Entity Map

.com domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/com/ · Wikipedia

The default address of the commercial internet. The most recognized extension in the world, and still the one buyers assume by default. Its price-cap agreement and thin-registry structure matter more than most owners realize.

.com is short for commercial. It was created for commercial entities and businesses, but that expectation was abandoned in the mid-1990s and .com has been an unrestricted, general-purpose namespace ever since. Its IANA type is a generic top-level domain (gTLD); ICANN's registry agreement listing records it as Non-Sponsored, and it is not a country-code TLD, however American its origins.

.com Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone. There is no nexus requirement, no business-registration or trademark requirement, no documentation, and no post-registration verification by the registry. Individuals, nonprofits, governments, hobby projects and parked portfolios all register .com freely. Nothing is enforced because there is nothing to enforce. The one check every registrant meets comes from the registrar: under the ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars must verify the registrant contact's email address or telephone number.

.com Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

ICANN's base gTLD registry agreements contain no price caps at all. .com's caps come from a separate United States government instrument, the NTIA Cooperative Agreement — which is why .com is capped while .net, .org, .info and .biz are not, and why ICANN is not the body regulating .com pricing. The formula is specific.

.com Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.net domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/net/ · Wikipedia

Originally for network infrastructure, unrestricted since the 1990s. The natural second choice when the .com is taken, with no eligibility rules and the same registry operator behind it.

.net is short for network. It was created for organizations involved in networking technologies and infrastructure — network providers, internet service providers, and the operators of the internet's plumbing — but that intent has had no operative force for decades. Its IANA type is a generic top-level domain (gTLD), non-sponsored and legacy, with an IANA registration date of 1 January 1985. The first .net registered was nordu.net, the Nordic university network, that same day.

.net Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. There is no nexus requirement, no networking-industry test, no documentation, no validation and no registry verification. The for-network-organizations framing is purely historical. This cuts both ways. Some buyers wrongly assume they are ineligible because they are not an infrastructure company; others assume, more damagingly, that a .net signals technical credentials to visitors. It confers nothing. The only check is the registrar-level contact verification required of all gTLD registrars.

.net Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.net has no external price cap. Unlike .com it is not covered by the NTIA Cooperative Agreement, and its only constraint is the ICANN registry agreement, which permits Verisign to raise the wholesale fee by up to 10% a year. That is a looser leash than .com's 7% in four years out of six, and the asymmetry surprises most buyers: the smaller, less commercially critical zone has more pricing freedom, purely because no US government instrument applies to it.

.net Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.org domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/org/ · Wikipedia

The default for non-profits, though open to anyone. Carries a credibility no marketing budget can buy, and survived one of the most consequential governance fights in domain history.

.org is short for organization. It was created as the catch-all for organizations that did not fit the other original categories, and it remains the default extension for nonprofits, charities, NGOs, foundations, open-source projects and standards bodies. Its IANA type is a generic top-level domain (gTLD), non-sponsored and legacy. Despite its mission-driven registry, .org is not a sponsored TLD : a sponsored TLD has a defined community and enforceable eligibility rules, and .org has neither.

.org Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. This is the most misunderstood fact about .org: there is no requirement to be a nonprofit . No charity registration number, no 501(c)(3) determination, no documentation, no validation, no registry verification. For-profit companies and individuals register .org freely and legitimately every day. The nonprofit association is convention and public perception, not policy. It is strong enough to be a real branding asset, and strong enough that exploiting it deliberately can look deceptive, but it is not enforced.

.org Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

The price caps are gone. Until 2019 the .org registry agreement capped the wholesale price and permitted only limited annual increases. ICANN proposed removing those caps in March 2019, moving .org onto the standard base gTLD registry agreement, which contains none. The proposal drew one of the most lopsided public comment records in ICANN's history — 3,252 comments opposed and 6 in favor — and ICANN removed the caps anyway. PIR then did the opposite of what everyone feared.

.org Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.io domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/io/ · Wikipedia

The startup and developer default, and a territory in transition. The technology sector's favorite extension is a country code belonging to a territory whose sovereignty changed hands in 2024. What that means for registrants is the question nobody answers clearly.

.io is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory - the Chagos Archipelago, in the central Indian Ocean. Delegated on 16 September 1997, its IANA type is country-code rather than generic - a distinction with real consequences for policy, privacy, and long-term risk. The territory has no permanent civilian population.

.io Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

At the second level - the part you actually buy, as in example.io - .io is open to anyone, anywhere: no local presence requirement, no nexus declaration, no identity or credential check beyond ordinary registrar verification. Third-level registrations historically required residency in the territory, which given the absence of a permanent civilian population made them unobtainable - a curiosity rather than a real restriction.

.io Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.io is a premium-priced namespace by design: wholesale cost sits far above legacy generic TLDs and there has never been a cheap-forever tier. What matters most is that renewals are not discounted. Registrars often run a modest first-year promotion, but the standing renewal is the real cost of ownership - the largest single source of registrant surprise here. The registry has raised wholesale prices repeatedly and scheduled more: Identity Digital announced a 12% increase effective 19 January 2027, applying to renewals as well as new registrations.

.io Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.ai domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/ai/ · Wikipedia

Anguilla's country code, transformed by the AI boom. A Caribbean island of roughly fifteen thousand people now earns a material share of its national budget from two letters, and moved to a new registry arrangement in 2025.

.ai is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) assigned to Anguilla, a British Overseas Territory in the eastern Caribbean with a population of roughly 15,000. Delegated on 16 February 1995, it is one of the older ccTLD delegations and sat commercially dormant for close to three decades. What changed had nothing to do with the Caribbean. AI reads as artificial intelligence, and since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 .ai has become the de facto namespace for AI companies, tools, and products.

.ai Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.ai is open. There is no local presence requirement, no Anguillan nexus, no eligibility declaration to sign, and no credential check, for individuals or companies, anywhere in the world. The only real gate is commercial rather than eligibility-based: the two-year minimum term described below. One policy applies after registration. The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy - the arbitration process trademark owners use to recover infringing registrations - is available for .ai.

.ai Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.ai is among the most expensive mainstream extensions, and its structure compounds that in a way buyers consistently underestimate: because the minimum term is two years, the minimum commitment is double whatever annual figure is advertised. There is no promotional-first-year structure at the registry level: renewals are priced the same as new registrations at wholesale, so what you pay to register is broadly what you pay indefinitely, plus increases.

.ai Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.co domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/co/ · Wikipedia

Colombia's country code, marketed globally as short for company. The most successful repurposing of a country code into a global commercial namespace, and a useful lesson in what that costs.

.co is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD — a two-letter extension assigned to a country or territory under the ISO 3166-1 standard) for Colombia. IANA classifies it as country-code, not generic, and it was delegated on 24 December 1991. Whatever the marketing implies, .co is not an abbreviation of company, corporation or commerce. It belongs to Colombia, and the Colombian state governs it.

.co Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

At the second level — the ordinary example.co form — .co is fully open. No domicile requirement, no Colombian nexus, no declaration, no documentation. Anyone may register in real time, and because nothing is declared there is no audit exposure and no risk of cancellation for a false statement. The third level splits in two. The open zones .com.co, .net.co and .nom.co are available generally, and a .org.co zone is documented historically.

.co Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.co sits in the mid-premium band: more expensive than legacy generic extensions, cheaper than the country codes that particular industries have bid up. Its defining pricing feature is the gap between the first year and every year after it. .co is among the most heavily first-year-discounted extensions at retail, which makes the proportional jump at renewal larger than for most extensions. Quote yourself the renewal, and multiply it by the years you intend to hold the name. Premium names.

.co Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.app domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/app/ · Wikipedia

HTTPS is mandatory, because the entire extension is HSTS preloaded. Google paid a record sum at auction for this extension, then made it the first where every site must serve over HTTPS or not load at all.

.app is short for application. IANA classifies it as a generic top-level domain: open, unsponsored, and a product of ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program. It is operated by Charleston Road Registry Inc., the registry subsidiary Google runs publicly as Google Registry, with the IANA delegation record last updated in April 2025. The string was delegated on 2 July 2015 and reached general availability on 8 May 2018, after a trademark sunrise from 29 March and a descending-price Early Access Program from 1 to 8 May. There has been no change of operator since.

.app Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere. There is no requirement to publish an application, no developer credential, no company verification and no geographic nexus. Registration is real time and first-come, first-served, and because nothing is declared there is nothing to audit and no false-declaration risk. The real constraints are syntactic and technical. Google Registry extensions accept labels of 3 to 63 characters, so one- and two-character .app names are not generally available, and the namespace is ASCII-only.

.app Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

At registry level .app is a standard-priced new gTLD for non-premium names. The gap between year one and year two is created by registrars rather than by Google: heavily discounted first-year offers that revert to a materially higher standard renewal are the norm. The renewal is the number that governs what a name costs you. Premium tiers exist and behave in a way that catches people out. Google Registry reserves short, generic and high-demand names at elevated pricing, and those names are generally premium at renewal as well as at registration.

.app Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.dev domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/dev/ · Wikipedia

HSTS preloaded like .app, so plain HTTP never works. The developer's extension, with the same mandatory-HTTPS rule as .app and the same capacity to surprise anyone who registers one blind.

.dev is short for developer, or development. IANA classifies it as a generic top-level domain from ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program: open, unsponsored, available to anyone. It is operated by Charleston Road Registry Inc., trading as Google Registry, the same operator that runs .app, with no change identified as of 2026. Google and Amazon both applied; Amazon withdrew in July 2014, leaving Google unopposed, in what ICANNWiki describes as following an assumed private deal.

.dev Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone. There is no proof of developer status to supply, no repository to link and no company to verify. Registration is open worldwide in real time, and because nothing is declared nothing can later be audited or revoked on eligibility grounds. The limits that exist are technical. Labels run from 3 to 63 characters, so one- and two-character names are not generally available, and the namespace is ASCII-only.

.dev Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.dev sits at a higher standard registry price point than most commodity new gTLDs, and is generally priced above .app at retail, positioned as a mid-premium developer namespace rather than a volume extension. That relative positioning is a market observation rather than a published figure. First-year discounting is common at registrar level, with renewals reverting to standard registry-driven pricing, so a portfolio priced on promotional first years produces an unpleasant anniversary twelve months later.

.dev Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.me domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/me/ · Wikipedia

Montenegro's country code, built for personal branding. Born directly out of the breakup of Yugoslavia and now a standard choice for personal sites, portfolios, and short branded links.

.me is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD — a two-letter extension assigned to a country or territory under the ISO 3166-1 standard) for Montenegro, a sovereign state in the Western Balkans, independent since 2006, a NATO member and an EU accession candidate. IANA classifies it as country-code, not generic. It was delegated on 24 September 2007. The generic pitch is unusually clean: me is the English first-person pronoun. From launch the namespace was marketed for personal branding, portfolios, CVs and domain hacks.

.me Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

At the second level, .me is fully open worldwide. No local presence, no nexus test, no citizenship condition, no documentation. Anyone may register in real time, and nothing is declared that could later be audited or found false. The third level is where people come unstuck. The zones co.me, net.me, org.me, edu.me, ac.me, gov.me, its.me and priv.me are reserved for Montenegrin citizens and Montenegrin-registered companies.

.me Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.me sits in the middle band — above legacy generic extensions, well below the country codes that particular industries have bid up. The cost of holding a standard .me is not the problem; misreading how it is priced is. .me is one of the most heavily promoted extensions at retail. First-year discounting is routine and often steep, and the standing renewal is meaningfully higher. The acquisition-to-renewal gap is proportionally wider than for most extensions, so the figure worth deciding on is the renewal, multiplied by your intended holding period.

