European domains: Germany (.de)

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Registration:

To register your German domain, click here!

Is your domain name working hard enough?

Currently, whether you have registered a .com or a .co.uk domain there are no restrictions if you would like to register both versions of your domain name - and many people do!.

Of course, the choice is all a matter of your preference - .com is often regarded as "International" where the .co.uk domain is deemed to be "UK only", usually it depends on the target market.

Whilst, the .com domain is recognised world wide, it is easier to remember and to type, and there is a whole world full of people who could register it before you do!

If your target is primarily the UK market then registering just the .co.uk domain would seem to be the obvious choice. The .co.uk instantly identifies you as a UK company and often, given a list of URLs in a search engine, people will choose a domain / URL with their country code. Therefore, it follows that if you want to extend your target market then registering your domain with other country-code top-level domains (ccTLD) will expand your target audience.

Registering both .com and .co.uk (and others such as .at, .dk, .es, .eu, .ie, .it, .nz, .se etc) domain names in fact makes very good sense - it stops anyone else from registering your name and leaves it ready for you to use either right away or in the future. Did you know that with Web Forwarding you can have as many domain names as you like pointing to a single website - see Web Forwarding below.

Email Forwarding

Create an almost unlimited number of unique Email addresses for your domain name (e.g. me@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com,sales@yourdomain.com, etc.) and forward them to your existing email account(s). Set up each employee or family member with their own personal Email address.

Catch All Email

Simply tell us 'one' address to have all your messages sent to and all of your emails will be forwarded to that address.

Web Forwarding

If you already have a website, start using your domain name without the additional cost of hosting. When a user enters your domain name into their browser, they'll be redirected to your existing website.

You can have many domain names forwarded to a single website.

Web Hosting

We offer several Web Hosting packages to suit your needs. Packages start 1gb of bandwidth (per month) and 30mb of disk storage on our server, plus 24hr access to maintain your website from anywhere in the world.

Search Engine Submission

Submit your website to 1000+ search engines, increasing both your web presence and your website traffic!

Web Design Templates

Get a professionally designed website without the cost of a professinal web designer by Googling for "web design templates" and find lots of free ready-to-use websites templates that you can download immediately.

Background

To register a .de domain name, you need to have a local contact in Germany. If you have no local contact, it may be possible for us to provide you with one so please enquire about this.

Due to very specific requirements regarding the name servers used with the desired domain name, the name servers need to be properly set up, in accordance to the registry rules and one of the name serves has to be in a different sub-net before applying for the domain name.

Below there will be an extract from a working .de zone. Areas of importance are the 'slave refresh period', 'slave retry interval', 'slave expire time' and 'negative response TTL'. There are special requirements that name servers need to respect if you plan to use a commercial web or e-mail hosting provider to host your .de domain name’s services. This must be done before the DeNIC (the German registry) will attach the name servers to the desired domain name.

xxxxxxxx.de.       86400  IN  SOA    ns1.bb-online.net. bob.mail.bb-online.net. xxxxxxxx.de. ( 
   2007010801   ;serial number (version) 
   14400        ;slave refresh period (4 hours) 
   7200 ;slave retry interval (2 hours) 
   635800       ;slave expire time (1 week, 8 hours, 36 minutes, 40 seconds) 
   86400        ;negative response TTL (1 day) 
   ) 
xxxxxxxx.de.       86400  IN  NS     ns1.bb-online.net. 
xxxxxxxx.de.       86400  IN  NS     ns2.bb-online.net. 
xxxxxxxx.de.       86400  IN  NS     brain.bb-online.co.uk. 
xxxxxxxx.de.       86400  IN  A      194.168.163.55 
mail.xxxxxxxx.de.  86400  IN  A      194.168.163.57 
www.xxxxxxxx.de.   86400  IN  CNAME  xxxxxxxx.de.

German domain names can be registered on a yearly basis and are available to anyone on a 'first come first serve' basis. They a registered directly under .de as a second level.

The maximum length of a .de domain name is 63 characters and the minimum is 3. The only exception of this 3 letter minimum is db.de (Deutsche Bahn), ix.de and hq.de which were registered before this rule was adopted. A .de domain name cannot be exclusively composed of numbers. Combinations of letters which are used for road-vehicle license plates to indicate the district they were issued in are not allowed to be used. Similarly, any combination that would result from replacing an umlaut with a two-letter equivalent (i.e. ä with ae, ö with oe or ü with ue) cannot be done.

All diacritics of the German language can be used in a .de domain name. In many languages, e.g., Spanish, French, Romanian and Portuguese, 'de' is used as a noun. This is used in many registrations under the German TLD for romance language web hosts. Sites like 'elforo.de', meaning theforum.of, can be used in a clever manner. Encoding site names into the URL path can lead to such websites like elforo.de/wikipedia which means theforum.of/wikipedia. The Federal Republic of Germany's country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is .de. The Network Information Centre responsible for the .de domains, DENIC, doesn't require specific second-level domains.

The domain name .de is based on the first two letters of the word 'Deutschland' which means Germany. Before the year 1989, East Germany, though having its own ISO 31661-1 code (dd), was never assigned its own ccTLD meaning that .de is and was the the only German ccTLD that existed. It is the second most popular ccTLD which is show in terms of number of registration. In first place is .cn. Out of all TLD's, it is third after .com and .cn. uni-dortmund.de was one of the first domain names of this type registered, a website for the Department of Computer Science of the University or Dormund. Though .se registrations can be done directly from DENIC, it is always faster and cheaper to do so through a DENIC member (registrar).

Over 12 millions .de domain names are now registered.

• Population is estimated to be 82,310,000 people
• Gross Domestic Product is $2.522 trillion US Dollars
• Languages recognised in German are German