Buy .nl Domain Name

No. The registry's general terms open the application to the whole world: wherever you live or are based, you may apply for a .nl name through a registrar. A company registered abroad, a sole trader and a private individual all register on the same terms, and no local address, local representative, trustee or chamber of commerce document is required. Nor is there a cap on how many names one holder may take. The only real condition is that the name is registered to the actual rights holder and that the contact details are accurate; the registry verifies registration data and inaccurate details can lead to suspension.

Years are not a concept on the registry's side. The term clause of the general terms defines the registration as running for an indefinite period: a .nl name has no expiry date and no renewal date, and it does not lapse because someone forgot. It stays yours until you file a cancellation request through your registrar. The annual period you see at checkout is your provider's billing cycle, not a registry term. The practical consequence is that the familiar generic-extension story of losing a name to a missed renewal does not happen with .nl. You lose the name by ending the registration, not by missing a deadline.

Forty days. For forty days after cancellation nobody but you can register the name; the registry calls this quarantine. Throughout that window the name is taken out of the zone, so the website and email stop working. Only the most recent registrant can have it reinstated, and that can be arranged through the old registrar or a new one, with the registrar settling it with the registry. At the end of the fortieth day the name is released. Between release and general availability a further random delay of between zero and one hour elapses, which deliberately frustrates software written to catch dropped names.

Two characters. The registry's technical requirements document states that a name must have at least two characters and no more than sixty-three, and that count excludes the .nl suffix. Measurement confirms it: two-letter .nl names have been registered and in active use for decades. Single-character names, by contrast, are not free but closed to registration, and the registry's lookup returns them with a distinct excluded status. The characters you may use are the letters a to z, the digits 0 to 9 and the hyphen. Every hyphen must have a letter or digit on each side, so a name cannot start or end with one, nor contain two in a row.

No. The registry's technical requirements list the permitted characters exhaustively: only the letters a to z, the digits 0 to 9 and the hyphen. That is a restriction rather than an example, so accented forms such as ë and é, and any non-Latin script, are not accepted in .nl. The registry publishes no IDN character table, no punycode converter and no bundle mechanism for .nl, unlike some other country extensions that support internationalised names. In practice you write the name in plain ASCII, replacing accented letters with their unaccented equivalents, and you should make that conversion before ordering rather than after.

You cannot, because the registry forbids it. Since 1 October 2023 a third party — a registrar, a reseller or a privacy or proxy service provider — may not appear as the nominal registrant; the name has to be registered to the actual rights holder. So this is a rule, not a gap in anyone's product range, and the answer is the same whichever provider you use. You lose nothing by it, though: the public lookup already shows no registrant name, address, telephone number or email, only the domain, its status, the registrar's details, the name servers and the dates. Review your own record on the whois search page.

With the domain's unique code, called the token. Your current registrar holds it and, under the registry's rule, is obliged to give it to you within five days of your asking. You pass the token to the new registrar, who settles the transfer with the registry; if the request is in order the name moves immediately. If the code does not arrive within five days, the registry publishes a ready-made reminder letter, and the new registrar can also approach the registry directly to have the token released. Because the registration runs indefinitely, no days are lost in the process. Start on the domain transfer page.

It does, and .nl is unusually far ahead here. The zone is signed with a modern elliptic-curve algorithm and a DS record is published in the root. On the registrant's side DNSSEC is switched on through your registrar, and according to the registry's own published figure about sixty-two per cent of .nl names are signed, which is more than 3.3 million of them. There is protection during transfers too: the registry supports the key relay mechanism, so moving a signed name to another registrar does not break the chain of trust. That detail matters, because a broken chain makes your site unreachable behind validating resolvers.