.site domain names

What .site is

.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. The extension was originally delegated to DotSite Inc., a Radix entity, and the operator transfers subsequently recorded at IANA, to Radix FZC in 2021 and Radix Technologies in 2024, are internal group restructurings rather than sales. IANA registered .site on 6 March 2015 and delegated it on 12 March 2015, the same day as .online, and it reached one million registrations in February 2019.

The most consequential recent change is technical rather than commercial: back-end registry services moved from CentralNic to Tucows Registry on 17 March 2026.

Who can register .site

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. Enforcement is entirely generic: suspension for materially inaccurate registration data, and loss of a name under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy or the Uniform Rapid Suspension system where a trademark owner prevails. Radix reserves and prices a premium list, which is a pricing gate rather than an eligibility one.

What .site costs to own

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.

The advertised price is what it costs to acquire the name; what it costs to own is the renewal multiplied by the years you intend to keep it. Beyond roughly two years .site costs more than .com, and that is a permanent structure, not a promotion working its way out of the system.

Be fair about why. Registrars discount the first year deliberately, often below their own cost, because a registration acquires a customer whose hosting, email, and renewals carry the margin. That is a legitimate model, and for a developer registering a name for a one-year project the low entry price is exactly the right instrument. It becomes a bad deal in one circumstance only: when the buyer commits without ever having seen the renewal figure. On .site that risk is unusually acute, because the extension has a documented distribution practice that can leave a registrant owning the domain without having consciously chosen it, and with auto-renew already switched on. No renewal percentage is published for .site individually and none should be quoted; the segment-wide estimate for new gTLDs is around 31%.

Premium names carry the standard Radix rule, which is registry-confirmed: premiums sold via EPP renew at the same price as the first-year registration fee, so a premium .site renews at its premium rate indefinitely. Restoration after expiry through the Redemption Grace Period costs substantially more than a renewal.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.site 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.

Transfers use the standard gTLD mechanism: an EPP authorization code obtained from the losing registrar, presented to the gaining registrar, with auto-approval after five days if the losing registrar does not respond. There is no tag change and no registry-specific form.

The March 2026 migration changed two things and invalidated a good deal of published guidance. Every authorization code was reissued: Tucows Registry states that codes did not carry over from the previous provider, so any .site code saved before March 2026 will fail. And the registry no longer enforces a transfer lock, so the 60-day restriction after initial registration now exists only as an ICANN-level right for the registrar to deny a transfer, not as a flag set on the domain. Current Tucows-era auth code format requirements are not documented publicly.

The 60-day lock following a change of registrant is unchanged, since it comes from ICANN policy and not from the registry, and a registrar-level opt-out remains available. The Redemption Grace Period, the window after deletion during which only the original registrant may recover the name for a restore fee, stood at 30 days before the migration; Tucows publishes no durations, so the current length is presumed unchanged rather than verified.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

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

Disclosure follows ICANN's Registration Data Policy, in effect since 21 August 2025. Personal registrant fields are redacted where legally required or where a commercially reasonable purpose supports redaction, and a contact email address or a web form must be published so the registrant remains contactable. Radix's own published WHOIS policy is stale here, 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 for .site, so the honest description is an absence of prohibition rather than an explicit registry permission.

DNSSEC is supported, though the post-migration practice statement could not be located and Radix's pointer still directs to the superseded CentralNic version. Internationalized domain names are supported, and .site was Radix's IDN pilot, receiving Japanese script support in July 2016 alongside .website, two months ahead of the nine-script rollout that covered .online and .store. Registrars now record the same ten scripts across all three.

Who .site suits, and who should avoid it

The clearest concrete case for .site is a project where the name is the point and the extension should get out of the way. A portfolio at yourname.site reads cleanly, makes no claim, and does not pretend to be something else. The second is developer and agency use: staging environments, client previews, demos, and disposable deployments, where a one-year term at a promotional price is precisely the right instrument and renewal is never intended. That is not a lesser use of the extension; it is the use the pricing is designed for. A third is multilingual work, since site is cognate across French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.

It suits you poorly wherever the domain must carry trust to a cold audience, because .site is the most generic string in its class and conveys the least about what is behind it. It suits you poorly as a primary business email domain, not because of any specific abuse record but because it is the least established extension in this group and the general new-gTLD filtering risk applies. It suits you poorly if you do not read your cart carefully at checkout. And it suits you poorly if you expect the string site to help with search visibility, which it does not. On abuse the fair statement is a qualified clean bill: .site does not appear in Interisle's Phishing Landscape 2025 top 20 by raw phishing volume or by rate per 10,000 registrations, though absence from a top-20 list is weaker evidence for a smaller extension than for a large one.

Common mistakes with .site

• Ending up with a .site you never deliberately chose. Domain Name Wire documented a registrar adding .site domains to customer carts with auto-renew pre-enabled in 2026, describing the practice as domain stuffing. Review your cart line by line at checkout and check the auto-renew setting on anything you did not explicitly add, because a renewal several times the acquisition price is a recurring charge you never planned for.
• Not checking the renewal price. For a disposable project the renewal is irrelevant. For anything you intend to hold for a decade it is the dominant cost, and on .site it has been reported at roughly double a .com renewal at some registrars.
• Assuming .site, .online, and .website are interchangeable. All three are Radix extensions, but they differ in registrar distribution, in renewal pricing, and in how the name reads to a visitor. Choosing on the advertised first-year price treats three different products as one.

Registry, back end, registrar: what actually changed in March 2026

Three different companies stand behind almost every domain name, and almost nobody explains the difference. The registry operator holds the ICANN contract for the extension, sets its policies, and owns the commercial relationship with the string; for .site that is Radix. The back-end registry services provider runs the machinery: the authoritative database of every registered name, the EPP interface registrars connect to, the DNS servers that answer queries for the zone, the DNSSEC signing, and the WHOIS and RDAP endpoints. The registrar is who you buy from, who holds your account, and who submits your commands into that machinery on your behalf.

Registries change back-end providers for the same reasons any business changes a critical supplier: cost per domain when the contract comes up, technical capability, service levels, or a corporate relationship that has run its course. It is among the largest operational undertakings a registry can attempt, because the entire zone has to move without a gap in resolution. On 17 March 2026 at 00:00 UTC, Radix moved .site, along with .store, .online, and the rest of its portfolio, from CentralNic to Tucows Registry: eleven extensions and roughly ten million domains in one transition.

What that means for a registrant is narrower than it sounds. What did not change: who owns your domain, what you paid, when it expires, the registrar you bought it from, the name itself, whether it resolves, and every ICANN protection attached to it. Radix remains the registry operator, and nothing was sold. What did change: every authorization code was reissued, so codes stored before the migration no longer work; the registry-level transfer lock after initial registration is no longer enforced, leaving the 60-day restriction as a registrar-level obligation under ICANN policy; and the technical endpoints for EPP, WHOIS, and RDAP moved to Radix-branded hosts operated by Tucows.

There is a practical consequence beyond the mechanics. Radix's own documentation has not caught up and still names CentralNic in several places, including the DNSSEC practice statement pointer and the WHOIS access policy. That makes .site and its sibling extensions unusually easy to describe incorrectly at the moment, and it is a good reason to verify current behavior with your registrar rather than trusting a policy page, whoever published it.