I am starting up a reseller business, and I am wondering, how do I host international domains? Is it the same as the .com.net.org, or are there any technical difference?

Also, is it possible to reseller international domain? Do I have to contact each registrator individual for that country?

Thanks,

Peter

Regarding hosting the international domains are just the same as .com. There is no difference.
As there are far over 100 different top level domains you probably will not find a registrar who offers all TLDs, but most registrars (e.g. http://www.dotster.com) offer some of them. If a customer wants a domain your main registrar doesn't offer you can either search another registrar or go directly to the NIC of this country. But be warned, there are some pitfalls: many NICs don't provide payment with credit cards and there are different systems at the NICs to register a domain.

Most internation domains are basically the same as doing a .com, .net, etc. HOWEVER, some international domains CAN be a pain. I don't remember which ones specifically offhand. But I know there were a couple that we had to go through a whole long process just to get our nameservers registered with the TLD. Most will do it automatically or pull it from the Internic DB. But be prepared to do some extra work for some of the less well-known TLDs.

One thing I forgot to tell you: some countries only allow to register a domain if the admin contact is located in the country.

We have .co.in
.net.in out here in india
and the rule is that they can be hosted only within political boundaries of the country .

Hosting here is very expensive and international connectivity is not that good, So even till date we have only about 3500 .co.in domains that are registered.


Regards
Manish Kapadia

I agree with you Manish. I am surprised that there are 3500 domains. I thought they should be lesser than that too considering that Only companies with a lot of $$ to invest and determination to get a .co.in go through the nightmare of registering and hosting their domain in India.

Hope fully things will change once we hae many international class datacentres out here,
Afterall what do you do when yourname.com is not available.

The bandwith is coming in huge chunks within a year or so.

Also Enron and satyam are going to have huge top class facilities in vashi (New Bombay) ,
Enron is putting up a 2 lakh sq feet facility in vashi.

If anyone wants to search how many country specific domains are registered then then they can see domainatlas.com , You can actually get a list of all domains that are registered :D

Regards
Manish Kapadia

ones to stay away from!!

.co.za - South Africa....real pain
.ie - Republic of Ireland....equally a real pain


Cheers,

thanks for the warning. Care to share some detail on the pains?

Peter

Some top level country domain registrars can be a pain in the a**.

I'm from Slovenia, we use *.si and it's limited to legally registred Slovene companies and institutions. Companies can only use the same word as their company name, nothing else. Also, no personal aplicants allowed. It's free though.

Our registrar is ARNES, an official government institution. They are *very* strict about DNS settings. I was unable to use the name servers from my reseller's account in US since there was no way I could explain to US that they are set up a tiny wee bit wrong. It hasn't bothered any .com etc. registrars before...

I ended up looking for a 3rd party name servers. Definitely an experience to take into consideration...