News archive

What’s Next for .ee? Big Ideas and Smart Changes

Our colleague Mare has already written about our main goals for 2025. Now, let’s take a look at some of the more technical and detailed changes we’re planning.

New year, new strategy

To us, a strategy is a plan for how to reach our big goal: to be the best domain registry in the world for both registrars and .ee domain users.

Sounds big, right? But we’re serious! We already get great reviews from users and registrars—the satisfaction rate has been over 90%. In 2024, 86% of people renewed their domains, which is also a pretty good result. Our system was up and running 99.99% of the time—that’s world-class reliability! We aim to keep things simple, flexible, and secure for users and stable and transparent for our registrars.

Less Data, More Freedom

We made some big changes starting February 1st:

• You no longer have to add admin or tech contacts unless you want to. Before, if you didn’t name anyone, your details were used in every role. Now, if you don’t want to add extra people, you don’t have to.

• Only one name server is required (instead of two). Your domain will still work with just one, although two is safer and still recommended by us.

• We wanted to remove the phone number requirement, but a new EU rule (called NIS2) obligates us to collect it. So instead, we’re looking for ways to use it better—like helping with safer logins.

• We’re thinking about letting people register .ee domains for just one month at a time. This could be handy for testing or short-term projects.

Bye-Bye, PayPal

Since 2015, we’ve let registrants use a PayPal Verified account to verify their identity. But things have changed within the last nine years, and PayPal is no longer a strong enough tool for identity checks.

That’s why we have created eeID, our global identity tool. It’s safer and works almost anywhere in the world. Therefore, we are leaving registrant identifications via PayPal to the past by the end of this year.

Moving to the Cloud

We’ve decided to move all our systems to the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Other registries like Sweden and Belgium already use AWS for their domain systems, and Amazon is giving us lots of support for the move. Although in times like these an important question is raised - as we cannot trust the biggest economy in the world is it still safe or smart to invest in their technology or has it become a different side of the same coin with the economy number two? 

We hope to fully run everything from the cloud by the end of 2025. For a little while, we’ll keep our old physical system too—just in case—but eventually, we’ll switch over completely.

Smarter, Faster, and More Secure

We’re always looking for ways to:

• Automate tasks

• Improve our systems

• Work smarter

• Make things more secure

We’re also working toward ISO 27001 certification, which is a fancy way of saying we’re upgrading our security and making our processes more transparent.

Auction Portal and its future

People often ask us if the .ee registry would develop an addition to our Auction Portal and launch an aftermarket to .ee domains. So, we’re planning to conduct an in-depth analysis for this possibility and involve our community and registrars in building a system that serves everyone’s interests in the best possible way. The aftermarket would offer a secure and reliable environment for the community to sell their .ee domains. Therefore, we provide an official marketplace, making the sale of .ee domains more secure and efficient.

It will be a busy year—and we’ve already made great progress in the first few months! We’re excited to keep going, step by step, to become the best domain registry in the world. Stay tuned!