Zoho Now Offering Free .in and .co.in Domains to Businesses in India

Zoho, an online business and IT company, on Wednesday announced that it will be offering .in and .co.in domains to micro, small and medium sized businesses in India, bundled with basic versions of its suite of application - Zoho Sites, Zoho Mail and Zoho Docs. The firm says the entire package will be available for free.

Announcing the news, Zoho on its official blog says, "Starting tomorrow [Thursday], we are giving away .in and .co.in domains to businesses in India."

"India's Micro, Small and Medium sized businesses have seen unprecedented growth over the last decade. Bangalore, in particular, has seen a visible rise, being one of the most entrepreneur friendly cities in the world. With trends pointing towards continuing growth in the industry, we believe that our business essentials package, combined the domain, would give these companies the much-required introduction to the cloud. The entire package will be given away for free," it added.

The company explains that the Zoho Sites is a drag-and-drop website builder which will help users to create websites without having to go through a single line of code; Zoho Mail is a business-class email hosting provider with integrated Calendar, Tasks, Notes and Contacts apps, and lastly, the Zoho Docs will provide users with an organization-wide document creation, sharing and management system.

India-based e-commerce portal Infibeam earlier this month launched a new generic top-level domain. The .ooo domain will be available to websites across the world. Infibeam made the announcement after it was allowed to use the domain by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

Google back in June launched its Google Domains service that offered domain name registration, along with services like a website builder and email services. The move by Google brought it into competition with companies like GoDaddy and BigRock.

The Mountain View, California-based search giant had highlighted the simplicity of its service, and also brought focus to the new set of top-level domains such as .guru and .photography instead the of the more familiar .com type of website address.

In August, the Indian government launched the .bharat domain name in Devanagari script covering eight languages including Hindi.