The LK Domain Registry: What Are They Doing Wrong?

The LK Domain Registry. The one place that you must go to, to obtain a .lk domain for your website. Think of the LK Domain Registry as a ledger of sorts, keeping track of all registered .lk domains. While you have services such as GoDaddy and Name.com giving you the ability to pick and choose your preferred TLD or Top Level Domain, the LK Domain Registry focuses more on the local side of things.

We decided to do an evaluation on the current state of the LK Domain Registry to see what people have to say about it. Is it the next best thing since sliced bread? Is it a web domain owner’s nightmare? Well, we spoke to a few entrepreneurs who own .lk domains and who have experience in managing websites to get their opinion on where the LK Domain Registry was doing things right and where they can improve. Here’s what we found out.

The LK Domain Registry Handles Payments… Okay.

For some, such as Shageevan Sachithanandan, Director at MyStore.lk, and Ayubo.lk, the experience with the LK Domain Registry has been quite straightforward. His only quirk with the system was that they should implement a method for recurring payments so that the payment for the domain would be automatically charged from the customer, thus alleviating the need to remember to pay for their domains and risk losing them.

For Indi Samarajiva, Director at Yamu, the process of interacting with the LK Domain Registry was fairly straightforward as well. The only issue he faced when trying to register a domain around 9 months ago was that the actual payment button wouldn’t work on most browsers. He suspected that it was an unresponsive Javascript code that was causing the button to malfunction. In addition, he also spoke about how a simple bank transfer took almost a month to be registered in their accounts. Apart from that, he had no complaints.

Sloppiness Breeds Inefficiency

Kasun (name changed due to privacy) explained his experience with registering a domain via the LK Domain Registry. His biggest problem was that it was difficult to make domain name changes. Unlike international domain registrars, such as GoDaddy or Name.com, you can’t change the name yourself.

Instead, you have to directly contact the LK Domain Registry to do it for you. To make such changes, one has to either send an email or directly call the LK Domain Registry. But good luck getting a prompt response. They too operate with the “Sri Lankan Government Office” mentality.

So if you call at 11.30, you’re most likely going to be told that the relevant party has gone to lunch. Frustratingly, you decide to call after lunch. You’re then told that they’ve gone to get their tea. Then you call again just before closing time, only to be told they’ve already left. So at the end of the day, you’ve wasted your time calling the office, and you’re no closer to getting your issue sorted.

Help is only a phone call away; if they answer

In the event you do manage to reach them, the LK Domain Registry, according to Kasun employs a manual method for processing orders. This can take anywhere from 24 hours to 48 hours. So you sometimes end up spending about 3 days doing absolutely nothing. This is why, Kasun explained that he goes out of his way to buy international domains and not .lk domains, even if the former is more expensive.

The thing is, if you’re tech-savvy and you have a domain purchased from an international domain name registrar, you can change whatever needs to be changed with minimal downtime. However, if you’re on a .lk domain, you will have to go through the LK Domain Registry to make all the changes. This, in turn, takes a lot more time.

Something else that Kasun explained was about the lengthy process needed to set up a .lk domain. Granted, this was a few years ago, so the process is more streamlined now. One thing he did mention was that your mobile number must be registered on a Sri Lankan mobile network. So if you’re in Norway, for example, and you’re looking to buy a .lk domain, you will first have to make sure that you have a registered Sri Lankan mobile phone number. This is required and is a mandatory field on the LK Domain Registry sign up form.

If the LK Domain Registry wants to sell domains to foreigners, they should ideally add functionality to add phone numbers from other networks as well. For example, in the video below, you can see how a little island is making a big name for itself by selling domains.

So you want to change your name server? That’s cute

Our Co-Founder, Andrew Jebaraj’s views were also critical towards the LK Domain Registry. Andrew explained that one primary feature that the LK Domain Registry should implement is to allow people to buy domains and allow them to change the name server. In case you didn’t know, the Nameserver is part of the DNS or Domain Name Service. It is used to translate the human-memorable domain names and hostnames into the corresponding numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

According to Andrew, propagation or changing of a domain name server takes around 24 hours. If we are to go through the LK Domain Registry, that process takes even longer, as opposed to doing it via something like GoDaddy or Name.com. If you are on a Google DNS, then the process is almost instantaneous.

There are still some bugs in the machine

Overall though, we find ourselves at a bit of a standstill. We have people for and against the LK Domain Registry. Both parties have compelling points backed up by their own experiences. By and large, no one can say that the LK Domain Registry is bad at what they do. It’s just that we feel that there are companies and 3rd parties that could do the job a lot better.

Because of this, you find people such as Kasun opting to purchase international web domains rather than local ones, simply because they are easier to manage and are less hassling. So yes, overall, the LK Domain Registry is doing a good job. But the point is, they can do it better.