.in domain names

What .in is

.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 organisation. 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. The back-end changed recently and many sources are stale on it: Afilias India ran it from 2012, Neustar from March 2019, and Tucows Registry Services took over at a cutover on 28 May 2025. NIXI remains the registry — Tucows is a vendor.

India's namespace is unusually deep: alongside direct registration at the second level, NIXI runs more than thirty second-level zones. The open ones — co.in, net.in, org.in, com.in, firm.in, gen.in and ind.in — carry labels that are historical rather than eligibility tests, and none requires proof of company, network-operator or non-profit status. The restricted zones do require documentation: ac.in, edu.in, res.in, gov.in, mil.in, nic.in and ernet.in, plus the sector-gated bank.in and fin.in, the former promoted by the Reserve Bank of India as an anti-phishing measure for banks. All one- and two-character .in domains are reserved.

Who can register .in

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 programme 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. NIXI contacts the registrant directly and is reported to be more responsive to the registrant than to the registrar. Indian individuals are asked for a government photo ID such as Aadhaar, a passport or a voter ID plus a statement of intended use; Indian organisations supply a certificate of incorporation, the signatory's ID and a letter on company letterhead. Foreign registrants are asked for documentation evidencing a business connection to India — not a published eligibility rule, but what registrars document NIXI asking for on review. If documents never arrive, NIXI does not delete the domain: it leaves it on serverHold until expiry.

Two policy overlays matter. In December 2021 NIXI capped registrations at two .in domains per individual and 100 per accredited company; the cap was published and heavily criticised, and its enforcement status is uncertain, so do not treat it as a hard live limit without checking. And an advisory dated 11 May 2026 states that auctioning, bidding or speculative sale of any .in domain is strictly non-permissible, reserving the right to suspend without notice and to blacklist the registrant or registrar.

What .in costs to own

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. The registry fee is denominated in Indian rupees, so registrars outside India carry currency exposure and retail prices can drift with the exchange rate without any registry change. And retail pricing is entirely registrar-set: there is no price cap, no notice obligation and no contractual renewal-price protection, because those are gTLD registry-agreement mechanisms that do not apply to a ccTLD.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Registration runs from one to ten years, a rule in force since 16 October 2008, and renewals stack to the ten-year ceiling. Domains auto-renew at expiry unless cancellation is arranged with the registrar. NIXI publishes no consolidated post-expiry timetable, but registrar documentation describes roughly a forty-day hold after expiry before deletion, followed by a thirty-day Redemption Grace Period — the window after deletion in which the former registrant may restore the name for a fee. These are registry-defined values rather than ICANN ones.

Transfers use an EPP authorisation code of six to sixteen characters from the losing registrar, and a domain cannot be transferred within sixty days of creation or within sixty days of a previous transfer. That resembles the gTLD rule but is NIXI's own policy: .in is not bound by ICANN's transfer policy and will not follow any reform of it. Registrant approval is required, the process completes in five twenty-four-hour periods once initiated, and a transfer adds one year to the term. Transfers are available only within the unrestricted zones; gov.in, ac.in, bank.in and the other gated zones do not move freely between commercial registrars. A domain on serverHold for pending or failed verification cannot be transferred out normally.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

Registry WHOIS is whois.nixiregistry.in and registry RDAP is served from rdap.nixiregistry.in, which is listed in the IANA RDAP bootstrap file — so standards-based lookup genuinely works for .in, which is more than many ccTLDs offer. .in is a thick registry, holding contact data centrally rather than only at the registrar.

Privacy and proxy registrations are prohibited. Registrar documentation states plainly that proxy and privacy registrations are not permitted, and there is no registry-blessed privacy add-on. Registrant, administrative and technical contacts are published; billing contact data is withheld. In practice registrars apply varying degrees of masking to personal data in live output, so a query can return less than the policy text implies. The direction of travel is toward more disclosure: on 30 December 2025 the Delhi High Court ordered mandatory verification of registrant details plus periodic re-verification, held that registrant information should not be masked by default, and required disclosure of verified data to law enforcement or courts within seventy-two hours.

Disputes run under the INDRP administered by NIXI rather than ICANN's UDRP, before a NIXI-appointed sole arbitrator under the Indian Arbitration and Conciliation Act 1996. The zone is signed for DNSSEC on algorithm 13 following the 2025 key rollover. Second-level IDNs work across more than twenty Indian scripts, with contextual validation live for twenty-three language tables, and India also operates fifteen internationalised country-code TLDs spelling India or Bharat in the major Indian scripts — separate top-level domains, not variants of .in.

Who .in suits, and who should avoid it

It suits:

• Anyone selling into India, where .in and co.in read as native in a way a .com does not.
• Indian companies, startups and small businesses, for which co.in carries a strong local business connotation.
• Global brands protecting a name in a top-tier market, given an active and complainant-friendly dispute process.
• Short-name and domain-hack projects, in a namespace far less exhausted than .com.
• Multilingual Indian-language projects, where the IDN support is best in class.

It is a poor choice for:

• Domain investors and speculators, since the May 2026 advisory makes auction and speculative trading strictly non-permissible.
• Anyone who requires WHOIS privacy, since proxy and privacy services are prohibited registry-wide.
• Anyone unwilling to complete identity verification, since the domain will stop resolving until you comply.
• Foreign registrants with no connection to India who cannot tolerate friction: registration is formally open, but the documented ask on review is evidence of a connection.
• Revenue-critical launches on a fresh registration, because the failure mode is serverHold rather than a warning email.

Common mistakes with .in

Assuming privacy can be added later. It cannot: privacy and proxy registration are prohibited across the extension, and the courts have pushed further against default masking. Registrants who set up a personal project at a home address end up choosing between publishing that address and abandoning the name.

Pointing production traffic at a new .in before verification completes. If the domain is pulled for e-KYC it stops resolving, and unverified domains sit on hold until expiry rather than being deleted and re-released, so there is no automatic reset. Verify first, then migrate.

Treating .in and co.in as interchangeable, or as one purchase. They are separate registrations at different wholesale tiers, frequently held by different people, and each is often available when the other is not. The related error is assuming a .in registration carries the Indian-script equivalent; those are entirely separate top-level domains.

Buying .in as an investment, which since the May 2026 advisory is explicitly contrary to registry policy.

From dormant delegation to one of Asia's largest registries

.in was delegated in 1989 and then barely existed for fifteen years. Under research-institution custodianship, registration was manual, documentation-heavy and effectively confined to Indian institutions, and totals stayed in the low thousands while the country's internet population grew around it. In 2004 the Government of India transferred responsibility to the new .in registry under NIXI, and the relaunch that followed is the real birth date of .in as a commercial namespace.

The mechanics were conventional; the effect was not. A sunrise period for trademark holders ran from 1 to 21 January 2005, and general availability opened on 16 February 2005. Crucially, liberalisation to foreign registrants happened at that same moment rather than later: the open zones were made available worldwide with no residency, citizenship or local-presence requirement, and that has been the position ever since — restated as recently as NIXI's July 2025 advisory, which exists because the confusion persists.

Growth afterwards makes .in one of the clearest natural experiments in the domain name system on what liberalisation does to a dormant ccTLD. Registrations passed three million by May 2022, and the May 2025 back-end migration moved approximately 4.2 million domains across 140 extensions — the most recent defensible measure, and one that places .in among the largest country-code registries in Asia. The trajectory since runs the other way: verification with real service consequences, a published cap on holdings, and an explicit prohibition on speculative trading.