.domains Domain
The Meta Domain for Domain Businesses
Register your .domains domain from just £37.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .domains domain?
The .domains extension is purpose-built for domain registrars, resellers, aftermarket platforms, and domain investment portfolios. It's a meta choice in the best sense: a domain about domains. Businesses that buy, sell, manage, or broker domain names get a URL that describes their entire operation in a single word.
Who should register .domains?
Domain registrars, resellers, aftermarket brokers, and domain portfolio investors.
Why choose .domains?
- Describes the entire business model
- Perfect for registrars and resellers
- Instantly understood by the industry
- Works for aftermarket and portfolio sites
Who runs .domains, and since when
Registry data from the .domains 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
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2013
- Delegated 12 December 2013
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no registrar accreditation required
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £37.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
The .domains registry does not use one itself
Start with an awkward fact. Type nic.domains into a browser and you land on identity.digital, which is a .digital address. The company operating .domains does not use one for its own site, and neither do most of the registrars and brokers the extension was built for. That is not a scandal, but it tells you what you are buying: an extension the industry approves of in principle and rarely commits to in practice.
The audience is small and expert, and that cuts both ways. Nobody in the domain trade will misread yourname.domains, so the address explains the whole business in one word to exactly the people who matter at a conference or in an inbox. Equally, nobody outside the trade attaches any meaning to it, so it does nothing for a general audience and can read as odd to somebody buying their first website.
It is one of the original 2013 delegations, recorded by IANA on 12 December 2013 under an applicant company named Sugar Cross, LLC and folded into Binky Moon, LLC with the rest of the Donuts portfolio in March 2018. The registry agreement is ICANN's standard base contract, so there is no accreditation to hold and no proof of trade to supply.
At £37.99 a year it costs close to four times a .co.uk. For a UK reseller selling hosting and domains to UK customers, that money buys nothing a .co.uk would not. Where it pays is a brokerage, an aftermarket marketplace, a portfolio landing page or a tool built for the trade, where the audience already speaks the language.
Is .domains the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.domains works well if
- You broker, park or trade domain names, and your customers work in the industry every day already.
- You are launching a tool for registrars or resellers, and the address is going on a slide at an industry event.
- You want a portfolio or aftermarket landing page whose address states its own business in a single word.
- The .com you wanted has been held by a domain investor since the 2000s, which in this sector is either an irony or a lesson.
Look elsewhere if
- Your customers are ordinary businesses buying their first website. The word means nothing to them and can read as a parking page.
- You sell mainly to UK buyers. A .co.uk costs £9.99 against £37.99 here and carries a UK signal this cannot.
- The address has to survive being said aloud on a sales call. "Dot domains" invites the question "which domain?" more often than it lands.
Selling hosting and domains to UK customers? A .co.uk does more for search and costs a quarter of this. See .co.uk pricing.
.domains vs .com: which should you register?
The domain trade runs on .com, which is the first thing to weigh. Registrars, brokers and marketplaces overwhelmingly sit on one, and buyers in the sector are conditioned to expect it. A .domains address stands out precisely because it breaks that convention, and standing out is worth something at a conference and nothing on an invoice.
Availability runs the other way. A one-word .com in this sector went long ago and will cost five figures on the aftermarket if it is even for sale, whereas the equivalent .domains is usually sitting there at the shelf price. If the name matters more to you than the extension, that is the argument.
The mistyping risk is worth a thought too. The singular, .domain, is not a real extension, so a mistyped address fails rather than landing somewhere else, which is annoying but harmless. Print it carefully and expect to spell it out.
| .domains | .com | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual price here | £37.99 | £15.49 |
| What it names | Your industry | Nothing in particular |
| Recognised by | The domain trade | Everyone |
| Short names left | Plenty | Almost none without hyphens |
| Common mistyping | Typed as .domain | Rarely mistyped |
.domains domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .domains domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyBrokers, aftermarket marketplaces, portfolio holders and people building tools for registrars and resellers. It is an industry extension in the fullest sense, understood instantly by a few thousand professionals and not at all by anybody else. The registry itself is a useful illustration of the limits: nic.domains redirects to identity.digital, so the company running the extension chose a different one for its own site.
No. ICANN records the .domains registry agreement as base and non-sponsored, which means no accreditation, no charter and no proof of trade. Anyone anywhere can register one. That is worth knowing in both directions: if your brokerage name matters to you, nothing reserves it on this extension, and the cost of holding it is one annual renewal.
It depends entirely on who reads your address. For a broker or an aftermarket platform whose audience is the trade, the extension does real work: it says what the business is before anything else loads. For a reseller selling hosting to UK small businesses, it does not, and the same money spread across a .co.uk and a .com covers more ground. Ask yourself who types the address most often.
Some will, and it is the most common complaint about this extension. The singular is not delegated in the root zone, so a mistyped address fails outright rather than landing on a competitor, which is the better of the two failure modes. Nothing available fixes it entirely. Spell the address out on calls, keep it out of long printed URLs, and pair it with a .com or .co.uk redirecting to the same site.
Included with Your .domains 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.
The Free Mailbox Sends Your Email. DKIM Proves It Was You.
Your domain comes with a real 10 GB mailbox. Signing what you send is the part that happens on a mail server rather than in DNS.
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SPF
Free with your domainSender Policy Framework. A DNS record naming the servers allowed to send mail for your domain. It vouches for the connection rather than the message, so it stops verifying as soon as anyone forwards what you sent.
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DKIM
Needs a mail server that signsDomainKeys Identified Mail. Your mail server signs every message on the way out, and the receiving server checks that signature against a key in your DNS. It covers the message itself, so it survives a forward where SPF cannot.
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=yourdomain.co.uk; s=default; t=1790160000; h=from:to:subject:date:message-id; bh=2jUSOH9NhtVGCQWNr9BrIAPreKQjO6Sn7XIkfJVOzv8=; b=NpX0k2f1oW8tR6yQzLm4cVb7JhTdEu...The header a signing mail server adds. d=is your domain andb=is the signature proving the message came from it. A domain on its own has no server to write that header. -
DMARC
Meaningful once DKIM is in placeDomain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. The policy telling a receiving server what to do with mail that fails those checks, and where to send the reports. It only bites once SPF or DKIM lines up with the address you send from.
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Register your .domains domain today
Secure your .domains domain from just £37.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
