When Lloyd Borrett set up a website in the mid-1990s for a local computer company, he had to move overseas to find a suitable domain name – well before it was fashionable to do so.

The restrictions on Australian domain names meant that he could not reserve expert.com.au for Expert, an IT business later acquired by Indian outsourcer Infosys for $31 million. Similar generic names such as florist.com.au or computer.com.au were not for sale.

Basically, any word in the dictionary was excluded, said Mr Borrett, who now works for anti-virus and security company AVG . So I went to Norfolk Island instead and registered expert.nf because they had just opened up a registry there.

The Australian rules were gradually relaxed and the trade in domain names ending in .au has boomed.

Last night, total registrations on Australia’s country-code top-level domain reached 2 million, indicating that Australian businesses, which make up almost 86 per cent of .au domain names, prefer local internet real estate. Almost a quarter of a million .au domains have been sold this financial year — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that hit the WordPress.com blog publishing platform last week originated from China, according to the founder of the site.

A DDOS attack involves harnessing hundreds or thousands of computers to simultaneously bombard a web site with data so it becomes overwhelmed. The computers in such attacks have typically been infected with malware so they can be used without the consent and awareness of their owners.

The attacks, which brought slowdowns to the WordPress.com site, were severe enough to interfere with the company’s three data centers in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas. The site has since returned to normal as of Monday — via redwolf.newsvine.com