Five mistakes when registering a foreign domain

Assuming free means available to you

Several registries require the holder to have a local connection: an address, a company, a citizenship. .eu is the best-known example — after Brexit, holders in the United Kingdom no longer met the criterion and lost their names despite having paid.

Check the eligibility rules before you plan anything around a name.

Applying .com knowledge to country extensions

ICANN rules on expiry, redemption and disputes govern generic domains. .pl, .de and .it each follow their own registry policy — different deadlines, different procedures, sometimes a different appeal route entirely.

Trusting an available result everywhere

Only 70 of 248 country registries publish RDAP, the service that gives a definitive answer. For the rest, checking falls back to DNS, which cannot separate a free name from a registered but unused one.

For .de, .eu, .it, .es and .io the result is indicative. Confirmation comes from a registrar.

Budgeting only the first year

Registration fees are often promotional; renewal fees are not. A .pl name renews for several times its first-year price, and .io costs the same substantial fee every year indefinitely. Price a domain over five years, not one.

Registering in your contractor’s name

A domain registered to an agency, or to an employee’s personal mailbox, becomes a problem the moment that relationship ends. Changing the registered holder is a separate procedure, charged by some registries and very difficult when the previous contact cannot be reached.

The holder record should name your company and a company email address. Five minutes at registration, months of trouble when skipped.