.online domain names

What .online is

.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. The ownership history is unusual and is covered in full below; in short, .online began as a joint venture and became wholly Radix-owned in 2015, and the operator transfers recorded at IANA since then are internal group restructurings rather than sales. IANA registered .online on 6 March 2015, delegation followed on 12 March, and general availability opened on 26 August 2015.

Back-end registry services moved from CentralNic to Tucows Registry with a transition day of 17 March 2026, which carries a mild irony given the ownership history. Radix's policy pages still name CentralNic, so anything written about this extension's technical operation before March 2026 should be treated as potentially stale, including material published by the registry.

Who can register .online

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. The applicable enforcement is generic: suspension for materially inaccurate registration data, and loss of a name through the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy or the Uniform Rapid Suspension system where a trademark owner succeeds. Radix reserves and prices a premium list, which affects cost rather than eligibility.

What .online costs to own

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. Discounting the first year is not a promotion that will normalize away; it is the settled business model of this segment.

It is also a defensible one. Registrars sell the first year below their own cost because the domain acquires a customer, and the margin sits in the renewal, the hosting, and the mailbox. A business that keeps the name and pays a normal ongoing rate has not been cheated by anything. The failure mode is narrow: committing on a number that describes only the first twelve months. Note too that .online's comparatively healthy renewal behavior does not mean the gap is smaller; it means more registrants choose to pay the renewal anyway. No renewal percentage is published for .online individually and none should be quoted; the segment-wide estimate for new gTLDs is around 31%.

Premium names carry a permanent commitment. Radix's published premiums report states that Radix premiums sold via EPP renew at the same price as the first-year registration fee, so a premium .online renews at its premium rate indefinitely, with no standard-renewal tier to fall back on. Restoration after expiry through the Redemption Grace Period costs substantially more than a renewal.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.online names are registered for one to ten years. That range is corroborated consistently across registrar sources, but no Radix registry document stating a general-availability maximum could be located, so treat it as corroborated rather than registry-confirmed. Individual registrars may cap the term lower.

Transfers work through the standard gTLD mechanism: obtain an EPP authorization code from the losing registrar, present it to the gaining registrar, and the transfer auto-approves after five days absent a response. There is no tag change and no registry-specific form.

Two aspects changed at the March 2026 migration, and guidance written before then is unreliable on both. Every authorization code was reissued: Tucows Registry states that codes did not carry over from the previous provider, so a .online code saved before March 2026 will not work. The registry-level transfer lock also went away, because Tucows does not enforce transfer lock at the registry; the 60-day restriction following initial registration now exists only as an ICANN-level right for the registrar to deny a transfer.

The 60-day lock after a change of registrant is unchanged, since it derives from ICANN policy rather than the registry, and a registrar-level opt-out remains available. The Redemption Grace Period, the window after deletion in which only the original registrant may recover the name against a restore fee, was 30 days before the migration; Tucows publishes no durations, so the current length is presumed unchanged rather than confirmed.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, became the definitive source of gTLD registration data on 28 January 2025, superseding WHOIS. For .online it is live at rdap.radix.host, the endpoint shared across the Radix portfolio and verified against IANA's RDAP bootstrap registry.

What is disclosed follows ICANN's Registration Data Policy, effective 21 August 2025. Personal registrant fields are redacted where redaction is legally required or supported by a commercially reasonable purpose, and either a contact email address or a web form must be published so that third parties can still reach the registrant. Radix's own WHOIS Access Policy is out of date, pointing at a pre-migration hostname and omitting RDAP entirely.

Privacy and proxy services are permitted. Radix's policy set contains no provision addressing them and registrars record WHOIS privacy as supported, so the accurate description is an absence of prohibition rather than an affirmative registry permission. In practice nothing at registry level prevents you from using it.

DNSSEC is supported and well corroborated, although Radix's practice statement pointer still directs to the superseded CentralNic document. Internationalized domain names are supported: .online was part of Radix's September 2016 rollout of nine scripts covering Latin, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Lao, and Arabic, and registrars now record ten with Chinese added.

Who .online suits, and who should avoid it

The concrete case is a business whose identity is genuinely internet-native, or a service moving a physical offering onto the web, where the word does real semantic work. A bank, a clinic, or a course provider that wants to distinguish its web channel gets something from yourbrand.online that a meaningless extension would not give it. It also suits international and multilingual projects, since online is one of a small set of English words recognized across many languages, and it has the broadest geographic registrar distribution of its peer group. If you want the extension in this class with the least abuse baggage, the evidence points here: .online does not appear anywhere in Interisle's Phishing Landscape 2025 top 20, by raw phishing volume or by rate per 10,000 registrations, despite being the eighth-largest gTLD in the world.

It suits you poorly where online adds nothing and the name reads as a compromise. If acmecorp.online plainly means the .com was taken, the extension is costing you credibility rather than adding meaning. It suits you poorly if you have not priced the renewal, or if you are buying a premium name without understanding that the premium recurs annually and permanently. And it suits you poorly in sectors where a conservative audience still reads a legacy extension as a trust signal.

Common mistakes with .online

• Treating .online as a cheap substitute for an unavailable .com. The extension works when online is doing semantic work in the name and fails when it is filler. A visitor who reads the domain as an admission that the .com was taken is a visitor you have lost something with, and no first-year discount compensates for that.
• Buying a premium .online without understanding perpetual premium renewal. Radix states that premiums sold via EPP renew at the same price as the first-year registration fee. There is no premium tier that reverts to a standard renewal, so the premium is an annual obligation with no exit other than dropping the name.
• Relying on pre-March-2026 auth codes or transfer-lock assumptions. All authorization codes were reissued during the Tucows migration, and the registry-level 60-day lock no longer exists. Documentation written before that date, including some of the registry's own, is wrong on both points.

From three-way joint venture to sole ownership

.online has the most tangled origin story in the Radix portfolio, and it illustrates how new gTLDs were actually acquired. The string was contested and settled at a private auction in 2014 rather than at an ICANN auction of last resort. What emerged was not a single owner but a joint venture between three parties: Radix, Tucows, and Namecheap. Radix acquired exclusive ownership in 2015, before general availability that August. The later operator transfers visible in the IANA record, to Radix FZC in 2021 and Radix Technologies in 2024, are internal restructurings and not sales.

The circularity is worth noting. Tucows sold out of the ownership a decade ago and, in March 2026, became the extension's back-end registry provider, the company that runs the database and the DNS infrastructure behind every .online name. Namecheap, the third original partner, remains the largest single registrar of .online domains.

Scale is where .online separates itself from the rest of its class. It is the eighth-largest gTLD as of the second quarter of 2026. ICANN's March 2026 transaction report gives a verified floor of 2,549,107 domains across the twelve largest registrars, from a file containing 413 registrars in total, and shows the extension roughly breaking even at 415,438 creates against 406,137 deletes.

The more revealing figures concern distribution rather than size. Registry-wide renewal commands in March 2026 numbered 66,663, comfortably the highest of the three Radix extensions here and higher than .shop's despite .online being the smaller of the two. No single registrar holds more than roughly 21% of the top-twelve base, with Namecheap, GoDaddy, Hostinger, REG.RU, IONOS, and others spread across it, and there is no dominant registrar giving the extension away free for the first year. That last point is the clearest structural difference between .online and the extensions whose headline counts are largely promotional. It is a relative judgment, not an endorsement: .online remains a heavily discounted new gTLD in a segment renewing at around 31%. But of the extensions in this class, it is the one whose registration total most nearly reflects genuine adoption. Radix's own claim that 65% of developed .online domains are in use by small and medium businesses is registry marketing and should be read as such.