.me Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.tv domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/tv/ · Wikipedia

Tuvalu's country code, and the original ccTLD monetisation deal. The extension that proved a country code could be a commodity, belonging to a nation facing a threat no other registry faces.

.tv is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD — a two-letter extension assigned to a country or territory under the ISO 3166-1 standard) for Tuvalu, a Polynesian island nation in the Pacific with a population of roughly 11,000. IANA classifies it as country-code, not generic. It was delegated on 18 March 1996. The generic pitch needs no explanation anywhere: TV means television.

.tv Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.tv is fully open. Anyone anywhere may register and transfer .tv domains, with no local presence requirement, no Tuvaluan nexus, no eligibility declaration and no documentation. There is nothing to be audited on and nothing to get wrong. Two structural notes. The registry reserves com.tv, net.tv, org.tv and gov.tv, so those third levels are unavailable. And the label rules are unusually permissive at the short end: 1 to 63 characters, letters, digits and hyphens, starting and ending with an alphanumeric.

.tv Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Premium tiering is the single most important thing to understand about .tv, and the source of more registrant grief than anything else about it. A large proportion of the names anyone would want are registry-premium rather than standard-priced: short labels, one- to three-character names, dictionary words, media and streaming keywords, and obvious brandables are overwhelmingly tiered. The critical mechanic is that premium .tv names carry premium renewal pricing that recurs every year.

.tv Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.cc domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/cc/ · Wikipedia

Run by Verisign on the same infrastructure family as .com. A country code for a territory of a few hundred people, operated by the company behind .com and sold worldwide without restriction.

.cc is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD — a two-letter extension assigned to a country or territory under the ISO 3166-1 standard) for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian external territory in the Indian Ocean with a population in the low hundreds. IANA classifies it as country-code, not generic. It was delegated on 13 October 1997, originally to eNIC. It is used almost entirely generically.

.cc Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.cc is genuinely open. There is no local presence requirement, no nexus to the Cocos Islands, no citizenship condition, no documentation and no eligibility declaration of any kind. Anyone worldwide may register in real time, and there is nothing that could later be audited or found false. The corollary is worth stating in the same breath, because buyers get this backwards in both directions: the absence of an eligibility gate does not make .cc a generic extension with ICANN's rulebook behind it.

.cc Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Verisign prices .cc as a premium-positioned country code: at the wholesale level it sits meaningfully above commodity new generic extensions and generally above .com itself. It is not a bargain extension, whatever a first-year offer suggests. That first-year offer is the trap. .cc is a perennial favorite for aggressive promotional pricing at retail, and the gap between the promotional first year and the standing renewal is among the widest in the market.

.cc Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.info domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/info/ · Wikipedia

The first unrestricted gTLD added after the original set. A genuine general-purpose alternative with a long track record, though one that carried a heavy spam reputation in its early years.

.info is short for information . It was built as an open, general-purpose extension for informational resources, though nothing has ever required a .info site to be informational. Its IANA type is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) , non-sponsored. It was one of the first seven new gTLDs ICANN approved in late 2000 - the first real expansion of the namespace since the 1980s - and the most commercially successful of that cohort.

.info Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

There are no eligibility restrictions. Anyone, anywhere, may register a .info for any lawful purpose - no nexus test, no documentation, no validation, no registry verification, and no obligation for the site to be informational or non-commercial. The only check that touches a registrant is a registrar duty rather than a .info rule: under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement, registrars must verify the registrant's contact email or phone number. Ignore that message and the domain can be suspended.

.info Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.info has no price caps . It moved onto the standard base gTLD registry agreement in the 2019 legacy-TLD renewals, alongside .org, .biz and .asia, which removed the earlier cap structure. Identity Digital raises prices in periodic portfolio-wide rounds . One took effect in early October 2024; a second on 6 October 2025 covered 231 top-level domains, with standard prices rising between 6% and 220% and a median increase of around 12%.

.info Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.biz domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/biz/ · Wikipedia

Created explicitly for business use. Launched alongside .info with a bona fide business-use requirement that is no longer meaningfully enforced.

.biz is a phonetic rendering of business , created explicitly as a business-oriented alternative to a saturating .com. It was one of the seven new gTLDs ICANN selected in late 2000, and its IANA registration date is 26 June 2001 - the same day as .info. Its classification needs care. IANA's root database labels .biz a restricted generic top-level domain , while ICANN's registry agreement listing records the current agreement, executed 30 June 2019, as Base, Non-Sponsored .

.biz Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.biz is the only widely used legacy gTLD that still carries a written eligibility restriction, and the enforcement question is what separates a useful answer from a copied one. Per ICANN's published .biz registration restrictions, a registration must be used or intended to be used primarily for bona fide business or commercial purposes .

.biz Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.biz has no price caps . It moved onto the standard base gTLD registry agreement in the 2019 legacy-TLD renewals, executed 30 June 2019, which removed the previous cap structure. GoDaddy Registry raises prices in periodic portfolio rounds rather than one-off adjustments - a documented example being an increase across 26 top-level domains effective 1 April 2025 - and .biz has been named in registrar price-increase notices alongside extensions such as .club and .vip.

.biz Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.pro domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/pro/ · Wikipedia

Created for licensed professionals, since opened up. Launched with genuine credential requirements for doctors, lawyers, and accountants, and progressively opened to everyone.

.pro stands for professional . IANA classifies it distinctively as a restricted generic top-level domain rather than a plain generic gTLD - a legacy of the credentialed-professionals mandate it launched with. It belongs to ICANN's 2000 proof-of-concept round, not the 2012 New gTLD Program. That classification now sits awkwardly against reality: the IANA type is still restricted generic, while the operative eligibility rules have not been restrictive since 2015.

.pro Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone. .pro has been fully unrestricted since 16 November 2015 . There is no license check, no certification requirement, no documentation and no verification step at registration; registrar policy documentation describes it plainly as an unrestricted TLD with no special registration requirements. The history matters because the assumption it created still lingers.

.pro Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.pro is priced above the commodity new gTLDs at the registry level. It is a legacy Identity Digital extension carrying a mid-tier wholesale fee rather than a volume play. Registry price increases are a live and material issue. One took effect on or around 19 January 2026 - widely reported at that date, though one registrar communication places it a few days earlier - and applied uniformly to new registrations, renewals and transfers , alongside simultaneous increases to .info and .io in the same Identity Digital adjustment.

.pro Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.tech domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/tech/ · Wikipedia

A descriptive extension for technology companies. One of the more successful descriptive new gTLDs, with a first-year and renewal price gap worth understanding before you commit.

.tech is short for technology. IANA classifies it as a generic top-level domain: open, unsponsored, and a product of ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program. It is aimed at technology companies, startups, technical products and technology media, and restricts nobody else. The registry operator is Radix Technologies Inc., part of the Radix registry group founded by Bhavin Turakhia, with the IANA delegation record last updated in April 2026. Radix won the string at auction and acquired the winning applicant, Dot Tech LLC, in October 2014.

.tech Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere. There is no requirement to be a technology company, no verification, no documentation and no geographic limitation. Registration is first-come, first-served in real time, and nothing is declared that could later be audited. Radix's Acceptable Use and Anti-Abuse Policy applies after registration, and it is a use restriction rather than an eligibility gate: it prohibits intellectual property infringement, cybersquatting, spam, phishing, malware distribution and financial scams, with suspension, cancellation or deletion as remedies.

.tech Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.tech has one of the widest first-year-to-renewal gaps of any major new gTLD, and this is the dominant fact about its pricing. Deep first-year discounts are routine at registrar level, and discounted multi-year bundles are sold through deal sites. The standard renewal is substantially higher than any of those entry prices, so budget the renewal and treat the promotion as a one-off saving. A registry-level price change took effect on 15 January 2026, and Radix has an established pattern of periodic adjustments.

.tech Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.cloud domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/cloud/ · Wikipedia

Operated by one of Europe's largest hosting providers. A precise fit for infrastructure and SaaS products, run by an Italian hosting company rather than a pure-play registry.

.cloud refers to cloud computing, and is aimed at cloud infrastructure, hosting, SaaS and cloud-adjacent services. IANA classifies it as a generic top-level domain: open and unsponsored, from ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program. The registry operator is ARUBA PEC S.p.A. of Ponte San Pietro, Italy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aruba S.p.A., one of Europe's largest hosting and cloud providers, with the IANA delegation record last updated in December 2025. Aruba has run .cloud since it won the contention set, with no change of operator identified.

.cloud Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone. The registry imposes no eligibility test. You do not need to operate a cloud service, sell cloud products, or have any technology connection whatsoever. There is no documentation, no verification and no geographic requirement; registration is real time and first-come, first-served. This deserves emphasis because the extension's name implies a category gate that does not exist.

.cloud Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.cloud is an accessible, volume-oriented new gTLD: its standard registry price sits toward the lower-middle of the range, and it is one of the more aggressively promoted extensions at retail. The gap between the first year and the renewal is wide, and it is created almost entirely by registrar acquisition promotions rather than by registry pricing. A promotional gap is a one-off saving that reverts on schedule; the standard renewal determines the cost over the name's life, and a batch registered in one promotion reverts on a single anniversary.

.cloud Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.xyz domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/xyz/ · Wikipedia

The highest-volume new gTLD, and the most argued about. Its launch produced one of the industry's longest-running arguments about what a registration number actually measures.

.xyz is a generic top-level domain from ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round. It is not restricted, not sponsored and not geographic, and the string is deliberately meaningless - it was positioned from the outset as a general-purpose alternative to .com rather than as a category label. That neutrality is the point: .xyz carries no semantic obligation, so it fits anything.

.xyz Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

There are no eligibility restrictions. Any individual or organization, anywhere, may register a .xyz for any lawful purpose - no nexus requirement, no documentation, no validation step and no registry verification. The only universal check is the registrar-side obligation under ICANN's Registrar Accreditation Agreement to verify the registrant's contact email or telephone number, which applies to every gTLD. Ignoring that message can get a domain suspended.

.xyz Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

The defining commercial characteristic of .xyz - and of the discount new gTLD cohort it leads - is the gap between what the domain costs to acquire and what it costs to keep . The registry sets a wholesale rate; registrars discount the first year only, frequently below their own cost, treating the registration as a customer-acquisition instrument, with the real margin in hosting, email and every renewal after the first. At least one major registrar gives the first year away entirely. That gap is not a promotion that will normalize.

.xyz Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.shop domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/shop/ · Wikipedia

Bought at auction for one of the highest sums ever paid for a gTLD. An unambiguous retail signal, and the clearest example of what a descriptive extension is worth to a registry.

.shop is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) delegated in ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round, aimed at retail and e-commerce. IANA classifies it as a standard, non-sponsored generic TLD: no community charter, no restriction on who may use it. The registry operator is GMO Registry, Inc. of Tokyo, part of the GMO Internet Group, which has run the extension since delegation with no change of operator and no change of back-end technical provider. GMO won the string at an ICANN auction on 28 January 2016, after nine applicants had contested it.

.shop Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere. Despite the retail semantics there are no eligibility restrictions on .shop: no requirement to operate a shop, no business registration, no country nexus, no identity or credential check beyond the contact-data obligations ICANN imposes on every gTLD registrar. With no declaration to make, there is no audit to fail and no extension-specific consequence for a false one.

