Tomorrow (28 July), the ZA Central Registry (ZACR) NPC celebrates 30 years of administering South Africa’s presence on the world wide web.
This includes the close to 1,2-million domain co.za second-level domain, as well as the web.za, org.za and net.za domains.
“We’ve been on the job for almost 11 000 (10 957.5) days and never once have any of the ZACR-administered domains experienced a single day of downtime due to our system failure,” says Lucky Masilela, CEO of ZACR.
“This uninterrupted service sustained over 30 years is the reason ZACR is Africa’s best performing registry operator with the highest domain name registration numbers.”
ZACR is a previous winner of the Best African Registry category awarded by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The ZACR was also one of the first registry operators in the world to implement a Mark Validation System for protecting Intellectual Property Rights within its domain name system.
ZACR was incorporated 30 years ago as UniForum SA on 28 July 1988. The non-profit was founded initially to promote open systems and networks. In 1995 UniForum SA was tasked with administering the fledgling co.za second-level domain within the greater .za namespace.
While it took several years to register the first 450 co.za domains, there are today close to 1,2-million domain names ending in co.za, web.za, org.za and net.za.
The ZACR’s subsidiary, Registry Africa is also the administrator of the dotAfrica (.africa) geographic Top Level Domain (gTLD) which has over 17 000 domain name registrations and is already making a significant positive impact on Africa’s presence in cyberspace.
Many leading global and continental organisations are buying into the dotAfrica (.africa) brand promise.
For their part, the ZAdotCities domains of .capetown (‘dotCapeTown’), .joburg (‘dotJoburg’) and .durban (‘dotDurban’) have notched up over 10 000 domain name registrations.