Rules for the assignment of a .UK domain name

(time rough for registration: in real time - 5 minutes max)

With over 2.5 million domain names registered, .uk is easily the most widely used country code domain extension in the world. It is and will continue to be essential for UK and International businesses to register their .uk domains.

.uk is a country code Top Level Domains (ccTLD's) which can be broken down into sub-categories to indicate their type of activity. These sub-categories (eg .co or .org) are called Second Level Domains (SLD's).

NetRegister now offers the following domain extensions:

.co.uk for commercial enterprises
.org.uk for non-commercial organisations
.me.uk intended for personal use


• The Registry assign the domain names to the registrants, following the chronological order of the requests; it's very important to complete the Netregister's form online for register quickly a domain
  
  
• May be registered by private individuals and companies around the world
  
  
• .me.uk is intended for natural person with an association with the UK (rules)
  
  
• An unlimited number of domains may be registered by the same Registrant (Owner of the domain)
  
  
• Certain domain names are reserved
  
  
• The Official Web Site is located at the URL: Nominet.Uk ; WhoIs database is located here: http://www.nic.uk
  
  
• The registration procedures ends only when a record will be created in NOMINET UK's database where management of the zone is delegated to NOMINET UK from which NS records will be generated and loaded into the primary nameservers for the zone
  
  
• Two letter names are not allowed, reserved for ISO country codes (i.e. it.co.uk )
  
  
• To name your domain you can use any letter, numbers between 0 and 9, and the symbol "-" (hyphen)
  
  
• The name can neither start nor end with the character "-" (hyphen)
  
  
• All second level names of .uk are banned from being used as third level names. e.g. nhs.co.uk would be banned as it is a second level name
  
  
• All top level domains are banned from being used as third level names. e.g. net.org.uk and org.co.uk are not allowed
  
  
• All one character domain names (ie [a-z0-9].xxx.uk) are reserved for possible future sub-domain usage. The only one currently delegated is X.CO.UK. The owner shall still maintain it unless they volunteer to relinquish it
  
  
• There is no difference between small and capital letters
  
  
• All .uk domains must be registered for a minimum of 2 years