.help Domain
Assistance is Just a Click Away
Register your .help domain from just £33.00/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .help domain?
The .help domain works for customer support portals, self-service knowledge bases, and helpline directories. It's one of the most intuitive extensions available: visitors know before clicking that they'll find solutions. Charities offering crisis support and tech companies running help desks both use it to reduce barriers.
Who should register .help?
Customer support portals, helpline directories, crisis support charities, and technical help desks.
Why choose .help?
- Intuitive and universally understood
- Reduces barriers to getting help
- Works for tech and charity alike
- Builds trust with vulnerable audiences
Who runs .help, and since when
Registry data from the .help 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
- Innovation Service Ltd
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2014
- Delegated 15 August 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no support-industry or eligibility test
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £33.00 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Who runs .help, and why that is worth knowing
Every other extension in this group is run by one of two large registry groups in the United States. This one is not. The IANA root zone record for .help names Innovation Service Ltd of Mahe, Seychelles as the sponsoring organisation, with CentralNic in London as the technical contact, and records the delegation on 15 August 2014. The registry website publishes a page headed Registry Policy Statement whose content runs to a single sentence.
None of that makes it a bad buy. ICANN registry agreements require escrowed registration data, oblige the operator to fund a continued operations instrument, and let ICANN appoint an emergency interim registry operator if service fails, so the names do not vanish if the company does. But if you are choosing an address you intend to keep for a decade, knowing who is actually behind it is reasonable diligence, and almost nobody tells you.
On the word itself, .help is one of the very few extensions a non-technical visitor reads correctly at a glance. Nobody needs it explained. That makes it strong where the address is spoken or printed rather than clicked: an advice charity, a crisis line, a directory people are told about rather than search for.
The honest counter is the one that applies to any service extension. You can already have help.yourcompany.co.uk for the price of a DNS record, and it keeps your support under the name customers already trust. Around three times a .co.uk a year buys separation from the parent brand, and separation only pays when the help is the service rather than a section of the website.
Is .help the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.help works well if
- The help is the service: an advice charity, a crisis line, a directory people are pointed at rather than search for.
- You give the address out over the phone or on a poster, and it has to be understood first time by people who are not confident online.
- You want a knowledge base with its own identity, so it survives the product beside it being renamed or sold.
- Your organisation name and the extension form a sentence together, so the address explains its own purpose.
Look elsewhere if
- You already own a domain. help.yourcompany.co.uk costs nothing and keeps your support under the name customers already recognise.
- At more than three times a .co.uk, this is a branding decision. Nothing about the extension performs better in any technical sense.
- The registry is a small operator whose published policy page runs to one sentence. If the size of whoever holds your extension matters, pick a larger one.
Bolting a help centre onto an existing site? A subdomain costs nothing, and a .support reads much the same for less. See .support pricing.
.help vs .chat: which should you register?
Both sell the idea of assistance and they promise different things, which is the whole basis for choosing between them.
.help promises answers. It fits documentation, a knowledge base, a directory or an advice line, and it makes no commitment about anyone being available at two in the morning. .chat promises a reply. Put it on a page with a contact form and a 48-hour response time and you have made a promise the site does not keep, which is worse than not making it.
There is a second difference nobody mentions: the two are run by very different organisations. .chat sits inside Identity Digital, a large registry group with a published policy set. .help sits with a small Seychelles company using CentralNic in London as its technical operator. Both are legitimate. Only one of them is what most buyers assume they are getting.
| .help | .chat | |
|---|---|---|
| What it promises | Answers you can read now | Someone replying |
| Typical use | Knowledge base or advice line | Live conversation |
| Registry | Innovation Service Ltd, Seychelles | Binky Moon, LLC (Identity Digital) |
| Root zone since | 2014 | 2015 |
| Annual cost here | Lower | Higher by around a sixth |
.help domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .help domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyInnovation Service Ltd, a company based in Mahe in the Seychelles, according to the IANA root zone database, which also names CentralNic in London as the technical contact and gives the delegation date as 15 August 2014. That split is common enough: the sponsoring organisation holds the extension, and a specialist registry operator runs the infrastructure. It is worth knowing because most buyers assume every extension belongs to one of the handful of large registries, and this one does not.
A subdomain, for most businesses. help.yourcompany.co.uk costs nothing, takes one DNS record, and keeps your support under the name your customers already trust, which is worth more than a shorter address. A .help earns its fee when the help is the service being offered rather than a section of a bigger site: advice charities, helplines and standalone directories all have a reason for their own name. Free DNS management comes with every domain we register, so the subdomain route costs nothing extra either way.
Yes. There is no requirement to run a support desk, no charity registration to produce, no residency test and no document to upload. The registry publishes no eligibility criteria, so a .help is bought the same way any open extension is. As with every new extension, the names unavailable to everyone are the two-character labels at the second level and the short-form names of countries and territories, which ICANN requires each registry to withhold.
Less than instinct suggests, because ICANN builds for that failure. Registry agreements require registration data to be held in escrow, oblige the operator to fund a continued operations instrument, and allow ICANN to appoint an emergency interim registry operator if service falls below defined thresholds, until the registry can demonstrate it is able to resume. The names keep resolving even if the company behind them does not survive. What a small registry does mean in practice is thinner published policy and fewer people to ask, which is a service consideration rather than a continuity one.
Included with Your .help 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 Community Domains Extensions
Register your .help domain today
Secure your .help domain from just £33.00/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