.shop Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Live pricing appears elsewhere on this page; the structure is what should drive the decision, and on .shop it is extreme. The first-year price and the renewal price are effectively different products. Registrars discount the first year heavily, often to a small fraction of what the same name costs to keep, and the multiple is among the widest in the industry. The renewal rate itself is an ordinary mid-market gTLD rate, and it is higher than .com's. Two things follow.

.shop Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.store domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/store/ · Wikipedia

A retail extension with an aggressive first-year discount model. Widely promoted at very low introductory prices, which makes the renewal figure the only number that really matters.

.store is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) from ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round: open, unrestricted, and positioned as an e-commerce keyword extension in direct competition with .shop. IANA lists it as a standard generic TLD, with no sponsorship and no community charter. The registry operator is Radix Technologies Inc., operating through CO Services Cayman Limited. Two operator transfers appear in the IANA record and both are easy to misread: the chain runs DotStore Inc. to Radix FZC in 2021, then to Radix Technologies Inc. in 2024.

.store Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.store is open to anyone, anywhere. There is no requirement to operate a store, no company registration to produce, no country nexus, and no identity or credential verification beyond the contact-data accuracy obligations ICANN places on every gTLD registrar. Since there is no declaration to sign, there is no audit to fail and no extension-specific penalty for a false statement.

.store Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Live prices are shown elsewhere on this page; the structure is what should drive the decision. .store follows the standard Radix pattern of heavy promotional discounting in the first year at volume registrars, against a renewal rate at the upper end of the mid-market and materially above .com's. Within its own peer group, .store's renewal sits at the more expensive end. The gap is wide enough that the first-year price is not usable for planning.

.store Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.online domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/online/ · Wikipedia

A broad, generic alternative when the .com is gone. Among the largest new gTLDs by registration count, with the discount economics that go with it.

.online is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) from ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round. It is open and unrestricted and, unlike the sector keywords it competes with, makes no claim about what kind of business you run. IANA classifies it as a standard generic TLD with no sponsorship or community charter. The registry operator is Radix Technologies Inc. SEZC, operating through CO Services Cayman Limited, which also operates .store and .site.

.online Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere. .online carries no eligibility restrictions: no business requirement, no country nexus, no professional credential, no identity verification beyond the contact-data accuracy obligations ICANN imposes on all gTLD registrars. With no declaration to make, there is nothing to audit and no extension-specific consequence for misstatement.

.online Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Live pricing appears elsewhere on this page. The structure is what should shape the decision, and .online follows the Radix pattern precisely: aggressive promotional discounting in the first year at volume registrars, against a renewal rate in the mid to upper mid-market that sits above .com's. The two numbers are not the same product. The advertised first-year figure is an acquisition cost; what you will pay to own the name is the renewal rate multiplied by the years you expect to hold it, and beyond roughly two years .online costs more than .com.

.online Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.site domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/site/ · Wikipedia

Generic and inexpensive, with a registry back end that moved in 2026. A low-cost general-purpose option whose value depends entirely on whether you intend to renew it.

.site is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) from ICANN's 2012 new gTLD round. It is open, unrestricted, and the most semantically empty string in its commercial peer group, functioning as a straightforward synonym for website. IANA classifies it as a standard generic TLD with no sponsorship and no community charter. The registry operator is Radix Technologies Inc. SEZC, operating through CO Services Cayman Limited, in an IANA record last updated on 21 April 2026.

.site Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Anyone, anywhere. .site has no eligibility restrictions whatsoever: no business requirement, no nexus declaration, no professional credential, and no identity verification beyond the contact-data accuracy obligations that ICANN places on every gTLD registrar. Because there is no declaration, there is no audit and no extension-specific penalty for a false one.

.site Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Live prices are shown elsewhere on this page; what belongs here is the shape. .site follows the standard Radix pattern of aggressive promotional first-year pricing against a renewal rate well above .com's. Domain Name Wire, reporting on registrar practice in 2026, put a .site renewal at roughly double a .com renewal at one registrar, though renewal rates vary widely and that is an observation at a point in time rather than a fixed ratio.

.site Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.us domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/us/ · Wikipedia

A declared US nexus is mandatory, and WHOIS privacy is prohibited. The only major extension where you must formally declare your connection to the country and cannot hide your details afterwards.

.us is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United States of America, assigned on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code US. Delegated on 15 February 1985 and administered at first by Jon Postel at the University of Southern California, it is the oldest country-code domain in existence. Direct second-level registration opened on 24 April 2002; beneath it the older geographic hierarchy codified in RFC 1386 and RFC 1480, the ci.boulder.co.us style of name, still resolves.

.us Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.us is restricted, and the restriction is formal. Every registration is governed by the usTLD Nexus Requirements Policy, which recognizes three ways to qualify. Category 1 is a natural person who is a United States citizen, a permanent resident of the United States or any of its possessions or territories, or whose primary place of domicile is in the United States.

.us Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

The registry fee is set under the NTIA contract rather than by a commercial pricing strategy: a low, flat wholesale fee per year with no history of meaningful registry-level increases. There is no registry-level split between first-year and renewal pricing, so any gap between the two is your registrar's margin, addressable by moving to a registrar whose renewal price you can live with.

.us Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.uk domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/uk/ · Wikipedia

Direct second-level registration, opened alongside .co.uk in 2014. The shorter British option, with a transfer mechanism that works nothing like the auth codes used by generic extensions.

.uk is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It carries a well-known anomaly: the UK's ISO 3166-1 code is GB, not UK. The British academic network had standardised on uk before RFC 920 designated GB in October 1984 and declined to move. .gb was reserved, never meaningfully used, and can no longer be registered.

.uk Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

There is no eligibility requirement for .uk. None. No UK residence, no UK company, no local presence, no nexus declaration, no documentation. Registration is first come, first served and open to any person or entity anywhere in the world. The restrictions in the .uk family sit in the other third-level namespaces, and buyers occasionally trip over them: .co.uk and .org.uk - no restriction in practice, whatever the commercial and non-commercial intent behind the labels. .me.uk - the registrant must be a natural person.

.uk Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Nominet charges a flat wholesale fee per year, and the same fee for a direct .uk as for a .co.uk. There is no registry premium for the shorter form and no premium name tier in the ordinary namespace. The structure that does matter is two-tier. Nominet members pay the per-annum wholesale rate for any term from one to ten years, while non-members pay a substantially higher fixed rate for a two-year block.

.uk Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.co.uk domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/co-uk/ · Wikipedia

Still the default commercial address in the United Kingdom. Far more widely held than direct .uk, and the extension British customers actually expect to see.

.co.uk is not a top-level domain in its own right. It is a second-level namespace inside the .uk country code, which makes a registration under it, yourname.co.uk, technically a third-level registration. IANA delegates uk to Nominet; Nominet defines co.uk beneath it. There is no separate registry, no separate contract and no separate policy set.

.co.uk Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Nothing is required, and this bears stating plainly because buyers routinely assume otherwise. There is no UK residence requirement. There is no UK company requirement: no Companies House number, no VAT registration, no trading history. There is no local presence or agent requirement, and no documentation of any kind is collected at registration. A person in Sydney, Sao Paulo or Seattle can register one this afternoon. The co label nominally means commercial, but Nominet does not enforce that and never has.

.co.uk Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Nominet charges a flat wholesale fee per domain-year, and the same fee for a .co.uk as for a direct .uk. The shorter form carries no registry premium, and there is no registry-level premium name tier in the ordinary namespace. The two-tier structure applies here as across .uk. Nominet members pay the per-annum wholesale rate for any term from one to ten years; non-members pay a substantially higher fixed rate for a two-year block, so buying through a non-member reseller costs more for no difference in what you receive.

.co.uk Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.ca domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/ca/ · Wikipedia

Canadian Presence Requirements are real and are audited. CIRA enforces its eligibility rules more actively than most registries, and revocation on audit is a genuine outcome.

.ca is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada, registered directly at the second level as yourname.ca. Provincial third-level namespaces such as .on.ca, .qc.ca and .bc.ca still resolve, but CIRA stopped accepting new registrations under them on 12 October 2010. The registry is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), a Canadian not-for-profit based in Ottawa, incorporated on 30 December 1998, to which ICANN redelegated .ca on 1 December 2000. There has been no change of operator since.

.ca Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.ca is restricted to registrants who satisfy CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements. In scope these are the strictest rules in the country-code group, because they cover every registration with no unrestricted fallback namespace. In definition they are broad: the policy sets out eighteen qualifying categories, and a registrant needs to fit only one. Canadian citizen , of the age of majority in their province or territory. Permanent resident , ordinarily resident in Canada and of the age of majority.

.ca Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

CIRA is a member-based non-profit and sets a single flat wholesale fee per domain-year. There is no promotional first-year registry price, no tiered renewal structure and no registry premium name tier. Any difference between a first-year price and a renewal price is your registrar's decision, and no CIRA wholesale price change has been verified for 2024 to 2026. Restoration after expiry costs materially more than a renewal.

.ca Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.com.au domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/com-au/ · Wikipedia

Australian presence plus a close and substantial connection. Australia requires not only local presence but a demonstrable link between the registrant and the name itself.

The .com.au namespace belongs to Australia and is not a top-level domain in its own right. IANA delegates au ; .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA) defines com.au beneath it, so yourname.com.au is a third-level registration governed by auDA's licensing rules rather than ICANN consensus policy. .au was created on 5 March 1986, when Jon Postel allocated it to Kevin Robert Elz at the University of Melbourne.

.com.au Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Two independent eligibility tests apply, and a registrant must pass both. Buyers routinely conflate them. The first asks who you are; the second asks whether the string you want relates to you. Test one is Australian Presence : one of roughly eighteen categories in the .au Domain Administration Rules: Licensing, including Australian citizens and permanent residents, companies registered under the Corporations Act 2001, foreign companies holding an ARBN, incorporated associations, ABN holders, Indigenous corporations, registered charities, trusts with

.com.au Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

auDA sets a wholesale fee per license-year and registrars set retail. The structure is flat: no promotional first-year registry pricing, no premium tier, and .au direct priced in line with com.au. A large gap between an advertised first-year price and the renewal is registrar margin, not registry policy. The five-year maximum term is itself a constraint, since there is no ten-year prepay to lock in cost.

.com.au Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.co.za domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/co-za/ · Wikipedia

South Africa's dominant commercial namespace, open to all. By far the most used extension in South Africa, and unusually open for a national namespace.

.co.za belongs to South Africa and is not a top-level domain in its own right. IANA delegates za , and co.za sits beneath it, so yourname.co.za is a third-level registration. The country code is a linguistic fossil: ZA stands for Zuid-Afrika , the Dutch name for the country, a language that has not been official in South Africa for decades. Two bodies run the namespace.

.co.za Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Nothing is required. .co.za is fully open. There is no South African residence or citizenship test, no requirement for a South African company or CIPC number, no local address, no local agent, and no documentary evidence of any kind. South Africans and non-South Africans register on identical terms, with non-South African registrants typically consenting to South African law and jurisdiction. The co in co.za is nominally commercial and this is not enforced.

.co.za Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Structurally, co.za is a low, flat, per-year wholesale fee. It has long been among the cheapest country codes in the world, which is a large part of why it dominates the African domain market. There is no registry-level premium tier and no promotional first-year registry pricing, so any first-year discount is registrar marketing. A ZADNA levy applies to .za registrations to fund the regulator; it is bundled into what registrars charge and is not separately visible to buyers.

