ICANN published its 2026 new gTLD application list on October 7, and hosting companies and registrars will notice quickly how little of it concerns them. The strings that defined the 2012 round for the industry, such as .web, .host, .cloud, .site, .app and .online, already sit in the root zone, so nobody could apply for them again. Among 1,615 applications from 481 applicants, the closest hosting-related names are .vps, .server, .dns and .cdn, each drawing one or two bidders.
The crowds went elsewhere. .agent attracted 13 applicants, including Google, Meta and OpenAI, while .bit drew 11, and .api, .brand and .hub drew ten each. By the count in ICANN’s contention file, 891 applications, or 55 percent, sit in 263 contention sets. That compares with 39 percent in 2012, though ICANN calculated the older figure after a string similarity review that has not yet run this round.
Portfolio registries dominate the big fights. Link Freedom Group filed 158 applications and XYZ.COM 139, while GoDaddy Registry, filing as Registry Services, LLC, submitted 77. Domain Name Wire credits Identity Digital with 216 applications, though it does not appear under its own name. Link Freedom was also the first to use the replacement window, abandoning 19 primary strings within a day.
Hosting names appear in smaller numbers. Aruba is the sole applicant for .vps, one of 20 strings it filed. Hostinger filed four, .gen, .hub, .human and .lab, and every one faces competition. Squarespace submitted 15, and Cloudflare, Wix and Shopify applied for their own brand strings.
Several dates will shift the numbers. Applicants can swap a contested string for a replacement until October 21, and ICANN confirms the final list on November 17. Withdrawing before November 27 returns $147,500 of the $227,000 fee, so every contention count remains provisional.
For registrars, the practical picture is short. The hosting extensions they already carry are unaffected, and the most requested strings are the least likely to be delegated soon, since large sets resolve through settlement or auction. The earliest additions to a catalog will likely come from uncontested generics, roughly 408 by one count, and .vps is one of them.
