Enter Switzerland market with a .CH Domain

No. The ordinance states that .ch names may be allocated to «any physical and moral person», and the registry answers the question just as plainly: you can register without being Swiss, without living in Switzerland and without having your business based there. A company in Türkiye, a sole trader and a private individual register on identical terms; no local address, agent or trustee is required, and no documents are asked for. Nor is there a cap on how many names one holder may take. Priority is purely chronological: where several valid requests arrive for the same name, the registry queues them by the moment of receipt and allocates to the first.

There is no term at registry level. The relevant clause of the terms and conditions defines registration as open-ended and says a name ends only through deletion or transfer; no expiry field is ever produced in the registry's records. The one-year period you see at your registrar is a billing period at provider level, not a registry rule. The practical difference is real: the generic-extension chain of «expired, grace period, redemption period» does not exist here. A name is deleted when your registrar files a deletion request, so what you need to track is not a renewal date but your payment relationship with your provider.

Three characters. The ordinance requires the name, or its punycode equivalent, to consist of «3 to 63 characters», and the registry's terms treat anything shorter than three or longer than sixty-three as a direct ground for refusal. Two-letter names are neither free nor for sale: every two-character name is reserved and goes only to public bodies — ch.ch to the Confederation, the twenty-six cantonal abbreviations from ag.ch to zh.ch to the cantons, and a few further names to the communes concerned. The upper limit of sixty-three applies to the punycode form, so a name with accents shows fewer visible characters.

Yes, since 1 March 2004. OFCOM's technical regulations list the permitted characters one by one: a–z, 0–9, the hyphen and thirty-two accented Latin letters such as ä, ö, ü, é, à and ç. The name enters the DNS in punycode form: bücher.ch appears in the zone file as xn--bcher-kva.ch. One caveat matters commercially: the accented form and the plain form are separate names and are not bundled together automatically, so if you want both you must register both. The registry also gives no guarantee that such names work smoothly in every browser and mail client.

Yes, within forty days. Once a name is deleted it enters a forty-day transition period during which no third party can register it, while your registrar can re-register it for you on request. The ordinance sets the same period as a quarantine and requires the name to be reassigned to its former holder during it if that holder asks. At the end of the fortieth day the name is released and anyone may take it. One special case exists: if your registrar goes bankrupt or its contract ends, you have ninety days to move management of the name to another registrar.

No. Since the amendment that took effect on 1 January 2021, personal details of holders such as name and postal address are no longer published in the public lookup service. What you do see is a short list: the name itself and its punycode form, the name servers, whether the name is protected with DNSSEC, the date of first allocation, and the details of the registrar managing it. Holder data is disclosed only to those who can credibly establish an overriding legitimate interest, and each request is assessed individually. You can check what shows for your own name on the whois search page.

Do not confuse the two operations. For a change of registrar you request the transfer code (Auth-Code) from your current provider and pass it to the new one; the holder does not change, and because registration is open-ended there are no days to lose. A change of holder is a separate procedure: the current holder files a transfer request through the registrar managing the name, and the new holder must meet the conditions of allocation. In addition, the registry must transfer a name when an enforceable Swiss court, arbitral or authority decision is presented. Start on the domain transfer page.

Yes, and this holds even though no local connection whatsoever is required at registration. The relevant clause covers the following situation: when a competent Swiss authority so requests, the registry asks any holder without a valid Swiss correspondence address to designate one within thirty days and to provide evidence of their identity. If the holder does not comply in time, the registry revokes the name and notifies the requesting authority. The same logic appears in the appeal route: an applicant registered or domiciled abroad who asks the regulator for a decision on a refusal or a revocation must supply a valid Swiss correspondence address.