Belarus: A Deep Dive into the Shared Hosting and Domain Market

Active Cloud was founded more than 15 years ago and was the first company to sell hosting services in Belarus. Currently, it’s the leader of the local shared hosting and domains market. The company also has an office in Moscow providing hosting and domain solutions. Marina Gubko, product manager of Active Cloud, sat down with us to share the inner workings of the Belarusian hosting market.

Belarus and Sales Strategies

Hosting in Belarus

'We are the leaders in our market. Customers prefer to subscribe for a fixed period at a certain tariff. We don’t want to have only one product in our portfolio. We’ve moved from being only a cloud provider to being a cloud aggregate. We offer cloud solutions, hosting domains, security solutions, Microsoft solutions, and more.' In Belarus, people prefer to buy .by or .бел (.bel) domains. More than 80% of the customers prefer to buy the .by domain, and there are around 127,000 .by and 15,000 .бел domains registered.

Hosting market laws in Belarus

When it comes to hosting businesses in Belarus, there are several laws and regulations they should adhere to. First and foremost, the company needs to be a resident of Belarus to become a registrar. There are also technical and financial requirements. From the technical side, it’s necessary to have fault-tolerant systems using encrypted certificate channels. From the financial side, the registrar should have net assets of at least 30,000 Euros to start working, which makes it hard for smaller companies to become registrars. Another barrier is that people expect to have 24/7 support in Russian or Belarussian. English is not a popular language for customer support in Belarus.

Market growth and pricing

According to Gubko, the Belarusian market for domains is growing significantly, registering around 10% annual growth. For hosting, it’s 15% growth. When it comes to price, the price of .by domain is fixed by a dedicated government organization to stand at $12/year. Shared hosting tariff can be compared to foreign providers, but because Active Cloud provides additional services, people usually don’t switch to foreign providers, as there is no additional value. Another thing making it difficult for foreign companies to enter the Belarusian hosting market is the payments: in Belarus, it is forbidden to sell with dollars, and the companies need to accept Belarussian rubles.

Foreign Companies in Belarus

Larger companies, like Wix or Weebly, have a presence in Belarus. However, according to Gubko, they are not very popular. The reason for this is that they don’t adhere to some of the rules, for example, they don’t sell in the local currency and don’t host in Belarus.

Website Builders in Belarus

In Belarus, the popularity of website builders has seen rapid growth. The main reason is the simplicity and flexibility of website builders, allowing them to make websites quickly and hassle-free. Tools like website import simplify the process of migration as well, making it easy to create any kind of website.

Marketing Tips from Active Cloud

'In the website hosting business, it’s hard to find any kind of know-how or fixed promotional strategies,' says Marina. 'We are trying to give our customers as much value as we can. For example, we had an agreement with Google AdWords Yandex Direct. When people purchased hosting or domains, they received special promotions allowing them to run ads on Google or Yandex for free in the limits of $55-60. This was especially useful for customers who just created a website and wanted to promote it.' Additionally, the company offers free technical support by phone and mail, as well as gives free mailboxes to hosting clients.

Final Words

The belarussian hosting market, as a newly emerging one, comes with its set of challenges. However, as a rapidly growing market, it also offers many opportunities. Looking into the nitty-gritty of how hosting and domain businesses operate in Belarus was very interesting for us, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed writing this recap, and that it has given you some practical knowledge you can use for your business. Good luck!