“.by” – 132,769 domains, “.bel” – 16,820 domains).

The most active months for domain registrations were October (3,534 domains per month), March (2,426 domains per month), February (2,409 domains per month) and November (2,039 domains per month).

Minsk and the Minsk region accounted for about 2/3 of all domain names registered in 2023. In other regions, the shares of registered domains were distributed quite equally.

Domain name statistics for regional centers of the Republic of Belarus

It is worthy of note that quite a lot of domains on Bynet are registered by non-residents of the Republic of Belarus. Thus, domain names in our national domain zone are registered by representatives of 98 countries!

Today, the TOP 4 most active foreign “clients” include Russia, China, Germany and the USA.

Non-resident owners of domain names in the .by and .bel zones

Also in the pool of countries whose representatives have registered domains in the national domain zone of Belarus, there are many European states and Asian countries, states of the Middle East and America.

In the past year, beCloud, as the technical administrator of the national domain zone, developed and launched an updated core of the Belarusian domain space registry.

In addition, in 2023, the operator continued to conduct charity auctions of domain names. A charity auction of domain names is the sale of domains that have become free (excluded from the national domain zone registry) for some reason, in order to resume their functioning, as well as to provide financial assistance to orphanages in Belarus.

Last year, 17 such auctions took place: from January 16 to December 19. The result is the registration of 496 domain names (“.by” – 484 domains, “.bel” – 12 domain names). At the same time, based on the results of all stages of the bidding, 81,420 Belarusian rubles were transferred to orphanages as donations.