.ruhr Domain
Germany's Ruhr Region Domain
Register your .ruhr domain from just £47.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .ruhr domain?
The .ruhr domain represents Germany's Ruhr metropolitan area, one of Europe's largest urban regions with over 5 million people. Covering cities like Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, and Bochum, the Ruhr has transformed from a coal and steel heartland into a hub for technology, culture, and education. The registry is run by dotSaarland GmbH, which took the contract over from the original operator, regiodot GmbH & Co. KG, in March 2022. Anyone can register a .ruhr domain: there is no requirement to live or trade in the Ruhr, and names are allocated first come, first served. The registry does ask for an administrative contact with a German address, and registrars generally supply one for customers who do not have a German address of their own.
Who should register .ruhr?
Ruhr-based businesses, Dortmund and Essen companies, regional cultural institutions, and any organisation anywhere that wants to signal a Ruhr connection.
Why choose .ruhr?
- Represents one of Europe's largest metropolitan areas
- Open to registrants worldwide, first come, first served
- Covers major cities: Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, Bochum
- Strong regional identity in a transformed industrial heartland
Who runs .ruhr, and since when
Registry data from the .ruhr 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
- dotSaarland GmbH
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2013
- Delegated 25 November 2013
- Who can register
- No eligibility policy is published by the registry; we will confirm before you order
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £47.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
- Transfer in
- £47.99
- Adds a year to whatever is left on the domain
What the .ruhr registry publishes and what it omits
The Ruhr is a region without a capital. Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, Bochum and their neighbours run into one another across North Rhine-Westphalia, and no single city name covers the whole of it. That is the naming problem .ruhr answers. A firm serving the region has nothing better to reach for, because a .de says Germany and a city domain would say only one city out of a dozen.
Now the part other pages will not tell you. IANA records the sponsoring organisation as dotSaarland GmbH, at Im Oberen Werk 1 in St Ingbert, with whois.nic.ruhr as the WHOIS server and RDAP served through CentralNic. The registry's own site at dot.ruhr publishes an abuse contact, a DNSSEC practice statement and a WHOIS pointer, and nothing beyond that: no registration policy, no naming rules, no eligibility criteria. The ICANN registry agreement for .ruhr carries no eligibility specification either.
Several third-party pages state that you need a connection to the Ruhr area before you can register one. We could not verify that against anything the registry publishes, so we are not going to repeat it here as fact. What we will do is confirm your eligibility with the registry before we take the order, rather than sell you a name that might be refused after you have paid for it.
The stronger argument to weigh is the bill. .ruhr is one of the more expensive extensions we sell, several times the annual cost of a .de, and a domain is a charge that recurs for as long as the business does. Regional identity has to be worth that every year, not only in the month you launch.
Is .ruhr the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.ruhr works well if
- Your customers are spread across the Ruhr rather than concentrated in one city, so naming Dortmund or Essen would misrepresent where you actually work.
- You are a regional institution, festival, trade body or cultural venue whose identity is the region itself rather than a single town.
- The .de of your name has gone, and you would rather add regional meaning than add a word nobody will remember.
- You want the domain as a campaign or landing address alongside a .de you already hold, where being memorable matters more than being cheap.
Look elsewhere if
- You trade nationally in Germany. A .de is the address German customers expect, it costs a fraction of this, and .ruhr narrows you to one region for no gain.
- Recurring cost matters. .ruhr sits among the priciest extensions on our list and that price arrives again every single year.
- You need certainty about the rules before you commit. The registry publishes no registration policy at all, so eligibility has to be checked case by case.
Trading across Germany rather than inside the Ruhr? The .de is the default address German customers reach for, at a fraction of the cost. See .de pricing.
.ruhr vs .de: which should you register?
.de is one of the largest and best understood extensions in the world, and it is what a German customer types without thinking. .ruhr is a regional label that a German customer will recognise instantly if they live in the region and may not recognise at all if they do not.
The cost gap decides most of these. A .ruhr costs several times a .de every year, so it has to be doing work a .de cannot. For a plumber in Bochum, a .de with Bochum in the copy does that work perfectly well. For a regional tourism board, a trade fair or a network of businesses spanning several cities, .ruhr says something a .de simply cannot.
There is also a documentation gap worth weighing. DENIC publishes the .de rules in detail and everyone can read them. The .ruhr registry publishes no registration policy, so anything unusual about your case is a question rather than a lookup. If certainty matters more than regional flavour, that is an argument for the .de.
| .ruhr | .de | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Generic, geographic string | Country-code, Germany |
| Published rules | None on the registry site | Detailed and public |
| Recognition | Strong in the region only | Universal in Germany |
| Annual cost | Several times a .de | Low |
| In the root zone since | 2013 | 1986 |
.ruhr domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .ruhr domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyWe cannot tell you from a published source, and we would rather say that than guess. The registry site at dot.ruhr carries an abuse contact, a DNSSEC statement and a WHOIS pointer, with no registration policy or eligibility criteria anywhere on it, and the ICANN registry agreement for .ruhr contains no eligibility specification. Other sites assert a regional connection requirement. Ask us before you order and we will confirm your position with the registry, because a refused registration is a wasted order.
The IANA root zone database records the sponsoring organisation as dotSaarland GmbH, at Im Oberen Werk 1 in St Ingbert, with whois.nic.ruhr as the WHOIS server and RDAP provided through CentralNic. IANA maintains the root zone, so its delegation record is the authoritative answer rather than whatever a reseller page states. The extension entered the root zone in 2013, making it one of the earliest of the geographic strings from that application round.
Only if the region is the point. .ruhr costs several times a .de every year, and that difference compounds for as long as the business trades. A firm serving the whole Ruhr conurbation gets something from it that no city domain and no national domain can provide, because the region has no capital to name. A national business, or a local trade with one shopfront, gets the same result from a .de and keeps the difference.
Not on its own. .ruhr is recorded in the root zone as a generic top-level domain rather than a country code, so it carries no automatic country or region signal in search the way a .de does for Germany. Local visibility comes from a verified business profile, a consistent address across the web, German-language content and links from regional sites. What .ruhr does buy is recognition with people who live there, which shows up in click-through rather than in position.
Included with Your .ruhr 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 .ruhr domain today
Secure your .ruhr domain from just £47.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
