Enter Solomon Islands market with a .SB Domain

No. The registrant agreement sets no condition on nationality, residency or a link to any Solomon Islands institution, and it asks for neither a local contact nor documents. The only qualification is that you are an identifiable individual over eighteen or a legally recognised organisation. A measurement on 15 August 2026 found holders in the zone registered in China, South Korea and the United States. The real obligation is keeping your details truthful and current: inaccurate or stale data counts as grounds for suspension and cancellation.

The manager of the extension is Solomon Telekom Company Limited, based in Honiara; it calls itself NICSB in its own rulebook and appears as SBNIC in the technical contact of the IANA record. The registry runs on software from CoCCA Registry Services, a New Zealand company, but CoCCA is the software and support provider rather than the registry itself. The DNS is in Solomon Telekom's hands too: on 15 August 2026 the zone's SOA record pointed at dns1.telekom.net.sb. You can verify records from the whois search page.

On paper there is none: both are namespaces of the same registry, under the same agreement, the same dispute procedure and the same expiry chain. The difference shows up in measurement. On 15 August 2026 certificate transparency logs held 436 direct names under .sb and 144 under .com.sb. Age and composition separate them as well: .com.sb registrations reach back to 2007 and hold the country's banks, utilities and newspapers, while .sb opened in 2015 and is largely an international pool of short and numeric labels. Choose .com.sb for local recognition, .sb for a short name.

Because the registry's policy page does not describe registration as an automatic transaction: all registrations are treated as applications and manually reviewed. On top of that, the registry or the registrar reserves the right to refuse a registration within sixty calendar days of receiving payment. What that means for you is practical: even once the name resolves, it is not settled during those first weeks. If you are taking a string that evokes a trademark or invites argument, waiting for confirmation before you start promotion or move company e-mail onto it is the safer order of operations.

The name is pulled from the zone on its expiry date and enters a recovery stage. On a live record measured on 15 August 2026 the chain ran as follows: expiry on 7 August, the status moved into the redemption stage four days later, the end of redemption fell 32 days after expiry, and the date on which the name would be purged fell 39 days after expiry. Late renewal is therefore possible, but the window is roughly five weeks and the name is already offline throughout it. Choosing a longer term is the most practical way to thin out that calendar.

The registry's lookup server is whois.nic.sb, it answers on port 43, and it returns the domain status, the registration, update and expiry dates, the redemption and purge dates, the registrar, the name servers and the DNSSEC state. Set your expectations about holder data in advance: Solomon Telekom's privacy statement says it generally makes the data public, and it offers no privacy service you can buy. The registry may mask some records at its own discretion, but it gives no undertaking to do so. You can run the query from the whois search page.