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Domain Registration

The Beginning of the journey...

What is a Domain Registration ?

Your first step in online world...

A Domain Name gives you / your company / products / services / idea etc. a unique identity over the net globally. It gives a name to your whole thought of going online. But how do you get this internationally unique identity over the internet landscape ? ie how do you get a Domain Name for yourself.

Simply, you acquire a Domian Name by registering it with an ICANN appointed agencies or their sub-agencies down the line (like us). ICANN is a not-for-profit organisation that regulates online addresses, better known as Domain Names. You can register any Domain Name of your choice (subject to availibility) at a nominal fees for a certain duration of time (in years). The fee and duration may differ for different TLDs. Once registered, you gain complete autonomy over your domain name for period of registration.

Related Topics

The second part (technicalled called label) of the domain names, i.e, the one after the dot (first label from the right most), is technically called a TLD. Initially only a handful of TLDs existed. Best example of early TLDs are:

.com - originally meant for (US) commercial organisations.
.org - originally meant for Non-profit organizations.
.net - originally meant for Internet providers.
.info - Information services.

The restriction with these TLDs are no more in place and any person can register domain names with these TLDs. Not only this, over the period of time since usage of internet among general public, a lot more TLDs have come into existence. These TLDs can be classified as follows:

gTLD - called generic "Top-Level-Domains"

sTLD - Sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD).
uTLD - Unsponsored Top Level Domains.

ccTLD - Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD).

gTLD - generic Top-Level-Domain: .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .name, and .pro are gTLDs that are open to all. There are some gTLDs that have some restrictions and hence not open to all like - .gov., .int, .mil.

sTLD - A sponsored TLD is a specialized top-level domain that has a sponsor representing a specific community served by the domain. The communities are formed/based on ethnic, geographical, professional, technical or other theme concepts. Some of these so called sTLDs have restrictive use (like .edu, .gov, .mil) while most of them are open to all for registration. Examples are .legal, .hotel, .club, .travel etc...

uTLD - An unsponsored TLD operates under policies established by the global Internet community directly through the ICANN process. All the gTLDs that are not sponsored ones are uTLDs like .com, .net, .org etc...

ccTLD - TLDs with two letters (.xx) have been established for over 250 countries and external territories and are referred to as "country-code" TLDs or "ccTLDs". Examples are .in for India, .ca for Canada, .jp for Japan etc... Registrants of .ccTLDs domains must meet the Local Presence Requirements of specific country / territory.

IDNs - Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) permit the global community to use a domain name in their native language or script. This is enabled by allowing domain names to have characters from different scripts, beyond the letters (a to z), digits (0 to 9) and hyphen (-). Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-Latin scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese or Devanagri).

IDNs variant TLDs (both gTLD & ccTLD) have also started coming into existence.

Examples: IDN ccTLDs are: .भारत (Devanagri/India), .中國 (Traditional Chinese/China)

Examples: IDN gTLDs are: .संगठन (.org in Devanagri), .コム (.com in Japaneese)