.in (dot in) domain names were released for unrestricted registration to the general public on 16 Feb 2005. Before this, there was a 22-day (Jan 1-21) period called the Sunrise period during which Indian trademark holders could pre-apply for a .in domain name. It seems that after the registry opened up on 16 Feb at 12 pm, 24,000 domain names were picked up in the first hour!
I just registered my first .in domain name – www.maisnam.in. I registered it using GoodLuckDomain.in. Registration was easy and fast. My site went live in less than 30 minutes. The domain management interface was also good and I was able to change my nameserver settings without any problems. However, they do not provide any other DNS functions. The only catch about registering through GoodLuckDomain is that the payment page is not over https. But, it seems that payment is handled by NamesBeyond.com which does have an https certificate from Verisign.
– .IN Registry (Official site)
– List of Accredited Registrars
Actually, I wanted to register my .in domain name using Net4India or Directi since they are reputed companies.
But Net4India opened up live registrations late and when they did open up to live registration, I found out that the minimum registration period is 5 years. I guess they have a lot of corporate customers and so they do not really care about the general public who wish to register for only one year.
Directi’s live registration is still not active. And it seems Directi and its resellers had problems registering .in domains for the past few days. And many of those resellers actually had to register using GoodLuckDomains. [ More info ]
Update (3:30 AM 2/19/2005): The main Directi.com website does not allow live registrations of .in domains yet. But it seems you can register .in domain names by going to http://manage.directi.com/. I have not tried this yet and so I am not sure. But if anyone has registered a .in domain name using the above manage.directi.com URL, please let me know.
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