Enter Mali market with a .ML Domain

.ml is the country code top-level domain of Mali, in West Africa. The zone is run by AGETIC (Agence des Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication), a Malian state agency based in Bamako; both the administrative and the technical contacts recorded in the root zone database belong to that agency. The extension has been in the root zone since 1993. Until 2013 it was held by SOTELMA, the national telecoms operator, and when that company was privatised .ml was redelegated to AGETIC on 11 February 2013. So .ml sits with the Malian state rather than a private company, and the state sets its rules.

No. For a period .ml names were handed out free and the extension became widely known online as a throwaway domain; that arrangement ended in 2023 and AGETIC took the registry in house. The registry's own portal now runs a full commercial flow: an account, a basket, an order summary, a tax-calculated invoice, and separate renewal and restoration items. On the payment side it offers Malian mobile money alongside international card options. You may still find pages describing free .ml domains in search results, but that information is out of date. Today .ml is registered, renewed and lost on expiry like any other country extension.

No. The registry's public lookup publishes no registrant fields at all, and this is not field-by-field redaction either: the response simply contains no registrant, admin or technical section. What you see is the name itself, the registry domain identifier, the creation and expiry dates, the registrar's details, the status codes, the name servers and the DNSSEC flag. The data is still collected: the registry's control panel asks the holder for name, company, address, country, email and telephone, but none of it is made public. You can check whether a .ml name is registered on the whois search page.

Once the expiry date passes the name is suspended and taken out of the zone, then enters a recovery period. A .ml name in that state cannot be renewed directly: the registry's system requires a restoration request to be opened, a separate restoration charge to be settled, and AGETIC to approve the request. While approval is pending the name is not live, so both your website and your mail stop working. At the end of the period the name moves into the deletion queue and there is no way back. The registry does not publish how long these stages run, so you cannot follow the countdown from outside; the only safe approach is never to miss the expiry date.

Alongside the flat second level, .ml also uses shared prefixes: the registry offers third-level registration under com.ml, net.ml, org.ml, edu.ml, art.ml, perso.ml and univ.ml. Technically these are not separate zones — they are served straight from inside the .ml zone. Measurement shows they are genuinely in use: the busiest by far is edu.ml, where Mali's universities and research institutes sit, followed by com.ml for commercial names and org.ml for associations. gouv.ml is closed to the public and reserved as a separate zone for Malian government bodies. If you are building an institutional identity in Mali, it is worth considering the flat .ml and the relevant prefix together.

The registry's published naming charter could not be reached at the time of measurement — its title and date are known, but the link the registry itself provides does not respond — so we cannot confirm whether a written residency condition exists. What can be measured is this: the country field in the registry's own signup form is free, not locked to Mali; the payment methods include an international card option; and names held through a registrar based outside Mali do exist in the zone. Even so, it is worth confirming the current terms before you order from abroad; you can reach us through the contact page.

There are two channels. The registry sells directly to end users through its own portal: you open an account, check the name, complete the order against an invoice, and manage name servers, URL forwarding, glue records and DNS from the same panel. Accredited registrars also register .ml names, and measurement found names in the zone held through a registrar based outside Mali. For anyone managing several extensions in one place, the registrar channel is the practical one. Check the status of the name you want on the domain name search page.