.co.za Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.de domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/de/ · Wikipedia

Among the largest country codes in the world. Requires a German administrative contact, uses its own transfer process, and is consistently one of the biggest namespaces anywhere.

.de is the country-code top-level domain for Germany. Registrations are taken directly at the second level, with no official second-level categories. The registry is DENIC eG , in Frankfurt am Main. The eG is load-bearing: eingetragene Genossenschaft , a registered cooperative under German cooperative law, with roughly 300 member companies — ISPs and registrars including Deutsche Telekom, United Internet and Vodafone Deutschland — who are simultaneously its owners and its principal customers.

.de Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.de is one of the world's most open major country codes. DENIC states that .de domains are available to everyone, with a single stipulation: you must have legal capacity and full legal competence. There is no nationality requirement, no residency requirement, and no standing requirement to nominate a German contact at registration. That last point is the most commonly out-of-date fact published about .de. The historic rule required an administrative contact, the Admin-C, resident in Germany and acting as the holder's authorized representative.

.de Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

DENIC charges its roughly 300 members from a published annual price schedule; members and their resellers set retail independently. Because DENIC is a not-for-profit cooperative owned by those same members, wholesale pricing is set to cover cost. There is no registration versus renewal differential at registry level — the price list does not distinguish an initial registration from continuing administration, so any first-year discount is purely the retailer's marketing and the renewal price is the real price.

.de Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.fr domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/fr/ · Wikipedia

Open to registrants established in the EU and EEA. France opened its namespace to the whole European Economic Area, which is broader than most buyers assume but still a real limit.

.fr is the country-code top-level domain for France. Registrations are taken at the second level; a legacy set of third-level namespaces survives but is largely frozen, with .gouv.fr restricted to the French administration and .asso.fr, .com.fr, .tm.fr, .nom.fr, .prd.fr and .presse.fr closed to new registration. The registry is Afnic , the Association Francaise pour le Nommage Internet en Cooperation , a French non-profit association.

.fr Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.fr is restricted, but the restriction is broader than the name suggests and narrower than a global buyer would like. Afnic's Naming Policy at article 5.1 states that registration or renewal may be requested by any natural person residing, and any legal person having its registered office or main establishment, in one of the European Union member states, or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland .

.fr Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Afnic charges a single flat wholesale fee per domain-year to its roughly 350 accredited registrars, with no tiered pricing by name . Uniquely among major registries it publishes an itemised six-way breakdown of where that fee goes: operating expenses, foundation and general-interest work, research and development, promotion, employee profit-sharing and reserves.

.fr Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.es domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/es/ · Wikipedia

Liberalised in 2005 and now effectively unrestricted. Spain removed its presence requirements two decades ago, making .es one of the more accessible European country codes.

.es is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Spain, delegated on 14 April 1988 - one of the earliest ccTLDs in existence, predating the World Wide Web by roughly eighteen months. The registry is Entidad Publica Empresarial Red.es, a Spanish public business entity trading as Dominios.es. Contrary to a common assumption it has not been merged away or renamed; only its parent ministry changed. Nor has the backend changed hands: Red.es runs the EPP interface, the database and policy in-house, outsourcing only anycast DNS.

.es Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Under clause Sexto of Orden ITC/1542/2005, all individuals or entities with interests in or ties with Spain may apply for a second-level domain. In practice this is a self-declaration. For .es, .com.es, .nom.es and .org.es, assignment is automatic: no documentary proof is demanded, no human review takes place, and there is no residency or local-presence requirement. The criterion is enforceable afterwards, though - a domain may be de-registered for containing false information. The most misunderstood requirement is the identification number.

.es Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.es runs a dual-channel model unusual among large ccTLDs: Red.es sells wholesale to registrars and directly to end users - and prices its own channel to lose. The registry states that direct registration provides only the domain name with no additional services, that its price is higher than accredited registrars' prices, and that it actively promotes the use of registrars because they offer more for less.

.es Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.nl domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/nl/ · Wikipedia

One of the highest per-capita domain adoption rates anywhere. The Dutch register domains at a rate few countries match, and SIDN has been an early mover on DNSSEC and registry security.

.nl is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the Netherlands - the European part of the Kingdom, since the Caribbean territories have their own extensions. The zone was delegated on 25 April 1986 and the first domain, cwi.nl, was registered six days later. The careful formulation used by both the registry and CWI is that .nl became the first active country-code domain outside the United States ; .us, .uk and .il were delegated earlier. The registry is SIDN, a foundation based in Arnhem, founded on 31 January 1996 by CWI, SURFnet and NLnet.

.nl Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.nl is genuinely open. Article 1.1 of SIDN's General Terms and Conditions states that anyone, living or based anywhere in the world, may apply through a registrar to register a .nl domain name. There is no residency, nationality or Dutch-nexus test and no trustee requirement, which makes .nl markedly more accessible than .eu, .fr or .it. Registration opened to private individuals in June 2003. Three qualifications apply.

.nl Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Wholesale has two components: a per-domain registry fee quoted on an annual basis, and a separate registrar account fee charged monthly as a flat platform charge independent of volume. That second component is part of why small and large registrars price .nl differently. SIDN publishes its fee changes as percentages: the registry fee rose 10% in 2024, then 2.5% in 2025, then 2.9% in 2026 - one substantial correction followed by small inflation-tracking adjustments. There is no ICANN-style six-months-notice or ten-year price-lock mechanic.

.nl Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.eu domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/eu/ · Wikipedia

Residency in the EU or EEA is required, and it has been enforced. The Brexit revocations made .eu the clearest cautionary example anywhere of what happens when you stop qualifying for a namespace.

.eu is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the European Union. It is unusual in that category: it maps to no ISO 3166-1 country and is governed by EU law rather than by a national administration. Two script variants exist as separately delegated TLDs, .ею in Cyrillic and .ευ in Greek. The registry is EURid vzw, a Belgian non-profit founded in April 2003 by DNS Belgium, IIT-CNR of Italy and IIS of Sweden. EURid does not own .eu.

.eu Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Eligibility is set by Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2019/517, applying in full since 13 October 2022. A .eu may be held by a Union citizen independently of their place of residence; by a non-citizen resident in a Member State; by an undertaking established in the Union; or by an organization established in the Union. Eligibility was extended to the European Economic Area - Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway - in 2014. The citizenship limb is recent: until 19 October 2019, eligibility was tied to residence or establishment.

.eu Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

EURid does not set retail prices - accredited registrars set their own. What the registry sets is a flat wholesale fee per domain-year, with no variation by name. The structural consequences favor buyers. There is no premium tier: no registry premium list, no surcharge for short or generic strings, no registry auctions. That is a legal outcome rather than a commercial choice, since Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/857 requires competitive pricing and directs annual surpluses to the Union budget.

.eu Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.ch domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/ch/ · Wikipedia

No local presence required, and no fixed registration term. Switzerland dropped its presence requirement and runs the registry on terms that differ noticeably from its neighbors.

.ch is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Switzerland, the abbreviation coming from the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica . It was delegated on 20 May 1987, making it one of the older ccTLDs in the root. Ownership and operation are separated: the Federal Office of Communications - OFCOM, known in Switzerland as BAKOM - is the regulator and holds .ch on behalf of the Swiss Confederation, and assigns no names directly. The registry function is delegated, and the delegate is SWITCH , the Swiss Education and Research Network.

.ch Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

There is no Swiss presence requirement, and there never has been. Article 45(b) of the Ordinance on Internet Domains provides that names subordinate to .ch may be allocated to or used by any physical and moral person - any natural or legal person, anywhere. Article 47 makes allocation first-come, first-served and states that the registry does not check the merits of an applicant's rights to the string. The registry says so plainly, and even warns the public not to infer nationality from the extension, since roughly 15% of holders are abroad.

.ch Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Wholesale pricing is regulated rather than market-set. Article 38 of the Ordinance provides that the price registrars pay annually per domain, for registration and administration of the data, is fixed in the delegation contract - a negotiated term of the OFCOM mandate rather than something SWITCH sets unilaterally, with adjustments permitted where the delegated tasks change, calculated on the basis of changes in costs. Retail is fully liberalised: Article 22 states that registrars are free to fix the price of their registration services.

.ch Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.it domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/it/ · Wikipedia

Open to EU, EEA, Swiss, San Marino, and Vatican registrants. Run by Italy's National Research Council rather than a commercial operator, with residency rules drawn along European lines.

.it is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Italy, delegated on 23 December 1987 and among the earliest European ccTLDs. The registry is Registro .it, the registry function inside the Istituto di Informatica e Telematica of Italy's national research council, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, in Pisa. It has never been privatised or outsourced: the delegation has moved only between CNR institutes, from CNUCE in 1987 to IAT in 1997 and to IIT in 2001. The governing document is Regulation version 8.0 of 30 May 2022, stable since.

.it Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.it is restricted, but the restriction is broad and has nothing to do with Italy specifically. Regulation v8.0 permits registration only to adults with citizenship, residence or a registered office in the European Economic Area, the Vatican City State, San Marino, Switzerland or the United Kingdom — the EEA limb covering all 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

.it Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Registro .it operates a flat-rate, prepaid, per-transaction wholesale model and sells only to accredited registrars, who must hold a VAT number, pass a competency test on live EPP operations, and maintain a positive prepaid balance. The annual renewal fee sits below the registration fee — but the change-of-registrar fee is priced at the same level as a registration , so .it transfers are not free at wholesale and do not bundle a year of renewal the way a gTLD transfer does. Restoring from redemption is likewise charged at registration level.

.it Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.in domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/in/ · Wikipedia

Liberalised in 2005 and open to registrants worldwide. India opened its namespace to the world and has grown one of the largest country-code registries in Asia.

.in is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for India, mapped to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code IN. IANA gives an original registration date of 8 May 1989 and lists the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), New Delhi, as the sponsoring organization. NIXI is a not-for-profit company under Section 8 of the Companies Act, sits under India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and was appointed registry operator with effect from January 2005.

.in Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

The open zones are genuinely open: no residency requirement, no citizenship test, no Indian company, no local contact and no local address. NIXI reaffirmed this in a registry advisory dated 29 July 2025, confirming that foreign nationals may register and that .in has never been limited to Indian nationals. What buyers miss is an active registrant verification program with real service consequences. It is triggered selectively on new registrations, and the domain is placed on serverHold while it is reviewed, meaning it stops resolving.

.in Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

NIXI publishes a flat wholesale fee schedule with no premium tier for standard names, and the registry pricing story is a two-tier structure: the direct second level carries a higher wholesale fee than third-level zones such as co.in, net.in and org.in. That is why co.in and its siblings are consistently the cheaper retail option — a structural difference, not a promotion. A separate restore fee applies after deletion, well above a renewal. Two risks deserve stating plainly.

.in Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.cn domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/cn/ · Wikipedia

Real-name verification is mandatory, and ICP filing is separate. Registration is only the first step: identity verification is required, and hosting inside mainland China needs a license most foreign registrants cannot obtain.

.cn is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the People's Republic of China, mapped to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code CN. IANA records an original delegation date of 28 November 1990 and lists the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), Beijing, as the sponsoring organization. CNNIC was established in June 1997, is a public institution affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and runs the registry itself, with no outsourced back-end and no change of operator on record.

