What to know before you register international domain names

"Hi Christopher,
We have an issue which needs to be actioned as quickly as possible. It appears that I am the owner of a lot of domains, which should be owned by our company instead..."

This email from one of our long term clients was the inspiration for the recommendations below. I hope it will help you to avoid any extra work when registering international domain extensions.

Before doing any international domain name registration here are 3 essential tips that you should follow:
1. The registrant of your international domain names should be your company, and registrant name should be the exact company name stated in the business registration certificate

I have seen web designers registering domains for their clients in their own name, so they would actually show up as the owner of their clients´ trademarked domains. When the client finally realises this some years later, then they have already stopped working with the web designer, and it is not easy to change registrant data by then. As in the case above the client registered international domain names in the name of an employee, which is not advisable either.

The Russian administration has just requested that all .RU registrants need to show a business registration certificate to prove ownership. If the document is not valid, the .RU domains will be deleted. China requested the same documents for .CN in the fall of 2009 after registering 15 million .CN domains without any requirements. The French hostmaster will reject .FR domains some months after their registration if the data is not correct - without any notice.

So make sure that the registrant name is the complete company name as stated in the business registration certificate.

2. Make sure the registrant contact email is non-personal and also active in 5 years from now

You wouldn´t believe how often the domain manager in companies are replaced! Mostly the contact email for an international domain name is the one of the contact person in the company, but will this person stay in the company forever, and if the person leaves, will someone make sure that his emails are forwarded? In most cases the answer is no and no.
Any country hostmaster depends on the contact email when communicating with the domain owner. However this is minor stuff. Imagine instead the following scenario: You - John - have used the email john@abc.com as contact to register all domains for your company ABC. ABC changes at one point name to ABC123. All employees now use the new email so John´s email is john@abc123.com. abc.com is not used anymore, however imagine that the domain was not renewed, and a 3rd party re-registers it. The new registrant can then recreate the contact email john@abc.com and basically administer and change owner details for any of the old international domain names, where this email was used as contact.
So use an email like domains@ which should always be active, and make sure to double check if you decide to let old international domain names expire.
3. Decide upon using registrar DNS or own DNS when submitting an order
When making an international domain name registration you need to decide between using our DNS or your own DNS. Changing DNS after an international domain name has a cost. We recommend clients to use our DNS as full management is included. When you register international domain extensions the new domain will be redirected instantly to your website. Furthermore you can simply create a MX record pointing to your hosting server if you wish to create emails for the new domain.

I hope you have avoided some future headaches with this advice. Below you can check availability for all international domain extensions - yes, all +300 international domain names ! European Domain Centre is trusted by companies worldwide since the launch in 2003. I hope that you will too,

Christopher Hofman Laursen
Director