Enter South Africa market with a .CO.ZA Domain

No. The rulebook defines a registrant as an «identifiable natural or legal person with the capacity to conclude an agreement»; nationality, residency, a local contact or a company registration are not required. The registry counts this zone among its four commercial, open second-level domains — the only moderated ones are school.za and law.za. Measurement confirms it: the two-letter ab.co.za is held by a registrant in the United States.

One to five years. The registry's namespace comparison table states «Registration Period 1-5» and «Maximum Renewal Period 5 Years» for all four zones, and Schedule B of the rulebook fixes it as a system parameter. New registrations arrive with auto-renew switched on by default; that flag can be turned off at any point, though not once a cancellation process has already started.

One character. Schedule B of the rulebook sets the minimum length at 1 and the maximum at 69 characters — 69 is an unusually high ceiling. Measurement confirms it: the single-letter a.co.za has been registered since 10 June 1996. A label is built from lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, a hyphen may not end the label, and a registered name can never be edited afterwards.

No. The registry publishes its name rule as a regular expression, and that expression explicitly excludes the Punycode prefix; the permitted character set is only a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen. Letters such as é, ü or ç therefore cannot be registered under .co.za. If your brand carries accents, you need to pick the unaccented spelling or a hyphenated variant instead.

Partly. Clause 11 of the rulebook lists the fields one by one: the domain, its creation and expiry dates, the registrar, the status codes, the registrant ORGANISATION, the province and the COUNTRY are public; the registrant's NAME, street, postal code, phone and e-mail are redacted. Redacted data is only available by approaching the registry or the registrar directly. You can run the query from the whois search page.

The registry sends an authorisation token to both you and your losing registrar, and the rulebook's truth table decides the outcome. Your vote is the decisive one: if the registrant approves, the transfer happens IMMEDIATELY, even when the losing registrar declines. The pending window is five days. Transfers are free of charge and do NOT add a year to the expiry date. You can start the process from the domain transfer page.

Yes, but the chain has three stages and thirty days in total. Once cancellation starts, the name sits in pendingDelete for five days, then it is pulled from the zone file and the site goes dark; five days later it is deleted from the register. Even after deletion a twenty-day closed redemption window runs: the name can be reinstated for a separate recovery fee, but only for one year and without being transferred to another registrar.

The regime was created by government gazette: disputes go either to the South African courts or through the .za ADR Regulations published in GG29405. ZADNA has accredited two providers — the South African Institute of Intellectual Property Law (SAIIPL), founded in 1954, and the Arbitration Foundation of Southern Africa (AFSA). Since 2018 ZADNA has also offered free voluntary mediation. Throughout the proceedings the registry locks the domain.