Enter the Sierra Leone market with a .COM.SL Domain

No. The registry's namespace clause counts .com.sl among the two spaces that are «for commercial and general use, and fully open for registrations»; the commercial label is guidance, not a burden of proof. No trade register extract, tax certificate or activity declaration is requested. Nor is an address, agent or trustee in Sierra Leone required, and measurement shows names in this space held by a bank registered in the United Kingdom. A document obligation exists only under gov.sl, where a signed authorisation letter from the Ministry of Information Office is needed; edu.sl is limited to educational bodies.

Four characters. The registry's name composition page sets the limit plainly: sixty-three characters at most, four at least. Only the third-level part you choose is counted; the com.sl suffix does not enter the calculation. Measurement confirms the rule: the registry's own availability check rejects a three-character .com.sl name with «invalid domain name, please follow the rules for domain name registrations», while a four-character name comes back as available immediately. The practical consequence is worth planning around — if you are aiming at a short, memorable abbreviation, do not stop at three letters, because the order flow will not accept it.

From one year up to five. The registry publishes a single term table that draws no distinction between extensions: one, two, three, four and five years are all available, no intermediate value is skipped, and five is the ceiling. One detail matters more than the table: the registry offers no auto-renewal. As expiry approaches it notifies the registrant and the administrative and technical contacts, but no payment is taken automatically. Choosing a longer term therefore mainly reduces the risk of forgetting. Put the renewal date in your calendar and make sure the recorded email address still works.

Yes, by default they are. The registration agreement states it as an undertaking: the account information you supply will be publicly available through the registry's whois directory. Measurement returns the same picture — .com.sl records show the holder's name, organisation, country and email address with no redaction line anywhere. That turns one precaution into something concrete: at order time, use your business address, a company mailbox and a switchboard number rather than personal details. You can see exactly how a record looks from the outside on the whois search page.

The name is removed from the zone file the moment the term ends. The registry states it directly: if the renewal payment is not made on time, the domain is taken out of the zone file and stops functioning. The effect is blunt — there is no buffer keeping the address alive for a few more days as you may expect from generic extensions. Your website and email go down the same day, and in practice customers usually notice the outage before you do. Because there is no auto-renewal either, acting on time is the only real protection.

Both sit with the same registry, under the same registration agreement and the same naming rules; the difference is the level and the signal each sends. .sl is registered directly at the second level and gives the shorter address. .com.sl sits at the third level and reads at once as a commercial presence in the national market, yet the registry asks for no document to back that up. Holding a name at .sl does not automatically close the .com.sl side: brands keeping the same name at both levels exist. For some names, though, the registry has blocked the commercial space, so query both separately.

There are two different operations, and their consequences differ. A change of provider you start with Atak Domain; open the process on the domain transfer page. A change of holder is a separate registry procedure: the request goes out from the recorded registrant's email address and must be confirmed by both the outgoing and the incoming holder. The commercially critical detail is here — the registry treats this as a deletion followed by a fresh registration and resets the expiry date to the day the reassignment took place. Your remaining term is lost, so factor it into any acquisition.

No. The registry's question-and-answer section defines internationalised domain names and then states that IDN registrations are not available for the time being, without distinguishing between extensions. The name composition rule points the same way and is stricter still: valid characters are the letters a-z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen. Accented and non-Latin letters are therefore excluded entirely, and the registry publishes neither a punycode converter nor a character table. A brand name carrying such letters has to be written with plain Latin equivalents. Capitalisation makes no difference: the registry treats names as case insensitive.