Enter Dominica market with a .DM Domain

The rulebook opens registration to organisations and individuals both inside and outside Dominica, with no residency, local contact or trustee requirement. The dispute policy states the single condition plainly: any natural person over the age of eighteen and any legally recognised entity may become a registrant. The registration agreement draws the same distinction and lists limited liability companies, partnerships, associations and similar structures on the entity side. There is therefore no separate barrier for private customers. The one exception concerns geography: names of parishes, villages, towns and cities in Dominica are reserved for people and organisations legally established in the country.

No. The rulebook settles the naming rule in a single sentence: a name may run to 63 characters, but only the letters A to Z may be registered, spaces are not allowed and case does not matter. Queries run against the registry's lookup server on 15 August 2026 showed the rule being enforced in practice: a purely alphabetic name came back as free, while every variant of the same root with a digit added was rejected as a restricted string. The practical consequence is straightforward — if your brand carries a year, a version or a model number, you cannot carry it into a .dm address and will need to build the name from letters.

For two distinct reasons. The first is a sector restriction spelled out in the rulebook: names related to banking, cryptocurrency, e-commerce, fintech services and online gaming are not accepted, and the registry adds that online gambling is not authorised in Dominica. The restriction is not visible at lookup time: on 15 August 2026 bank.dm and crypto.dm came back unavailable, while fintech.dm was free and ecommerce.dm was offered as a premium name. A name can therefore look purchasable and still be refused at the registry's review. The second is discretion: the registry may refuse a request, and may cancel a name even after registration, if it judges the name capable of harming the country's laws, morals or cultural and diplomatic sensitivities. Since no list of reserved or restricted names is published, checking availability up front is the practical route.

Personal data does not appear. Under its privacy heading the rulebook states that all personal information about a registrant is redacted and not publicly disclosed in lookup results. Every record sampled from the registry's port 43 server on 15 August 2026 confirmed this: the name, organisation, address, telephone and e-mail of the registrant and of the administrative, technical and billing contacts all came back hidden, and the only field left in the clear was the registrant's country. The technical fields are open — creation, update and expiry dates, the registrar, status codes, name servers and signing state are all readable. Run a query from the whois search page.

The registry describes itself as an auto-renew registry: at expiry the name renews itself for a further year, so if you intend to drop it the request has to reach the registry before that date. Reminders go to the address on record 60, 30, 15 and 5 days ahead of renewal, and the text states that failing to respond to them results in deletion. After a deletion request a thirty-day redemption period runs, followed by a five-day hold, and at that stage the address no longer resolves — the website and the mail stop. Recovery remains possible, but a restore fee applies on top of the annual renewal charge.

Transfers run through an accredited registrar, and the rulebook supplies two concrete numbers. The first is a lock: transfers are not permitted within the first 60 days of an initial registration, so a freshly registered name cannot be moved straight away. The second works in your favour: a successfully completed transfer automatically adds one further year to the name, so no time is lost in the move. Changing the legal owner is a separate route and does require documents — a passport or driving licence for an individual, a certificate of registration and articles of incorporation for a company. Start the process from the domain transfer page.

The difference is technical and decisive. The rulebook in force states that registration requests are accepted for second-level .dm names, while the related third-level labels are held for brand protection and will not be configured in the zone files. A DNS measurement on 15 August 2026 confirmed it: queries for .dm returned the zone's own record, whereas queries for .com.dm and .org.dm came back as non-existent. The practical conclusion is clear: if you want a working website and e-mail address, the name you need sits directly under .dm.