Buy .at Domain Name

No. The registry's own policy states that a .at domain may be registered by «any individual or legal entity, irrespective of their nationality, place of residence, area of operations». There is no local address, agent or document requirement. What the registry does insist on is accurate data: a private applicant must be of age and legally competent and give their full first and last name, while a company appears with its full name and legal form in the organisation field. A PO box is not accepted as an address, and holder details may not contain umlauts or other special characters. Where the applicant has no legal personality, a real person who will carry the name is entered instead.

You never choose a number of years. A .at contract is concluded for an indefinite period, and the name does not lapse because an end date has arrived. The day and month of your registration become an annually recurring cutoff date; each service period runs for one year and is invoiced on that date. To give the name up, your cancellation must reach the registry at least one day before the next period begins. Consumers get one extra right: from the second service year onwards, a cancellation filed in the first six months of a period brings back half of the annual fee already paid. This is also why the registry's whois output shows neither a creation nor an expiry date.

About eight weeks. You decide whether the cancellation takes effect immediately or at the end of the current service period. From that moment the name is locked, stops working technically and is flagged as «PENDING DELETE» in the whois database, while the former holder stays visible in the record. Once the lock runs out the name is deleted and opens to everyone on a first-come, first-served basis — the previous holder gets no priority. Inside that window the cancellation can still be withdrawn: you reply to the registry's confirmation email or send a signed withdrawal form, and companies additionally show proof of signing authority.

Two separate operations. For a change of provider you ask your current provider for the AuthInfo code and hand it to the new one; the registry states plainly that the code must be handed over even when old invoices are still outstanding. If the provider refuses anyway, the new one requests a confirmation token from the registry: it is emailed straight to the holder, is valid for 21 days and works for that provider only. A change of holder is a different procedure, requiring matching declarations from the old and the new holder, and the name moves together with any unpaid debts. Start on the domain transfer page.

For private individuals, no. The registry does not publish the data of natural persons, whether they are the holder or the technical contact; in measurement those records carry the line «data not disclosed». Data of organisations with legal personality is published in full, while telephone, fax and email can be suppressed on request. The administrative contact field was dropped altogether on 16 May 2018 on data minimisation grounds. Hidden data is reachable through a motivated request: law enforcement, lawyers and anyone who can evidence a legitimate interest applies through a web form. See what a record looks like on the whois search page.

In court. There is no UDRP and no arbitration procedure for .at; the registry openly refuses to act as an arbitrator, and where the parties cannot settle the route is the ordinary courts — the agreed venue is the Vienna Commercial Court and the governing law is Austrian. The one instrument the registry offers is the wait status: whoever makes a legal claim to the name credible, with a company or trade mark register extract for example, sends a signed request to the legal department, and a change of holder is blocked for one month, extendable once. The name itself keeps running throughout.

Yes. The .at zone is signed, and the registry opened DNSSEC to the public on 29 February 2012. At registration and on later changes you may submit up to six DS records, which the registry checks automatically. The division of duties is written into the guidelines: signing your own zone and delivering the DS record is your job, while the registry publishes it and keeps .at correctly signed. Separately there is a «Security Lock» service: while it is active the holder must confirm every change to the name through an emailed link, and it has to be lifted before a change of provider.

Not the rules — only the size. Both zones are run by nic.at under the same terms and conditions and the same registration guidelines, which name them together in a single sentence. Eligibility, name composition, the term model and the dispute procedure are identical, and «co» does not require you to be a company. The registry's own figures show the gap: on 15 August 2026 there were 1,487,121 names under .at against 34,132 under .co.at. In the smaller zone the chance that a short or generic word is still free is therefore markedly higher.