.capetown Domain
South Africa's Mother City Goes Digital
Register your .capetown domain from just £19.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .capetown domain?
The .capetown domain puts Cape Town on the internet map with its own dedicated TLD. Managed by ZA Central Registry, it serves businesses, tourism operators, and organisations in one of Africa's most visited cities. Table Mountain, the V&A Waterfront, and the Cape Winelands draw millions of visitors each year, and .capetown helps local businesses capture that attention online. Open to anyone, but strongest for those with real Cape Town connections.
Who should register .capetown?
Cape Town tourism operators, local businesses, estate agents in the Western Cape, and event organisers in Cape Town.
Why choose .capetown?
- Dedicated domain for Africa's most visited city
- Strong tourism and business appeal
- Managed by ZA Central Registry
- Captures Cape Town's global brand recognition
Who runs .capetown, and since when
Registry data from the .capetown delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- ZA Central Registry NPC trading as ZA Central Registry
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2014
- Delegated 5 June 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no Cape Town or South African connection required
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £19.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Who a .capetown domain is actually built for
ZA Central Registry runs .capetown alongside .joburg and .durban, and states the purpose of the three plainly: to give South African cities an online platform promoting them as tourist and business destinations, and to give city communities a local identity to trade and socialise under. ZACR is not a newcomer to this. It was formed as UniForum SA in 1988 and took over co.za in 1995.
Registration is open. The published dotCapeTown policies and procedures set no residency test and no requirement to prove any connection to the city. They do specify a thick registry: four contacts are required on every name, registrant, administrative, technical and billing, although the same contact may fill all four. Privacy and proxy services are expressly permitted, which is not true everywhere.
The case for a city extension is narrow but real. It works when the location is the product, so tourism, property, restaurants, venues and anything a visitor searches with a place name attached. It works badly for a business that happens to sit in Cape Town but sells everywhere, because the address then advertises a boundary that does not exist.
Is .capetown the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.capetown works well if
- Your business only makes sense in one place: a guest house, a tour operator, a restaurant, a venue. The city name is doing real work in the address.
- You sell or let property in the Western Cape and want the address to answer the "where" question before anybody clicks.
- You are running a conference, a festival or a campaign tied to the city, where an address that dates in a year costs you nothing.
Look elsewhere if
- You are in Cape Town but sell nationally or worldwide. The ending fences you into one city; a co.za or a .com does not.
- You want a search advantage in South Africa. .capetown is a generic extension in the root zone, so it carries none of the country signal a co.za gives you.
- Your customers are British. Almost nobody in the UK has met a .capetown address, and a proportion will read it as a typo or a scam.
Selling across South Africa rather than one city? A .com travels further than a city ending. See .com pricing.
.capetown vs .africa: which should you register?
ZA Central Registry runs both of these, so the choice between them is purely a choice of scale. .capetown names one city and nothing else. .africa claims a continent. Neither is a country code, so neither gives a search engine a geographic signal, and both are open to anyone anywhere.
What separates them in practice is how specific your business really is. An operator whose entire trade happens within twenty miles of the harbour gains from the city name and loses nothing, because a customer searching for Cape Town meets an address that matches. An organisation running programmes in six countries gains from .africa for the same reason in reverse. Picking the wrong scale is the common mistake: a city address on a national business reads as a limit, and a continental address on a single-city business reads as a stretch.
.capetown domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .capetown domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. The published dotCapeTown policies and procedures contain no residency requirement, no proof of a city connection and no documents to supply, so registration is first come, first served through an accredited registrar. That openness has a downside worth naming: because nobody checks, the ending is not evidence that a business is really in the city. If local trust is what you are buying, the page needs a real Cape Town address and phone number behind it.
For South African search results, co.za does more. It is the country code, and Google reads country codes as a signal that a site targets that country, while .capetown is a generic extension in the root zone and carries no such signal. Where .capetown wins is on the human side: it names the city in the address, which is worth something to a business whose customers arrive by searching a place. Plenty of operators hold both and point one at the other.
Yes, as a paid add-on. The dotCapeTown policies expressly permit privacy and proxy services, and where one is used the public WHOIS shows the proxy details rather than yours. That is not the same as the free privacy on a .uk domain, where a UK individual registrant's name and address are not published by default under Nominet's consent-based rules. On .capetown, as on every other non-UK extension we sell, privacy is an add-on you choose and pay for.
Included with Your .capetown Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other Geographic Domains Extensions
Register your .capetown domain today
Secure your .capetown domain from just £19.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
