Buy .ng Domain Name

No. NiRA's rules list .ng among the open zones and impose no restriction whatsoever on the applicant's status: no local address, no agent, no trustee and no trade-register extract. The Nigerian presence requirement applies only to the closed zones for universities, schools, government and the military. There is exactly one route to registration — an accredited registrar; the registry accepts no applications directly. Priority is chronological: the first valid application for a name is processed, the rest are refused, and a refused name is not held in reserve for anyone. You must also accept NiRA's registrant agreement electronically, or the actions taken on that registration are void.

From one to five years. The rules let the applicant choose any term between one and five years and expressly forbid registrars from narrowing that choice to a single year. Renewal brings a second ceiling into play: the unexpired part of your term plus the renewal you request may never exceed five years together. The «stack up to ten years» habit familiar from generic extensions does not work in this zone — however early you renew, the registration is never carried more than five years forward. Measurement agrees: none of the active .ng records sampled had an expiry date further out than five years.

Three characters. The rules reject one- and two-character names at both the second and the third level, and measurement returns the same picture. Every existing one- and two-character .ng name sits in the registry's reserved pool, and the whois output carries, in place of a registrar name, a note saying that single and two-character domains are not open for public registration. Three-character names are ordinary commercial names and some of them are still free. A few three-letter names are refused as well, but on the reserved-word and geographic-name lists — that is a word refusal, not a length refusal.

Both are run by the same registry, NiRA; what differs is the level and the positioning. .ng is registered directly at the second level and gives you the shorter address, while .com.ng sits one level down, inside the sub-zone set aside for commercial organisations. On eligibility both are open zones. The real difference is legal: the rules treat the two levels as independent, so holding a name at .ng gives you no claim to the same name at .com.ng. To close your brand properly on the Nigerian market you have to treat each level separately.

Yes, but only inside a fixed window. The first thirty days after expiry allow renewal without penalty. From the thirtieth to the sixtieth day the name is suspended — the website and email stop working, though renewal is still possible. On the sixtieth day the name servers are removed and a 28-day redemption period begins, in which the name can be brought back only through your registrar and only against a restoration fee. On the eighty-eighth day the name moves into pending delete for up to fourteen days, where the registrar can neither renew nor redeem it. After that the name is released and goes to whoever applies first.

Your personal details are not shown. The registry's privacy policy lists exactly which fields are opened to third parties through whois: the domain name, the registrar's name and registry number, the creation, update and expiry dates, whether the name is suspended or in transfer, and the name servers together with their addresses. The holder's name, postal address, telephone and email are not on that list; in measurement those fields come back marked as redacted for privacy, and the only identifying field left standing is the country code. An individual holder may publish more voluntarily — publication is a choice, not the default. See how your own record looks on the whois search page.

There are two separate operations. For a change of registrar, your new provider files a request with the registry, the registry emails you, and you have seven calendar days to approve it; without approval the request is cancelled and nothing changes. Your registration period is untouched, so no days are lost. A change of holder is a different procedure needing approval from both sides: the transferring holder confirms first, then the incoming one, each within seven calendar days. The remaining term travels with the name. During the first thirty days after expiry a name cannot move to another registrar without being renewed. Start on the domain transfer page.

No. The rules state plainly that internationalised domain names are not offered and that names beginning with «xn--» cannot be registered; the permitted set is the twenty-six unaccented Latin letters, the ten digits and the hyphen. Turkish letters such as ş, ç, ğ, ı, ö and ü therefore cannot appear in a .ng name, and neither can German umlauts nor Cyrillic characters. Two further rules apply: a name may not begin with a hyphen or end with one, and a name made up of digits alone is refused. Combinations of letters, digits and hyphens register without difficulty.