With more than 800,000 domain names and growing fast, the land rush for the .eu domain has been a huge success, but not entirely without problems.

The so-called “land rush” period for .eu domain names started today at 11:00 CET. Now everyone can register .eu domain names, not just companies and copyright holders.

The response has been overwhelming, with the systems initially being occupied with the massive amounts of pre-registered domain names.

"The registration system is working smoothly. At 13:22 we had 552,000 active domain names," said Patrik Lindén, EURid’s Communications Manager in a phone interview with Ipwalk.

This positive outlook is shared by Frederick Schiwek, the VP of International Business Development at EuroDNS: “Until now the land rush is running very stable and very good for us. It is 15:00 now and we are still submitting names.”

The high demand has not been entirely without problems. The EURid whois service has been extremely unresponsive, with whois.eu appearing to be down since 10:58 (according to the Ipwalk uptime tool GIGRIB), just two minutes before the land rush started.

Patrik Lindén explained that even though whois.eu is not technically down, it is being accessed by such a high number of clients that its response time is very slow.

EuroDNS were not surprised by the whois overload problem. “We expected that the whois will not work any more during the land rush because of a high load,” said Frederick Schiwek.

It remains to be seen if .eu will become the European .com, but the initial public launch of .eu domain names is a definite success.

For details about the uptime of whois.eu, visit this Ipwalk GIGRIB uptime page: http://uptime.ipwalk.com/site/month...me/www.whois.eu.

About Ipwalk
Ipwalk is a global information company providing statistics based on a continuously updated database. Ipwalk is processing and analyzing more than 60 million domain names and 50 million IP addresses on a daily basis. This information is provided through the Ipwalk.com website and through customized trend reports.

For more information, please contact;
Peter Alguacil, Ipwalk AB, +46-21-124248, peter@ipwalk.com