Buy .co.bw Domain Name

Botswana's communications regulator, BOCRA — the Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority. It sits in the capital, Gaborone, and IANA's root zone record lists it as the sponsoring organisation for .bw as well as both the administrative and the technical contact. Regulator and registry are not separated here: the body that writes the policy is the body that keeps the records. Applications are not filed with the authority itself; you register through a registrar accredited by BOCRA. A measurement on 17 August 2026 showed local registrars such as GBS, Desert Road and MTN Solutions Botswana on live records.

.bw is the country's extension in the root zone; co.bw is a shared label beneath it, set aside for commercial entities. Most registrations in the Botswana namespace are made under labels like this, at the third level: academic institutions use ac.bw, government bodies gov.bw, network service providers net.bw and non-profits org.bw. Names sitting directly under .bw do exist, but they are legacy registrations — among the second-level names sampled on 17 August 2026, none had a creation date more recent than 2016. The channel for new commercial registrations is co.bw.

No. The Botswana registry publishes no registrant, administrative or technical contact fields in its lookup output. The responses measured on 17 August 2026 carried only the domain name, the registry identifier, the creation and expiry dates, the registrar's name and contact details, the status codes and the name servers. There is no redaction notice either, because nothing is being redacted: those fields are never printed at all. You can check what your own name exposes on the whois search page.

co.bw is the label set aside for commercial entities and businesses in the Botswana namespace, so it is the natural address for a company selling into the country, opening an office there or building a local brand identity. The other commercial labels are far narrower: shop.bw is open only to licensed retailers and agric.bw only to companies trading in agricultural produce. For personal use the regulator opened a separate label on 1 March 2021. It is worth asking your registrar in advance how the eligibility conditions are assessed at the moment of registration.

Changing registrar works in practice in this zone: in the measurement of 17 August 2026, a number of live records carried traces of past transfers between different registrars. What actually blocks the process is locks, and the lock regime has two layers. Locks placed by your registrar can be lifted at your request; locks placed by the registry itself cannot be lifted by a registrar and require going to the registry directly. So check the lock status of the name first, then start the process on the domain transfer page.

Botswana's own country zone publishes them directly. In the measurement of 17 August 2026, SOA and NS queries for co.bw returned no zone of their own; authority stayed with .bw. In practice the delegation of a .co.bw name sits in the country zone file and is published from the four authoritative name servers of .bw. Those servers are not concentrated in one place: some answer through international anycast networks, others from infrastructure inside the country, and two of them carry IPv6 addresses. The same measurement found the zone carrying a DS record in the root.

The regulator publishes its rule set as separate documents rather than one contract. Two core texts are dated February 2022: the registration terms and conditions, which govern registration itself, and the acceptable use policy, which draws the limits of use. Alongside them sit a domain life-cycle policy covering the expiry and deletion chain, a registrar accreditation agreement, and a dispute resolution policy dated October 2023 together with its procedural annexe. Before you register, have your registrar confirm which edition of each document is currently in force.