It’s been almost a year now since I’ve invested in .PH and .COM.PH domains. I’ve made a lot of costly mistakes but also learned the most valuable lessons in the field of domaining. As a stakeholder in dotPH (being a PH domain investor), I’d like to see dotPH grow as my domains would have more value. In this post, I’d like to give my recommendations to dotPH to be able to help us, as well as them, to improve .PH and .COM.PH domains further.

One of the best things about .PH and .COM.PH domains is that it somehow felt like the 90′s where a lot of premium generic keyword domains are still available for hand registration. Here I experienced how it would be like owning one of the premium domains and how it really ranks you high in Search Engines.

My recommendations to dotPH

Marketing support

Everyone in the Philippines has started to love our country more, people are becoming more patriotic towards our country (unlike before that it was only about US or imports). It would be nice if they can sponsor events, make print ads or do more promotions to raise awareness on why use .PH or .COM.PH. You do have a Why.PH, why not expand it to offline print ads to get the support of more people to invest or to develop their websites with your domains. We’d love to see more promotion and ads to encourage people to get into .PH.

Unregistered domains list

Andre have told me about a website that used to list all the unregistered domains with traffic before. What would be nice is if dotPH could release a website like that but instead on focusing on traffic, it would be all the dictionary word domains listed in it. That way you promote what is still unregistered and encourage or entice people to register it first. Developers are constantly on the look out for domains they can use on their projects (which they don’t have an idea on what to name).

Lower Registration / Renewal Fees

Registration Fees are really high, I understand that with high fees comes more quality and serious developers. But the problem is it attracts domainers like us into it and discourages a lot of developers in the process. A lot of web developers I know of, have a great plan on how they intend to develop but are discouraged by the registration fees compared to .COM or .NET. It would be great you can lower fees (but I’m not saying that you should drop it down to .COM prices) or do a promotion once in a while to encourage more people to join. I’ve also had a message from disappointed domainer, that he’s about to lose his big client since he can’t use his prepaid credits (as a registrar) to renew his domains. (I still am waiting for a reply from dotPH for this matter) But if this is so then it is unacceptable as we did pay for it a lot.

Payment Options

In the Philippines, a lot of people still don’t trust the web. They think of the web as a dark place that is full of hackers and their data is always at risk. But the great thing is that Paypal is doing a great job getting them to purchase online. It would be nice if dotPH could start to accept different payment options which can really help them decide faster.

Advancement of system

Right now, as a registrar, you need Internet Explorer to go to the admin. But I use Ubuntu and MAC, I feel that it would be great to have a cross browser support since when I purchased my registrar credits the person I spoke to said that you’re working on having it work on FireFox. I’m not saying that you should be able to make it like Godaddy’s (which if you can, that would be really really great), but, at least, show us that you’re improving the system and it would be easier for us to use it. Just imagine owning 100 or 1000+ domains and try changing the nameserver one by one.