.cn Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Eligibility is close to open. Article 18 of CNNIC's Implementing Rules, effective 18 June 2019, allows natural persons, legal persons and unincorporated organizations to register, with no nationality, residency or local-presence requirement. Anyone told that foreigners cannot hold .cn is reading pre-2012 information: individual registration was effectively stopped in the December 2009 clampdown and restored by an amendment announced on 28 May 2012. The gate that matters is real-name verification: mandatory, enforced, and separate from registering.

.cn Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

.cn is structurally one of the cheapest mainstream ccTLDs, deliberately so: adoption has been treated as state policy rather than as a profit center. Registry pricing is set in renminbi, so registrars elsewhere carry currency exposure and retail prices can move with no registry change. None of the gTLD protections apply — no price caps, no six-months-notice obligation, no contractual renewal-price protection — and no CNNIC wholesale change has been announced for 2025 or 2026.

.cn Domain Names — Registry, Rules, Pricing — published by Check a Domain

Popular domain extensions

Taxonomy · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/popular/

Generic top-level domains and generically-marketed country codes that are open to registrants worldwide.

Generic top-level domains and generically-marketed country codes that are open to registrants worldwide.

Popular Domain Extensions — published by Check a Domain

Country domain extensions

Taxonomy · https://www.checkadomain.com/extensions/country/

Country-code top-level domains, most of which restrict registration by nexus, local presence, or verified identity.

Country-code top-level domains, most of which restrict registration by nexus, local presence, or verified identity.

Country Domain Extensions — published by Check a Domain

ICANN

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit that coordinates the domain name system's policy, accredits registrars, and contracts with generic top-level domain registries.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit that coordinates the domain name system's policy, accredits registrars, and contracts with generic top-level domain registries.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

IANA

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which maintains the DNS root zone database recording the operator of every top-level domain.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which maintains the DNS root zone database recording the operator of every top-level domain.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

Domain Name System

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The hierarchical naming system that translates domain names into the addresses and service records clients need to reach a host.

The hierarchical naming system that translates domain names into the addresses and service records clients need to reach a host.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

WHOIS

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The legacy query protocol for domain registration data, sunsetted as the authoritative source for generic top-level domains in January 2025.

The legacy query protocol for domain registration data, sunsetted as the authoritative source for generic top-level domains in January 2025.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

RDAP

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The Registration Data Access Protocol, the structured JSON successor to WHOIS and the definitive source for gTLD registration data since 2025.

The Registration Data Access Protocol, the structured JSON successor to WHOIS and the definitive source for gTLD registration data since 2025.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

Extensible Provisioning Protocol

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The protocol registrars use to create, transfer, and modify domain registrations at a registry, and the source of domain status codes and authorization codes.

The protocol registrars use to create, transfer, and modify domain registrations at a registry, and the source of domain status codes and authorization codes.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

DNSSEC

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

DNS Security Extensions, which cryptographically sign DNS records so resolvers can verify that an answer has not been forged or tampered with.

DNS Security Extensions, which cryptographically sign DNS records so resolvers can verify that an answer has not been forged or tampered with.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

UDRP

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, the administrative process for resolving trademark-based domain disputes without litigation.

The Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, the administrative process for resolving trademark-based domain disputes without litigation.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

Domain name registrar

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

An organization accredited to sell domain registrations and to submit registration, renewal, and transfer requests to a registry on a registrant's behalf.

An organization accredited to sell domain registrations and to submit registration, renewal, and transfer requests to a registry on a registrant's behalf.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

Domain name registry

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The operator of a top-level domain, responsible for the authoritative database of every registration within it and for the extension's policies.

The operator of a top-level domain, responsible for the authoritative database of every registration within it and for the extension's policies.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

GDPR

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

The General Data Protection Regulation, whose 2018 application caused registries and registrars to redact registrant contact data from public registration records.

The General Data Protection Regulation, whose 2018 application caused registries and registrars to redact registrant contact data from public registration records.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

Cybersquatting

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ · Wikipedia

Registering a domain name in bad faith to profit from someone else's trademark, the conduct the UDRP and the ACPA exist to address.

Registering a domain name in bad faith to profit from someone else's trademark, the conduct the UDRP and the ACPA exist to address.

Domain Name Guides — published by Check a Domain

How to Check Domain Availability, and Trust It

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/how-to-check-domain-availability/

What an availability check really queries, why registrars disagree, and why an available name can still be the wrong name to register.

A domain is available if, and only if, the registry that operates the extension has no record of it. The registry runs the top-level domain: it operates the authoritative nameservers for the extension and maintains the master database of every name under it. Verisign operates .com and .net, Public Interest Registry operates .org, Nominet operates .uk. They sell wholesale to registrars rather than to you, but the answer to is this name taken originates in their database and nowhere else. A registrar answers in one of two ways.

How to Check Domain Availability, and Trust It — published by Check a Domain

Caching. Results are cached so search interfaces do not hammer the registry with every keystroke. A name registered minutes ago can still read as free at a checker on a slower refresh cycle, and one released minutes ago can still read as taken. Premium and registry-reserved names. Registries withhold labels from general registration, and not the same ones. Operational labels such as nic, whois and rdds are reserved as a matter of course, along with country and territory names and the Olympic and Red Cross protected identifiers.

How to Check Domain Availability, and Trust It — published by Check a Domain

Three informal tests circulate widely, and all three produce false positives. The website does not load, so the name must be free. A registered domain with no nameservers carries the status inactive: the registration is valid and nothing resolves. A domain under clientHold or serverHold has been pulled out of the DNS deliberately, and registrars apply clientHold for expired registrations, unverified contact details, abuse complaints and unpaid invoices. It expired last month, so it should be free by now. Almost certainly not.

How to Check Domain Availability, and Trust It — published by Check a Domain

How to Choose a Domain Registrar

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/choosing-a-domain-registrar/

An evaluation framework for domain registrars: accreditation, renewal pricing, transfer friction, DNS quality, locks, support and consolidation risk.

The registrar is the retailer; the registry operates the extension and sells wholesale to registrars rather than to you. Your legal relationship is with the registrar, and it is the registrar that controls who is listed as registrant, which nameservers are delegated, whether the domain is locked, and whether it auto-renews.

How to Choose a Domain Registrar — published by Check a Domain

Introductory and renewal pricing are independent variables. A registrar can price the first year at or below its own wholesale cost, because the economics work on the renewal stream and on attached services. A deep first-year discount is not evidence of a cheap registrar. It is evidence of an acquisition strategy, and it tells you nothing about year two. The renewal price for each extension you actually hold. Registry wholesale costs differ enormously, so a registrar competitive on one extension may be uncompetitive on another.

How to Choose a Domain Registrar — published by Check a Domain

Since ICANN's Registration Data Policy took full effect on 21 August 2025, much registrant personal data is redacted from public lookups by default, with registrars publishing an email address or a web form in place of contact details. Redaction is not a privacy service: redaction is data the registrar or registry holds and withholds, whereas a privacy or proxy service substitutes a third party's details for yours by contract.

How to Choose a Domain Registrar — published by Check a Domain

Bulk Domain Registration and Portfolio Control

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/bulk-domain-registration/

How to scope a defensive domain portfolio rationally, what it costs to carry, how to keep it from lapsing, and how to decide what to release.

A defensive registration buys one narrow thing: the certainty that a specific string in a specific extension cannot be used against you, because you hold it. It does not buy protection from cybersquatting generally. The variant space around any brand is effectively unbounded, and no budget registers its way to safety. That is why enforcement mechanisms exist, and understanding them turns a portfolio decision into an economic one. The primary mechanism is the UDRP, incorporated into every gTLD registration agreement.

Bulk Domain Registration and Portfolio Control — published by Check a Domain

Generate exhaustively, then cut hard. Working the other way round, adding names as each occurs to somebody, is how portfolios reach a size nobody can justify. Extensions. Your primary extension, the ones a customer would plausibly type by mistake, and the country-code extensions of markets where you actually trade. Dispute volume signals where squatting concentrates: around 80 per cent of WIPO's caseload concerns .com. Misspellings.

Bulk Domain Registration and Portfolio Control — published by Check a Domain

Most defensive portfolios are larger than they need to be, and the reason is structural rather than foolish. They grow by addition, one incident and one nervous meeting at a time, and nobody has ever been thanked for canceling a registration. The only counterweight is a written rule applied on a schedule. Does the variant sit on a path anyone actually walks? A misspelling nobody makes protects nothing, and a redirect nobody follows is evidence that it never did.

Bulk Domain Registration and Portfolio Control — published by Check a Domain

What Domain Names Really Cost

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/what-domain-names-cost/

Registration, renewal, premium tiers, transfers, restore fees and the aftermarket - how domain pricing really works, and how to model ten-year cost.

A domain registration is a lease on a label for a fixed term. Registrations run in one-year increments, with a floor of one year and a ceiling of ten - no gTLD registration may carry an expiry date more than ten years in the future, a cap set by the base registry agreement. When the term ends you renew or you lose the name. Nothing you pay buys the label permanently. At the registry level a first-year registration and a renewal usually cost the same, and that registry fee is a floor under every retail price.

What Domain Names Really Cost — published by Check a Domain

Read the renewal column first and the registration column second. If a price list does not show renewal pricing at all, that absence is itself a finding. ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires registrars to make renewal fees, post-expiration renewal fees, and redemption or restore fees reasonably available on their website, and extends the same duty to resellers. Then check what a headline price conceals. Whether the quoted registration price covers one year or a multi-year minimum term.

What Domain Names Really Cost — published by Check a Domain

Registry wholesale prices rise, and the mechanism is contractual rather than arbitrary. Under the base gTLD registry agreement a registry operator must give registrars six months of notice before a price increase, and registrants may renew for up to ten years at the pre-increase price before it takes effect. That second clause is the most actionable pricing fact available to a domain buyer, and it is almost never used.

What Domain Names Really Cost — published by Check a Domain

Free Domain Registration: The Honest Answer

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/free-domain-registration/

Bundled free first years, free subdomains, giveaway namespaces and promotional pricing - what each one really is, and what it costs when you outgrow it.

Search for a free domain and you will be offered four quite different arrangements under the same word. Separating them is most of the work, because the differences decide whether you end up owning anything. A bundled first year. A real registration in your name, given away as part of a hosting or website-builder plan, renewing at the provider's standard rate. A free subdomain. A label underneath somebody else's registration, granted to you by contract. You are not the registrant of anything. A giveaway registration.

Free Domain Registration: The Honest Answer — published by Check a Domain

What happens is straightforward. The host registers a domain in your name at its own cost, sponsors it through its own accreditation or a reseller relationship, and gives you the first year as part of the plan. This is a real registration. You are the registrant, the name exists as a registry object, and you can point it wherever you like. What it costs is the renewal, every year after the first, at whatever the host charges.

Free Domain Registration: The Honest Answer — published by Check a Domain

A free subdomain gives you a working address on somebody else's registration. The platform holds the name; you hold a label beneath it, granted by contract and revocable under that contract. Everything else follows from that single fact. You are not the registrant. The registry record shows the platform, and no registry-level recovery or dispute mechanism runs to you. You cannot transfer it. There is no auth code and no gaining registrar, because a subdomain is not a registry object. You cannot take it with you.

Free Domain Registration: The Honest Answer — published by Check a Domain

What Happens When a Domain Expires

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/domain-expiration-lifecycle/

Every stage from expiry to the drop: grace periods, DNS suspension, redemption, pending delete - what is ICANN-mandated and what is registrar discretion.

