Enter Djibouti market with a .DJ Domain

No. The terms define an applicant as «a person or organization» and nowhere require establishment in Djibouti, a local address, a tax number or an agent. The country list on the registration form covers every country in the world and Djibouti is not preselected, so a company based abroad, a sole trader and a private individual all apply on the same footing. The registry's own registration page names its audience as «deejays, musicians, parents, kids, seasoned web pros». The absence of a geographic barrier does not mean the application skips approval.

Because the registry curates the namespace by hand. Its home page states that registration is subject to prior approval in order to prevent naming conflicts, and the request goes to dotDJ for review after payment is taken. The screening is not merely formal: generic names, the names of countries, languages and cities, two-letter names, top-level extension names and poorly documented applications can all be refused. The fee also includes membership of A.DJ, the association of registrants, for the duration of the registration. You know approval has come through when the name enters the database; DNS deployment then takes hours to days.

Three characters. The terms define the length of the second-level name as «3 characters or more, including numbers and a hyphen», not exceeding sixty-three. Measurement confirms it: a two-character query is rejected by the registry's lookup with the notice that the name must be more than two characters long, while a three-character name is processed normally. Two further rules are easy to miss: a name may not begin or end with a hyphen, and it may not begin with the digit zero either. Digits are otherwise allowed anywhere in the name.

The term is a fixed list rather than a continuous range. The registry's own application form offers six options — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 years — with two years preselected. In practice that means a six, seven, eight or nine-year .dj registration cannot be chosen; those durations have no counterpart at the registry. The terms state that the fee is set on a yearly basis and that a multi-year discount applies to registrations of ten years and over. On renewal the new period runs from the previous expiry date, so renewing early costs you nothing.

You get forty-five days. The reassuring detail in this zone is that the terms expressly keep the name active online throughout the grace period, so your site does not go dark the moment the term ends. Renew within that window and the new period runs from the old expiry date, so no days are lost. The redemption stage familiar from generic extensions, however, does not exist here: at the end of the forty-fifth day the name becomes available to anyone. You also cannot transfer the name to a third party during the grace period. Notices arrive only by email, so keep your address current.

Names can be transferred, but the procedure does not use the familiar authorisation code. The terms describe a transfer as the registry changing the registered email address of the two holders once it is satisfied the request is authentic. A transfer is subject to the standard registration rules, meaning the incoming holder also goes through approval and the request can be denied — if it is, the name stays with the former holder. At registration you accept that A.DJ may refuse transfers. No transfer is possible during the forty-five day grace period. Start on the domain transfer page.

No. The registry's public lookup reports whether a name is registered and its expiry date; beyond that, the holder's name, organisation, address, email, telephone, creation date and name servers are never published. The terms turn this into an undertaking: the registry will not disclose any information on registrants to the public or to any authority except under legal obligation. There is also no classic whois server on port 43 for .dj and no RDAP endpoint, so the registry's own web lookup is the only channel. You can check your own records on the whois search page.

The registry has adopted ICANN's UDRP, but the body that runs it is different. Under the terms, disputes are administered by A.DJ, the association of registrants, and A.DJ may decide to replace the usual panels with member juries drawn at random from a particular category of registrant. Experts from the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center are brought in only if A.DJ approves them case by case, and at the complainant's cost. The right to complain is not limited to trademark owners: abusive retention of common-interest names can be raised with A.DJ by any internet user.