.pub Domain
Your Local Deserves a Proper Domain
Register your .pub domain from just £34.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .pub domain?
The .pub domain is a natural home for pubs, gastropubs, and pub chains across the United Kingdom. It carries the warmth and familiarity of the British pub tradition and gives your venue an address that feels as welcoming as the real thing.
Who should register .pub?
Pubs, gastropubs, pub chains, and traditional British drinking establishments.
Why choose .pub?
- Quintessentially British identity
- Short and effortlessly memorable
- Perfect for local community pubs
- Pairs naturally with pub names
Who runs .pub, and since when
Registry data from the .pub 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
- Dog Beach, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2014
- Delegated 20 February 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, and not restricted to licensed premises
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £34.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Why .pub does not only mean public house
To a British reader those three letters have one meaning and it is obvious. Elsewhere they are read at least as often as a shortening of publication or publisher. And in computing they are a file suffix: the OpenSSH manual says of a generated key pair that "The public key is stored in a file with the same name but '.pub' appended", which puts the same three characters on every Linux and macOS machine in the world. None of that stops a village local using the extension. It does explain why it is not the uncontested pub extension a British buyer assumes it to be.
Where it does real work is the shared name problem. British pubs are named from a small pool: The Crown, The Red Lion, The Ship, The White Hart. Every sensible .co.uk built on those went years ago, and what is left is padded with a village, a county or a hyphen. The extension gives you a second run at a short address, and it disambiguates in a way a longer .co.uk cannot.
IANA records the sponsoring organisation as Dog Beach, LLC, care of Identity Digital, delegated on 20 February 2014. It follows the same Acceptable Use Policy as the rest of that group, and the same reserved names practice, which holds certain premium names back and lets the registry revise the list.
Our steer: if the pub trades on people walking through the door, the .co.uk plus a maintained Google Business Profile is doing the work, and the .pub domain is worth having as the short one you can say across a bar. If you run a small group of houses, it gives you a consistent address for each without inventing a group name every time.
Is .pub the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.pub works well if
- Your pub carries one of the shared classic names and every usable .co.uk went a decade ago, so you need a second run at a short address.
- You run two or more houses and want a matching address for each rather than a different compromise for every one.
- It is short enough to say over a noisy bar and to fit on a beer mat, a chalkboard or a pump clip without shrinking.
- The building is also a restaurant, a venue and a room for the night, and you want the address to name the place rather than pick one of its jobs.
Look elsewhere if
- Visitors from outside these islands may read it as publication or publisher, and technical visitors read .pub as the file holding a public key.
- Pub trade is overwhelmingly local. Visibility comes from your Google Business Profile, your photos and your reviews, and none of them look at the domain.
- It is another annual bill beside the .co.uk you will keep anyway for email and for the customers who type it out of habit.
Only want one address? Take the .co.uk first, then add this later as the short one you can say across the bar. See .co.uk pricing.
.pub vs .uk: which should you register?
Nominet's shorter .uk is the direct rival here, because both are short, both are memorable, and both exist because the obvious .co.uk had gone. They solve the same problem from opposite ends.
.uk keeps the country and drops the category. It is two characters, it tells Google the site is British, and a UK individual gets free WHOIS privacy under Nominet's consent-based rules. .pub keeps the category and drops the country. It says what the building is, which is useful when the name alone is shared with a hundred others, but it carries no geographic meaning at all in search.
For a single pub relying on passing trade and local search, .uk is the safer buy. For a group building a brand across several towns, or a pub whose name is its whole identity, .pub does something .uk cannot.
| .pub | .uk | |
|---|---|---|
| Characters after the dot | Three | Two |
| What it says | The kind of place | The country |
| Location signal | None | United Kingdom |
| WHOIS privacy | Paid add-on | Free for UK individuals |
| Transfer to us | Days, with an authorisation code | Near instant IPS tag change |
.pub domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .pub domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. It is an open extension with no licensing test, no premises check and no eligibility conditions of any kind, so a brewery, a beer festival, a publisher or a magazine can register one just as easily as a licensed house. Identity Digital lists it with no restriction note. The practical limit is its Acceptable Use Policy, which prohibits abusive activity such as phishing and malware distribution and lets the registry suspend or cancel a domain that breaches it.
Some will, particularly outside Britain and Ireland, and technical readers have a third association again: the OpenSSH manual documents that a generated public key is stored in a file with .pub appended, so those three letters mean a key file to anyone who has used a terminal. In practice this rarely costs a village pub anything, because its audience is local and its customers already know what it is. It matters more if you trade internationally or your customers are technical.
Yes, with no limit and no group registration to set up. It is one of the better arguments for the extension: a small estate can give every house a matching short address rather than inventing a different compromise for each. Two things to plan for. Short, obvious names may be classed as premium under Identity Digital's reserved names policy and priced differently, and the annual cost multiplies by the number of houses, so price the whole estate before committing to the pattern.
In most cases yes, and it is worth budgeting for both from the start. The .co.uk is what regulars and suppliers type from habit, it is the one Google reads as a British site, and it is where you will want your email to sit. The .pub is the address you say aloud, print on a pump clip and use in a QR code. Point one at the other so a customer who guesses wrong still arrives at the right place.
Included with Your .pub 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 Food & Drink Domains Extensions
Register your .pub domain today
Secure your .pub domain from just £34.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