A generic-extension domain moves through a fixed sequence of registry-side states, the same at every gTLD registry. The day counts attached to those states are not equally binding, and that distinction is the most useful thing to carry into the rest of this guide. Some durations are ICANN consensus policy. Some are registry operational policy that happens to be near-universal. One of the most consequential intervals is entirely at your registrar's discretion.

What Happens When a Domain Expires — published by Check a Domain

ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy, a consensus policy with compliance required from 31 August 2013, imposes hard notification duties on registrars for generic extensions. There are three notices and the timing is specified. Approximately one month before expiry. ICANN Compliance treats 26 to 35 days ahead as compliant. Approximately one week before expiry. The compliant range is 4 to 10 days. At least one further notice within five days after expiry , including renewal instructions.

What Happens When a Domain Expires — published by Check a Domain

At the expiry date the registry, in the standard gTLD model, auto-renews the domain and sets the status autoRenewPeriod. The registrar is billed for a renewal you have not paid for, and if it later deletes the domain within this window it receives a credit - which is why the window exists and why cheap late renewals are possible during it. The standard duration is 45 days, and that figure deserves careful phrasing.

What Happens When a Domain Expires — published by Check a Domain

How to Check Who Owns a Domain Name

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/who-owns-a-domain/

WHOIS stopped publishing registrant names in 2018. What RDAP still shows, why that is usually enough, and the real routes to identity when it is not.

Look up a generic domain today and you get a full record. It simply will not contain a person. The registrar is named, the dates are there, the status codes are there, the nameservers are there, and where the registrant name, street address, phone number and email should sit you get a redaction marker or a link to a web form. That is not a fault in the tool you used, and it is not the registrant hiding something.

How to Check Who Owns a Domain Name — published by Check a Domain

WHOIS is specified in RFC 3912, published in September 2004 and describing a protocol already ancient by then. The mechanics are as crude as they sound. A client opens a TCP connection to port 43, sends a text query, and the server replies with free-form text and closes the connection. Closing the connection is how the client knows the answer has ended. For roughly two decades that reply contained the whole registrant record: name, postal address, telephone number and email, plus administrative and technical contacts.

How to Check Who Owns a Domain Name — published by Check a Domain

The General Data Protection Regulation became applicable on 25 May 2018 across the EU and EEA, with extraterritorial reach over anyone processing the data of people located there. Publishing the name, address, telephone number and email of every registrant to the open internet was incompatible with it. ICANN's response was the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data, adopted by the ICANN Board on 17 May 2018 and effective on 25 May 2018.

How to Check Who Owns a Domain Name — published by Check a Domain

WHOIS Privacy After GDPR: What It Still Does

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/whois-privacy-gdpr/

Registry redaction and a paid privacy service are not the same thing. What each hides, which registries ban privacy, and what neither protects you from.

Before May 2018, buying WHOIS privacy was close to mandatory hygiene for anyone who did not want their home address on the open internet. The public record carried the registrant's name, street address, telephone number and email to anyone who asked, indefinitely. That is no longer the baseline. ICANN's Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data took effect on 25 May 2018, the day GDPR became applicable, and its successor — the Registration Data Policy, effective 21 August 2025 — now governs.

WHOIS Privacy After GDPR: What It Still Does — published by Check a Domain

A privacy or proxy service substitutes a third party's contact details for yours in the published record. Instead of your name and address, it shows the provider's, usually alongside a forwarding address that relays messages to you. The distinction buried in that sentence is contractual rather than technical, and it is the one to get straight. Under a privacy service in the narrow sense, you remain the registered name holder — the legal registrant — and only the published contact data is substituted.

WHOIS Privacy After GDPR: What It Still Does — published by Check a Domain

These get conflated constantly, including by people selling them. Redaction is the registry or registrar withholding, from the published record, data that it holds and continues to hold. For generic extensions it is mandated, automatic, free, and applies to nearly every registration regardless of what the registrant asked for. The details remain on file at the registrar, escrowed, and disclosable under process. A privacy or proxy service is a contract with a third party whose details are published in place of yours.

WHOIS Privacy After GDPR: What It Still Does — published by Check a Domain

How to Transfer a Domain to Another Registrar

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/transfer-a-domain/

Auth codes, registrar locks, the three 60-day locks and the five-day approval window, plus why country-code transfers work nothing like this.

An inter-registrar transfer changes one thing at the registry: which accredited registrar sponsors the registration. The domain does not move, the registration is not recreated, and the name is untouched. Only the registry's record of who is responsible changes. Most of what people fear will break is unaffected. Nameserver delegation carries across unchanged, so if your DNS is hosted elsewhere, nothing about your website or email changes.

How to Transfer a Domain to Another Registrar — published by Check a Domain

An EPP authorization code — auth code, EPP code, transfer key, all the same thing — is a per-domain secret held at the registry proving that whoever requests a transfer controls the registration. The Transfer Policy requires these codes to be unique per domain; no registrar may issue one shared code for a portfolio. Your entitlement is specific. The registrar must provide the code within five calendar days of your request.

How to Transfer a Domain to Another Registrar — published by Check a Domain

clientTransferProhibited is a status your registrar sets at the registry on your behalf. It is not a penalty, not a sign of trouble, and not something to be alarmed by. Most registrars apply it by default, and leaving it on is the most effective defense against hijacking available to an ordinary registrant. The Transfer Policy is explicit that a registrar cannot deny a transfer merely because the domain is locked. It must provide a readily accessible means to remove it, no harder than changing contact details.

How to Transfer a Domain to Another Registrar — published by Check a Domain

Nameservers vs DNS Hosting: Who Controls What

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/nameservers-vs-dns-hosting/

The difference between your registrar, the registry and your DNS host, what changing nameservers really does, and who to call when a domain breaks.

Almost every my-domain-is-broken question resolves to a misunderstanding of which of three parties owns the problem. The registry operates the extension and holds the authoritative record of every domain under it. The registrar is the retailer you buy from, and the only party that can write to that record on your behalf. The DNS host runs the nameservers that actually answer queries for your zone. These are frequently three different companies.

Nameservers vs DNS Hosting: Who Controls What — published by Check a Domain

The registrar holds an accreditation agreement with ICANN for gTLDs, a contract with the relevant registry, or both, and writes your domain's record into the registry database. ICANN describes an accredited registrar as an entity offering registration services with direct access to the gTLD registries, which is the wholesale structure in a phrase: for most extensions you cannot buy from the registry directly.

Nameservers vs DNS Hosting: Who Controls What — published by Check a Domain

The registry operates the top-level domain. It runs the authoritative nameservers for the extension itself, and maintains the master database of every domain registered under it. Verisign operates .com and .net, Public Interest Registry operates .org, and Nominet operates .uk. When a resolver asks who is authoritative for your domain, it is the registry's servers that answer with your delegation. The registry also holds the status codes that determine what may be done to the domain.

Nameservers vs DNS Hosting: Who Controls What — published by Check a Domain

Domain Security: Locks, DNSSEC & Hijacking

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/domain-security/

Registrar lock versus registry lock, 2FA, registrant email hygiene, DNSSEC and CAA, mapped against the ways domains are actually hijacked.

ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee put the problem in one sentence: all an attacker needs to gain control of an organization's entire domain name portfolio is a user account and password. A domain is defended as three things at once, being a registrar account, the mailbox that can reset that account, and the delegation record held at the registry. An attacker needs to win only one of them. Every control below appears in a WHOIS or RDAP lookup as an EPP status code, and the prefix is the whole game.

Domain Security: Locks, DNSSEC & Hijacking — published by Check a Domain

Registrar lock is the status clientTransferProhibited: a flag your registrar sets instructing the registry to refuse inter-registrar transfer requests. It costs nothing, is on by default at most registrars, and you can remove it yourself when you genuinely want to transfer. The SSAC's 2005 hijacking report identified the absence of registrar lock as one of two available safeguards that went unused in the panix.com case. Its limit is precise. Because you can lift it in two clicks, so can whoever has your password.

Domain Security: Locks, DNSSEC & Hijacking — published by Check a Domain

Registry lock is a paid, manual, high-assurance service in which the registry applies all three server-side prohibitions, being serverUpdateProhibited, serverDeleteProhibited and serverTransferProhibited, and lifts them only after out-of-band human verification with a named, pre-authorized individual. No API call, no control-panel toggle and no stolen password can change the domain while it is in force. Verisign's service covers .com, .net, .cc and .name.

Domain Security: Locks, DNSSEC & Hijacking — published by Check a Domain

How to Recover a Stolen or Hijacked Domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/recovering-a-stolen-domain/

What actually recovers a hijacked domain: the registrar emergency channel, the four grounds for a registry undo, and why the UDRP is the wrong tool.

Two things decide whether a stolen domain name comes back: how fast you move, and whether the name has already passed on to a third party. Which policy you cite and which lawyer you hire matter less. The reason sits in ICANN's Transfer Policy, the consensus policy binding every accredited registrar for generic extensions.

How to Recover a Stolen or Hijacked Domain — published by Check a Domain

Secure the email account the registration is tied to first. Password resets and transfer confirmations arrive there, so a mailbox the attacker controls makes every step you take visible to them. Change the password, revoke active sessions, remove forwarding rules you did not create, and turn on multi-factor authentication. Then report the loss in writing to the abuse contact your registrar publishes, using the word unauthorized.

How to Recover a Stolen or Hijacked Domain — published by Check a Domain

The Transfer Policy requires every registrar to establish a Transfer Emergency Action Contact, or TEAC, for urgent communications about transfers. It exists to open a real-time conversation while a theft is fresh, and most registrants have never heard of it. You cannot use it. Communications to TEACs are reserved for accredited registrars, gTLD registry operators and ICANN staff, so your task is to get the losing registrar, the one you are still a customer of, to open the channel to whoever holds the name now.

How to Recover a Stolen or Hijacked Domain — published by Check a Domain

The Fake Domain Renewal Invoice: How to Tell

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/domain-registration-invoice-scam/

An invoice-shaped domain renewal notice from a company you don't know is a solicitation. What it sells, how to verify your registrar, and where to report it.

A letter or email headed attention: important notice or domain name expiration notice , naming your domain and quoting an amount due, is almost always a solicitation rather than a bill. Do not pay it, sign it, or return it. The reason is structural. Only one company can renew your domain: the registrar of record, the ICANN-accredited company holding the registration in the registry database, which you already have an account with.

The Fake Domain Renewal Invoice: How to Tell — published by Check a Domain

Notices of this shape carry one of two payloads, and telling them apart decides what you do next. A transfer dressed as a renewal. The fine print, usually on the reverse or in the smallest type on the page, describes moving your domain to a different registrar, and paying authorizes the move. Under ICANN's Transfer Policy a completed transfer adds a one-year extension, so nothing visibly breaks. What changed is who controls the name and what you are charged next year. An unrelated service dressed as an obligation.

The Fake Domain Renewal Invoice: How to Tell — published by Check a Domain

US postal law addresses this exact document. Under title 39 of the US Code, section 3001(d), matter that reasonably could be construed as a bill or statement of account due, but that is in fact a solicitation for an order of goods or services, is nonmailable unless it carries a notice on its face: this is a solicitation for the order of goods or services, or both, and not a bill, invoice, or statement of account due. You are under no obligation to make any payments on account of this offer unless you accept this offer.

The Fake Domain Renewal Invoice: How to Tell — published by Check a Domain

Public Suffix List: Finding the Registrable Domain

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/public-suffix-list/

The registrable domain, or eTLD+1, cannot be derived from a hostname with string splitting or a regex. How the Public Suffix List works, and how to use it.

