Buy .bj Domain Name

No. The charter applies to «any natural or legal person requesting a service relating to domain names» and asks the applicant neither to be established in Benin, nor to incorporate there, nor to appoint a local representative. Holders with addresses outside the country are plainly visible in the registry database. The locality condition is placed on the registrar rather than on the registrant: to sell .bj a company must either be governed by Beninese law or be recognised as a registrar by ICANN, and must evidence a minimum annual volume backed by a bank or insurance guarantee.

Two bodies, with distinct roles. The competent authority is the country's regulator, ARCEP-Bénin; the mandate comes from the digital code that took effect in 2018, and the same statute requires the management of .bj names to be centralised in a single organ. The registry is actually operated by JENY SAS, selected through a call for candidates; the company took the role under a delegation agreement signed on 14 June 2018 and submitted the naming charter for the regulator's approval. The registry takes no direct applications, and it invoices registrars rather than registrants.

The charter defines the unit of validity as one year and starts the clock on the date the name is activated, not on the date the application was filed. It also sets a renewal calendar: the holder is expected to file the renewal request two months before the end of the validity period, and renewal runs on the annual tariff. The text sets no ceiling on how many periods may be renewed at once. In practice the calendar follows the activation day, so track your expiry against the registry's activation date rather than your order date.

You get two months. For a name that has not been renewed by the end of its validity period the charter grants a two-month grace period, and a renewal filed within it takes effect from the date the name fell due, so no days are lost. At the end of that period the name is released and may be assigned to another applicant. The separate redemption period you know from generic extensions is not provided for in this zone: the concept appears among the definitions, but no article grants such a period to .bj. Do not think of delay in months here.

Yes. The charter states it expressly: all information relating to registrants and to their administrative and technical contacts is published online and kept accessible to everyone, with no distinction between natural and legal persons. The registry's own lookup confirms it — name, street, city, country and telephone come back unmasked. The charter grants a «restricted diffusion» option only for the nom.bj space reserved to individuals, and that space is not an operating zone today. You can see how your record appears on the whois search page.

The charter describes a sectoral scheme — com.bj for commercial companies, org.bj for associations, net.bj for telecom operators, univ.bj for universities and so on — but that scheme does not operate today. Measurement shows why: these labels are not delegated as zones of their own; they sit as registry-held records with no name servers assigned, and no live name could be found beneath them. Only gouv.bj, reserved for state bodies, is a genuine sub-zone and it requires prior authorisation. In practice a .bj name is taken directly at the second level, as yourname.bj.

There are three separate limits. Terms reserved to the registry are never assigned: bj, nic, www, web, w3, whois and registre. The charter further prohibits names contrary to public order, national security, the interests of the State, morality, religion, language and culture, as well as names with racist or ethnic connotations; the registry's lookup rejects certain words outright as a prohibited string. The third limit is a procedure rather than a ban: country and city names, regulated professions, names of international organisations, generic terms and signs filed with intellectual-property authorities go through prior examination.