Support Start > About Us and Our Services > About Domain Name Only Service > Available Domain Names

We can directly register, transfer and renew domain names ending in .com, .net or .org and more than 100 other extensions.

Free domain name registration and renewal is included for .com, .net or .org with our hosting plans (or you can purchase domain names without hosting service). Our price list shows prices for other suffixes.

We can also host websites and/or email ending in any other domain name you own or buy through a different company, even if we can’t provide domain name renewal for that suffix. To use a different domain name not shown on our price list, you can first buy it through another company if you haven’t already done so, then use our usual signup form: it will explain what to do (it involves updating the DNS nameservers at the other company). You’ll need to separately renew the domain name with the other company each year.

On this page:

• What do the domain name suffixes mean?
• Can I register a locality-based .us name, such as "something.ca.us"?
• Can I register a .edu domain name?
• Can I register internationalized domain names (IDNs)?

What do the domain name suffixes mean?

For the most part, there's no difference between a domain name ending in, say, .com and one ending in .org. The central registry for each domain name suffix is run by a different company, but the domain names work the same way when you use them for a website or email service.

There are some restrictions on who can register two types of domain names, though:

• .biz domain names can only be used by businesses.
• .us domain names can only be used by people who live or work in the United States.

All the other types of domain names can be registered by anyone. (Originally, .net was intended for Internet companies and .org was intended for nonprofit organizations, but that's no longer an actual rule. For example, a for-profit company may use a .org domain name if they wish to do so.)

Can I register a locality-based .us name, such as "something.ca.us"?

Locality-based .us domain names, which end with a state abbreviation such as ".ca.us", are not handled like normal .us names. They're separately assigned by local "delegated managers", coordinated by a company named NeuStar.

Getting one of these domain names is a somewhat manual process, explained on the "Interim Process" section of the NeuStar "Delegated Managers" page. You'd download and complete the template they mention, then email it to them. They'll do a lot of checking to make sure you're really the appropriate representative of the local government, then issue the domain name to you.

We can provide hosting service for locality-based .us domain names if you ask us to manually set up the hosting account, even though we can't procure the domain name for you.

Can I register a .edu domain name?

Only universities and other institutionally accredited post-secondary institutions can register .edu domain names. They aren't available to the general public or to other schools such as elementary schools, high schools, etc.

Can I register internationalized domain names (IDNs)?

We don’t currently support registering or transferring non-ASCII internationalized domain names.

However, we can provide hosting service for them if they’re registered with another company. To do this, sign up for it using the “punycode encoding” version on our order form, such as xn--bcher-kva.ch (not the Unicode “Bücher.ch” version).

Note that our systems provide only basic IDN support. As one example of the limitations, you will usually see the encoded “xn--” version of the domain name in our control panel, on our help pages, and so on. If that bothers you, it would probably make sense to choose a different company with more full-fledged IDN support.