The registrable domain of a hostname cannot be worked out from the hostname. It has to be looked up against the Public Suffix List, because the line between the part a registry controls and the part a registrant controls is set by registry policy and appears nowhere in the string. Take the last two labels and www.example.com gives example.com , which is right, while www.example.co.uk gives co.uk , which nobody registered. Take the last three and co.uk works while .com breaks.

Public Suffix List: Finding the Registrable Domain — published by Check a Domain

The Public Suffix List is a plain text file, public_suffix_list.dat , published at publicsuffix.org and maintained in a public repository on GitHub. The Mozilla Foundation created it for the security and privacy policies of Firefox and holds the copyright, but it runs as a community resource any software may use, with registries asked to maintain their own portions. The format is deliberately dull.

Public Suffix List: Finding the Registrable Domain — published by Check a Domain

A public suffix is the part of a domain name not under the control of the individual registrant: one under which Internet users can, or historically could, directly register names. The cookie specification calls it a domain controlled by a public registry, giving com , co.uk and pvt.k12.wy.us as examples. Effective TLD , or eTLD, is the same idea under an implementer's name, used because co.uk behaves like a top-level domain without being one. The registrable domain is the public suffix plus the one label immediately to its left.

Public Suffix List: Finding the Registrable Domain — published by Check a Domain

What a Domain Name Does for SEO

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/domain-names-and-seo/

What Google has documented about exact match domains, extensions, domain age, migrations and expired domains - and where the industry repeats folklore.

A domain name decides what people type, what they recognize, and — if you pick a country extension — which country Google reads the site as being aimed at. It does not decide what you rank for. Google's starter documentation lists keywords in a domain name among the things not to focus on, and says that from a ranking perspective they "alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs." Three things about a domain are documented to matter: a country-code extension works as a geotargeting signal, a permanent redirect carries signals from an

What a Domain Name Does for SEO — published by Check a Domain

An exact-match domain, usually shortened to EMD, is a domain whose name is the literal text of a search someone might type: the query registered as a name rather than a name that identifies a business. In September 2012, Matt Cutts, then head of Google's webspam team, announced on Twitter a small algorithm change to reduce low-quality exact-match domains in results, describing it as affecting 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. It was never written up as documentation. The common claim today is that Google has gone quiet on EMDs since.

What a Domain Name Does for SEO — published by Check a Domain

The real decision is rarely about EMDs in the abstract. It is whether to pay a premium for a generic keyword domain rather than register a coined or brandable name. Beyond the ranking answer above, a generic string works against you three ways. It is hard to own. A descriptive phrase is weak as a mark, and a competitor can sit beside you with a near-identical name in another extension. It is not automatically your label in search results.

What a Domain Name Does for SEO — published by Check a Domain

Can You Transfer a Domain That Has Expired?

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/transferring-an-expired-domain/

Usually yes while your registrar still holds it, and only if you renew first. No once it reaches redemption. How to tell which state your domain is in.

Usually yes: a domain past its expiration date can normally still move to another registrar, provided the registrar of record has not yet deleted it and you settle the outstanding renewal first. Once it has been deleted and the registry places it in redemptionPeriod, the answer is no. Transfers are prohibited at the registry, and the only route back is a restore through the registrar you were trying to leave. Which of those two situations you are in is decided by the domain's registry status, not by the number of days since expiry.

Can You Transfer a Domain That Has Expired? — published by Check a Domain

Every generic domain carries EPP status codes, the state flags the registry publishes in the public registration record. You can read them in a WHOIS lookup or, for generic extensions, in RDAP. Four of them settle the transfer question on sight. autoRenewPeriod - the registry auto-renewed the name at expiry and billed your registrar. The domain is expired but not deleted, and a transfer is still conceivable. clientHold - your registrar has pulled the delegation out of the DNS, which is why the site and mail are down.

Can You Transfer a Domain That Has Expired? — published by Check a Domain

At expiry the registry auto-renews a generic domain and bills the registrar for a year the registrant has not paid for. Delete within that window and the registrar receives a credit, which is why cheap late renewals exist. The standard length is 45 days - established registry practice reinforced by ICANN's Expired Domain Deletion Policy rather than a mandated grace period length - and the registrar picks its own delete date inside it.

Can You Transfer a Domain That Has Expired? — published by Check a Domain

DNS A Record: What It Is and How It Works

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/a-record/

An A record maps a hostname to one IPv4 address. What it can hold, why several A records are not failover, and why a stale one invites takeover.

An A record maps a hostname to a single IPv4 address. It is the record that tells a resolver, and through it a browser or mail server, the numeric address to connect to. Everything else in DNS is indirection on the way to that answer. NS records say which servers hold the zone, a CNAME says that one name is really another, an MX record names a mail host. Follow any of those chains far enough and it ends at an A record or at its IPv6 counterpart, the AAAA record, because an address is the only thing a client can connect to.

DNS A Record: What It Is and How It Works — published by Check a Domain

The value side of an A record is an IPv4 address and nothing else. RFC 1035 defines the record data as a 32 bit Internet address, written in a zone file as four decimal numbers separated by dots. IANA lists the type under value 1, described simply as a host address. That one sentence rules out most of what people try to put in the field: A hostname. If the destination is a name rather than a number, you want a CNAME or an apex alias feature. A URL. There is no scheme and no path. Forwarding is a web server function, not a DNS one. A port.

DNS A Record: What It Is and How It Works — published by Check a Domain

The apex of a zone is its top point, the bare domain with nothing in front of it: example.com rather than www.example.com. RFC 8499 defines it as the point in the tree owning the SOA record and the authoritative NS set, and that definition is why the apex behaves unlike every other name in your zone. Because the apex must carry SOA and NS records, it cannot carry a CNAME, which is not allowed to coexist with any other data at the same name. An A record has no such restriction.

DNS A Record: What It Is and How It Works — published by Check a Domain

DNS AAAA Record: IPv6 Addresses Explained

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/aaaa-record/

A AAAA record points a hostname at an IPv6 address. How dual-stack clients choose, why a broken AAAA is worse than none, and how to test before publishing.

A AAAA record maps a hostname to a single IPv6 address. It does the same job as an A record, in the same place in the zone, for the addressing scheme that is replacing the one A records were designed around. The name is arithmetic rather than a code. An IPv4 address is 32 bits; an IPv6 address is 128 bits, four times as long, so the record type collected four As. IANA lists it under type value 28, defined by RFC 3596, which describes it as a record specific to the Internet class that stores a single IPv6 address encoded in network byte order.

DNS AAAA Record: IPv6 Addresses Explained — published by Check a Domain

Two specifications describe the behavior, and they apply in order. RFC 6724 sets the preference. Its default policy table prefers communication using IPv6 addresses to communication using IPv4 addresses when a matching source address is available, expressed as precedence values in which the general IPv6 range outranks the IPv4-mapped range. An administrator can invert that locally, and the RFC shows how, but almost nobody does. On a dual-stack machine, the AAAA answer wins by default.

DNS AAAA Record: IPv6 Addresses Explained — published by Check a Domain

Having no AAAA record is an unambiguous statement: this service is reachable over IPv4. Clients ask, get nothing back, use the A record, and connect. Nothing is lost except native IPv6 reachability. A AAAA record that does not work is a false statement, and false statements in DNS are paid for in time. The client believes the address, prefers it, and tries it first. How much that costs depends on how it fails, and the two modes are not close. If something at that address refuses the connection, the refusal comes back quickly and the client moves on.

DNS AAAA Record: IPv6 Addresses Explained — published by Check a Domain

CNAME Records: The Alias Rule and the Apex

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/cname-record/

A CNAME makes one name an alias for another and replaces everything else at that name. Why the apex refuses it, and what ALIAS and flattening really do.

A CNAME record makes one name an alias for another. When a resolver asks about the alias, it is told the name it asked for is not the real name, and it is handed a second name to look up instead. Three terms sit inside that sentence. The owner name is the name being aliased, such as www.example.com . The canonical name is the target in the record's data. The record itself is the CNAME.

CNAME Records: The Alias Rule and the Apex — published by Check a Domain

The bare domain cannot be a CNAME. The reason is not a special rule about the apex, which is where most explanations go wrong. The apex is the top point of a zone, example.com with nothing in front of it. RFC 8499 defines it as the point in the tree owning an SOA record and the corresponding authoritative NS set, and those two records are what make the zone a zone. Apply the exclusivity rule to that. A CNAME at the apex would have to be the only record there, displacing the SOA and the NS set, and the zone would stop being a zone.

CNAME Records: The Alias Rule and the Apex — published by Check a Domain

ALIAS records, ANAME records and CNAME flattening are three names for one trick, and the trick is not a new record type. The provider accepts an alias-shaped entry in its control panel, resolves the target itself, and publishes an ordinary A or AAAA record on the wire. The client never sees an alias, so nothing in the protocol is violated. The vendor documentation says as much. One provider calls its ALIAS record a dynamic A record that looks up addresses on the fly.

CNAME Records: The Alias Rule and the Apex — published by Check a Domain

Wildcard DNS Records: What the Asterisk Matches

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/wildcard-dns-record/

A wildcard DNS record answers for names that do not exist in your zone. What the asterisk matches, what silently shadows it, and the risks it enlarges.

A wildcard DNS record is a record whose leftmost label is a single asterisk, such as *.example.com . It instructs your authoritative servers to synthesize an answer for names that do not exist in the zone, so a query for a hostname you never created still gets a reply. The synthesis step explains why wildcards are hard to audit.

Wildcard DNS Records: What the Asterisk Matches — published by Check a Domain

The rule people expect is that a wildcard catches everything not listed elsewhere. The rule that applies is narrower: a wildcard is used only when it sits one label directly below the deepest existing name in the zone that is an ancestor of the query, which RFC 4592 calls the closest encloser. Anything that makes a deeper name exist moves the closest encloser and takes the wildcard out of play. Four kinds of existence do that, and the RFC's own example zone shows each. A name that exists with any record type at all.

Wildcard DNS Records: What the Asterisk Matches — published by Check a Domain

A wildcard covers names, not record types. If *.example.com owns an A record and nothing else, a query for the MX of a nonexistent subdomain does not fall back to the MX at the parent domain and does not return an error. It returns success with an empty answer, a different condition from the name not existing. RFC 4592 shows this directly: in its example zone the wildcard owns TXT and MX records, and a query for an address at a covered name is answered with no error and no data, because no address record sits at the asterisk.

Wildcard DNS Records: What the Asterisk Matches — published by Check a Domain

DNS MX Record: How Mail Finds Your Server

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/mx-record/

An MX record names the host that accepts mail for a domain. What the preference number means, why the target cannot be a CNAME, and how to cut over safely.

An MX record names the host that accepts mail for a domain. It is the only record type that does that job, and every message addressed to your domain begins with a lookup for it. The record has two parts, defined in RFC 1035 and unchanged since: a preference value, which is a 16 bit integer, and an exchange , which RFC 1035 describes as a domain name specifying a host willing to act as a mail exchange for the owner name. IANA lists the type under value 15 with the terse meaning mail exchange.

