Enter Tanzania market with a .TZ Domain

No, the company does not have to be established in Tanzania. Neither the regulation, nor its 2023 amendment, nor the guidelines the registry publishes contain a single provision requiring the holder to be resident, to show a local address or to appoint a trustee; the holder's address is recorded with a country code field, so foreign addresses are provided for in the registry's own data model. The regulation expressly allows foreign registrars to be accredited, and the registry's accredited list does include firms based in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and South Africa. What is required is not a country but a capacity: the .tz level is reserved for a registered company or business entity.

Four characters in practice. The name composition clause of the regulation sets only the permitted characters, the sixty-three character ceiling and the hyphen rules; the minimum comes not from there but from the reserved names list the registry publishes. Three separate sections of that list forbid one, two and three character registrations at the second level. For one and two character names the regulator additionally holds an auction power, so they are not abolished, merely closed to ordinary registration. The three-letter .tz names you can find today are legacy allocations from the priority period when the second level opened, and they are no precedent for new applications.

For one year, extended by renewal. The term clause of the regulation states that a registration is valid for one year and may be renewed through the registrar once it expires; the same clause allows several years to be paid up front but caps that at five years at once. A ten-year .tz registration is therefore not possible: the longest single operation is five years, and you simply repeat the renewal later. A change of holder does not alter the clock either — the regulation says plainly that a transfer does not affect the original day of expiration, so you neither gain nor lose days by transferring.

Both sit with the same registry under the same regulation; the difference is level, eligibility and scale. .tz is registered directly at the second level, and the regulation treats it as a premium category reserved for a registered company or business entity; short names are additionally closed off there by the reserved list. .co.tz sits at the third level, carries neither of those constraints and holds the large majority of registrations in the country. Holding both is possible and common: when the second level opened in 2022, existing .co.tz holders were given the first claim on the exact-match .tz name.

You get thirty days. The regulation provides that a name not renewed on or before its expiry day enters a protection period of thirty days from that day, and is cancelled if it is still not renewed within it. The second step of the grace-plus-redemption chain familiar from generic extensions has not been published for this zone; there is no second chance window. The fee schedule does carry a separate restoration item, so the name can be recovered inside the protection period. The practical consequence: put the expiry date in your calendar, because a delay beyond a month loses the name for good.

No. The registry's whois and RDAP output shows only the domain name, the identifiers of the contact records, the name server set and key set identifiers, the registrar and the dates; the holder's name, organisation, address, email and telephone are never printed. The basis for this is not a privacy product but the regulation itself: it bars the registrar from disclosing holder personal data to third parties, prevents publication without consent, blocks bulk and automated extraction from the central registry, and binds the regulator's own staff as well. You can inspect your own record on the whois search page.

There are two separate operations, easily confused. For a change of registrar you request the domain's authorization code; by the registry's own definition that code is accessible only to the owner of the domain and its administrative contact, and you hand it to the new provider. A change of holder is a different procedure: the request goes in writing to the regulator through your registrar, the action is chargeable, and fees already paid are not refunded. What both share is this: a transfer does not alter the original day of expiration, so no days are lost. Start on the domain transfer page.

Yes. The zone is signed and the registrant-facing operation works in production: the regulation defines both the key set and the delegation signer record, treats the key set as a mandatory data object and names the technical contact as the party entitled to change it. The registry publishes a counter of protected names on its own site, and the figure corresponds to roughly three per cent of all registrations — so the feature is available but still thinly used. Turning DNSSEC on proves to a validating resolver that answers for your domain were not altered in transit; ask your registrar to enable it.