Thursday, January 26, 2012

ZANIC: The Other South African "Domain Registry"

If you are not satisfied with range of services offered by the various second level domain namespaces under South Africa's Domain Registry, ZADNA, perhaps you can secure some good "South African" domains under the pseudo Top Level Domains za.org and za.net run by an organization called ZANIC.

Registrations are open to residents of South Africa only and the domains are free; like in .co.za you need nameservers before applying for domain registration. List of restricted domains include South African second level domains namespaces, all ISO 3166-1 two letter codes, one letter characters.

Domains are free and the registry claims it has registered some 30,000 domains. For a free pseudo Top Level Domain name, the ZANIC namespaces are quite well developed with several businesses and organizations using za.net and za.org domains. Several za.net and za.org have been developed into popular websites, showing the domain namespaces have gained a level of acceptance amongst some South Africans who missed out on great .co.za .org.za .com .org .net domains.

CentralNIC has a similar business model with over 20 pseudo TLDs including gr.com gb.com  de.com us.com domains offering alternatives to ccTLDs. CentralNIC also owns za.com domain although currently it redirects to CentralNIC website.

Work can be republished with attribution. Email Us africadomainnames@gmail.com

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