DNS MX Record: How Mail Finds Your Server — published by Check a Domain

The preference value is a number attached to each MX record, and the rule runs opposite to what the word suggests to most people: lower values are preferred. RFC 1035 states it in four words, Lower values are preferred . RFC 974, which defined MX handling in the first place, describes the number as indicating the order in which the mailer should attempt delivery, with the lowest numbered exchange tried first. Any value from 0 through 65535 is legal.

DNS MX Record: How Mail Finds Your Server — published by Check a Domain

Two MX records sharing a preference value do not form an ordered pair; they form a group. RFC 974 requires that every exchange at a given preference be tried before any exchange at a higher value, and says nothing about order inside the group, because there is no order to specify. That is load sharing among equals, and it is the right configuration for two servers that both accept mail all of the time. Senders spread across them, and one that stops answering is simply passed over.

DNS MX Record: How Mail Finds Your Server — published by Check a Domain

DNS TXT Records: SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Tokens

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/txt-record/

A TXT record holds a string DNS gives no meaning to. How SPF, DKIM and DMARC use it, why a domain gets one SPF record, and what the 255 limit covers.

A TXT record holds a string of text, and DNS assigns that string no meaning whatsoever. RFC 1035 says so directly: TXT records hold descriptive text, and the semantics of the text depends on the domain where it is found. The specification is stating that the meaning lives outside the record. Everything interesting about TXT records follows from that. SPF, DKIM, DMARC and the verification tokens dozens of services ask you to publish are conventions rather than record types.

DNS TXT Records: SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Tokens — published by Check a Domain

A domain must publish exactly one SPF record. Publishing two does not mean the second is ignored, and it does not mean the two are combined: it means SPF stops producing a result at all. RFC 7208 requires SPF policies to be published as TXT records and no other type. A checker collects the TXT records at the name, discards every one that does not begin with exactly v=spf1 , then applies the rule that matters. If the resulting set holds more than one record, the check produces a permerror — a permanent error, not a fail and not a softfail.

DNS TXT Records: SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Tokens — published by Check a Domain

DKIM inverts the SPF rule, which trips up people who learned the SPF rule first. A domain signing through four services correctly publishes four DKIM records, and they do not conflict, because each lives at a different name. RFC 6376 puts DKIM public keys in a subdomain named _domainkey , addressed by a selector , a label the signer chooses. A signature carrying a domain of example.com and a selector of foo.bar sends the verifier to foo.bar._domainkey.example.com.

DNS TXT Records: SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Tokens — published by Check a Domain

DNS NS Record: The Delegation That Exists Twice

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ns-record/

An NS record names a server authoritative for a zone, and the list is published twice: by the registry and by your own zone. What breaks when they differ.

An NS record names a nameserver that is authoritative for a zone. Every other record type lives in one place; the NS records for your domain are published twice, by two different parties, and only one of those copies is authoritative. One copy sits in the parent zone. When you set nameservers at your registrar, the registrar passes that list to the registry that runs your extension, and the registry publishes it as the delegation for your domain. This is the copy the world meets first.

DNS NS Record: The Delegation That Exists Twice — published by Check a Domain

Setting nameservers at your registrar is a registry operation rather than a DNS edit. The registrar writes the new delegation into the registry's database, the registry publishes it in the extension's zone, and a resolver asking about your domain is sent somewhere new. Three things that change does not do: It does not move your records. A, AAAA, MX, TXT and CAA records do not travel with the delegation. Point a domain at a provider where the zone has not been built and the site and the mail go down as resolvers pick up the change.

DNS NS Record: The Delegation That Exists Twice — published by Check a Domain

Your zone's apex NS set is usually not something you wrote. Managed DNS providers create it with the zone, fill it with the servers they assigned you, and treat it as infrastructure. One large provider creates the apex NS and SOA records automatically and blocks their deletion through its API; another advises against adding, changing or deleting servers in that record except in rare circumstances. That advice is worth taking, because the apex set is one half of a pair.

DNS NS Record: The Delegation That Exists Twice — published by Check a Domain

DNS SOA Record: What Each Field Actually Does

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/soa-record/

The SOA record is a zone's own metadata: one per zone, seven fields, and most of them addressed to secondary nameservers. What each does, and which one bites.

The SOA record, short for start of authority, is a zone's metadata about itself. There is exactly one per zone, it sits at the apex alongside the zone's NS records, and it points at no website and no service. Its seven fields are a mixed set. Two are names, one is a version number, three are timers that govern how a secondary nameserver keeps its copy of a zone in step with the primary, and the last decides how long the internet remembers that something in your zone does not exist. For an owner on managed DNS, six of the seven are inert.

DNS SOA Record: What Each Field Actually Does — published by Check a Domain

MNAME is the first field: the nameserver that was the original or primary source of data for the zone. In a classic primary-and-secondary setup it names the server the secondaries pull from. On a managed anycast platform it names one of the provider's servers because the format requires a name in that position, and it carries little meaning for you. RNAME is the second, and it is the field people misread, because it is an email address written as a domain name. The record format has no room for an @ sign, so the @ becomes a dot.

DNS SOA Record: What Each Field Actually Does — published by Check a Domain

These four fields exist for zone transfer, the mechanism by which a secondary nameserver holds a copy of a zone published by a primary. The serial is a version number, and RFC 1034 requires it to advance whenever the zone changes. A secondary compares the serial it holds with the primary's, and a higher serial means fetch the zone again. Comparison uses sequence space arithmetic rather than a plain greater-than test, which is part of why the common YYYYMMDDnn format works well: it always increases and stays readable.

DNS SOA Record: What Each Field Actually Does — published by Check a Domain

PTR Record and Reverse DNS: Who Can Set One

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/ptr-record/

A PTR record maps an IP address back to a name, and it lives in a zone you almost certainly do not control. Who owns it, why mail cares, how to ask.

A PTR record maps an IP address back to a name, and for most domain owners it is the one record they cannot create. It does not live in your domain's zone. It lives in a separate zone attached to the address, and that zone belongs to whoever was allocated the address: your hosting company, your cloud provider, or your ISP. This catches people out because every other record follows the domain. You buy a name, point it at nameservers, and from that moment you decide what an A record or an MX record says.

PTR Record and Reverse DNS: Who Can Set One — published by Check a Domain

The reverse lookup is an ordinary DNS query for an ordinary name. What makes it look strange is the name being asked about. IPv4 addresses are queried under in-addr.arpa , with the octets in reverse order, so the address 10.2.0.52 is asked about as the name 52.0.2.10.in-addr.arpa. IPv6 addresses are queried under ip6.arpa , one hexadecimal nibble per label, also reversed, which turns a single address into thirty-two labels.

PTR Record and Reverse DNS: Who Can Set One — published by Check a Domain

A reverse zone can be delegated once. The natural unit for IPv4 is the /24, a block of 256 addresses, because that is where the octet boundary and the label boundary line up. Whoever receives that delegation administers the whole block, and a provider is not going to hand a shared block to one customer on it. There is a documented way around this for smaller allocations.

PTR Record and Reverse DNS: Who Can Set One — published by Check a Domain

SRV Record: Fields, Lookups and What Uses It

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/srv-record/

An SRV record names the host and port that run a service for a domain. What priority and weight really do, the underscore naming rule, and who reads them.

An SRV record tells a client two things an address record cannot: which host runs a named service for a domain, and which port it listens on. IANA registers the type under value 33 with the meaning server selection, and RFC 2782 defines it. Everything before SRV assumed the port was already known: a client had to be told the exact host, or had to guess a well-known port. SRV separates the service from the machine, so a domain can put its directory service on one host and port and its calendar service on another, and move either by editing DNS.

SRV Record: Fields, Lookups and What Uses It — published by Check a Domain

The distinguishing feature of an SRV record is that half of it is in the name. A lookup for the XMPP client service on example.com is a query for _xmpp-client._tcp.example.com , and a client looking for a Kerberos server in a Windows domain queries _kerberos._tcp under the domain name. The service label comes first, the protocol label second, and both carry a leading underscore. The underscore is deliberate.

SRV Record: Fields, Lookups and What Uses It — published by Check a Domain

Priority is the first-choice mechanism, and it runs the same way round as MX preference: lower wins. A client must attempt to contact the target host with the lowest-numbered priority it can reach, and only moves to a higher number when the lower group cannot be reached. Weight distributes selections among records that share one priority value. It does nothing else, and it never compares across priority levels. Port is the TCP or UDP port on the target host, and it is the field that makes the record worth having.

SRV Record: Fields, Lookups and What Uses It — published by Check a Domain

CAA Record: Control Who Can Issue Your Certs

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/caa-record/

A CAA record lists the certificate authorities allowed to issue for your domain. How the tags work, how far the tree walk reaches, and what it cannot stop.

A CAA record names the certificate authorities allowed to issue certificates for your domain. Publish one and every public CA not on the list is obliged to refuse the request, whoever made it and however convincing it looks. IANA registers the type under value 257 with the meaning certificate authority restriction, and RFC 8659 replaced the original specification in 2019. The record is small: a flags byte, a property tag, and a value. A working configuration can be one line at the apex naming your issuer.

CAA Record: Control Who Can Issue Your Certs — published by Check a Domain

CAA spent four years as a specification almost nobody honored. That changed with CA/Browser Forum Ballot 187 , which made checking a condition of the Baseline Requirements, the rules public CAs follow. The adopted text sets the date plainly: the section is effective as of 8 September 2017. The requirement is narrower than the summaries suggest. As part of issuance the CA must check for a CAA record for each dNSName in the certificate, following the procedure in the specification, and must process the issue, issuewild and iodef tags.

CAA Record: Control Who Can Issue Your Certs — published by Check a Domain

The value of a CAA record starts with a property tag that determines what the rest means. Three are in ordinary use. issue authorizes a CA, identified by the domain name that CA publishes for the purpose. Each issuer gets its own record, so a domain using two providers publishes two. The tag has a second use that is easy to miss: an issue record whose value is a bare semicolon authorizes nobody, which is how a domain that should never hold a certificate says so. issuewild covers wildcard certificates, and its precedence rule is the one people trip over.

CAA Record: Control Who Can Issue Your Certs — published by Check a Domain

Email DNS Records: What a Receiving Server Checks

Concept · https://www.checkadomain.com/guides/email-dns-records/

The order a receiving server runs its checks in, which DNS record each one reads, and what a pass, a fail and a permerror really mean for delivery.

A receiving mail server checks the connecting address first, then the reverse DNS name it maps to, then the greeting name the sender announces, then SPF against the envelope sender, then any DKIM signature, and last DMARC alignment against the From line the recipient sees. Each step becomes possible only when the conversation reaches the stage that supplies its input, so the sequence is fixed by the protocol rather than chosen. RFC 5321 gives the spine.

Email DNS Records: What a Receiving Server Checks — published by Check a Domain

Nothing corroborates the EHLO name when it is given: a false one costs what a true one costs. RFC 5321 puts the obligation on the sender: the name given in the EHLO command must be either a primary host name, one that resolves to an address record, or, where the host has none, an address literal. That binds the client, and what a receiver does about a bad one is local policy. Local policy sits well above that floor.

Email DNS Records: What a Receiving Server Checks — published by Check a Domain

The check on the connecting address is a round trip, not one query. RFC 8601 registers it as the iprev method and states it as set membership: if the client peer's IP address is I, the list of names to which I maps after a PTR query is the set N, and the union of IP addresses to which each member of N maps after corresponding A and AAAA queries is L, then this test is successful if I is an element of L. The outcome vocabulary repays attention.

Email DNS Records: What a Receiving Server Checks — published by Check a Domain