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What are the technical standards for a .at domain name?

A domain name may include letters ("a-z"), numbers ("0-9") and hyphens ("-") as well as the characters added by IDN. Two hyphens in a row as the third and fourth character of the domain name are not allowed. The name must consist of at least one letter and must not begin or end with a hyphen.

Length:

Domain names below .co.at and .or.at: at least one letter (e.g. t3.co.at und s.or.at),
Domain names below .at: at least three characters. Maximum length: 63 characters.

Which characters are basically allowed in a domain application?

Capital and lower case letters from A to Z, numbers 0-9 as well as !\$\%\&\/\(\)\=\+\*\#\-\.\,\;\:\_\s\@\[\]\{\}\<\>\|\"\'\?. Please note that this is a minimum standard. Certain fields (domain name, e-mail address etc.) have specific requirements.

What are the technical reasons for the rejection of a domain application?

There are various reasons why an application may be rejected: errors in the application itself (incomplete field descriptions, missing mandatory fields, invalid version etc.), invalid domain names, wrong entry formats, invalid characters. The most frequent source of error is an incorrect nameserver configuration. Please click here for more information about the application check and nameserver configuration.

Shall I send domain applications more than once?

No, one application per domain is sufficient. More applications per domain will only cause error messages and do not make its processing faster or more efficient, as applications are always processed in the order of their receipt. Depending on mail queues and the number of domain applications submitted, the (positive)handling of your application may take some time. Your application will be processed in any case and won't get lost.

What are objects?

An object is a data record belonging to either a person or a domain. Therefore, a distinction is made between person objects and domain objects. A person object contains information such as name, address, telephone number, e-mail address of a person, whereas a domain object contains the technical data and person objects that are linked with a domain (via handles).

What is a domain object and what does it look like?

The domain object contains the domain name and the corresponding holder, contact and nameserver data. The contact persons can be specified using handles.

Example:

domain:
descr:[organization]:
descr:[name]:
descr:[street address]:
descr:[postal code]:
descr:[city]:
descr:[country]:
descr:[phone]:
descr:[fax-no]:
descr:[e-mail]:
admin-c:
zone-c:
tech-c:
nserver:
remarks:
nserver:
remarks:
notify:
source: AT-DOM

What is a billing object and what does it look like?

A billing object contains the data of the invoice recipient. If available, the nic.at customer number (no handle!) and VAT number should also be specified.

Example:

customer-no:
organization:
organization:
division:
name:
name:
street address:
postal code:
city:
country:
phone:
phone:
fax-no:
mobile-phone:
e-mail:
UID:

What is a person object and what does it look like?

A person object contains data of the persons related to a domain (holder or contacts like admin-c). The persons can be clearly identified via handles.

Example:

PERSON OBJECT
personname:
organization:
status:
street address:
postal code:
city:
phone:
fax-no:
e-mail:
nic-hdl:
source: AT-DOM

How often are the nic.at nameservers reloaded?

4 times a day: at 10:00 am, 1:30, 5:30 and 10.00 pm (CET).

What does IDN mean?

IDN is for "Internationalized Domain Name", which is a standard that enables the use of other characters in addition to the currently allowed ASCII-characters (the 26 Latin letters, the ten numbers 0 – 9 and the hyphen) for domain names. The respective registry decides which additional characters are allowed with the implementation of IDN.

What is the "ACE-string"?

As the domain name system (DNS) still only accepts the currently allowed characters for addressing a domain, all IDN must be converted into a character string that solely consists of these ASCII-characters. According to the Punycode regulation, the IDN is converted into a character string that only consists of ASCII-characters (please refer to RFC 3492 ). This ACE-string (for ASCII-compatible encoding) consists of a prefix which identifies the following domain as an IDN. This prefix consists of four characters: "xn--". In addition, the coding must indicate the position of the non-ASCII characters within the IDN. This code requires several characters itself. In between, there are characters that don’t need to be coded as they have been allowed before.

Examples:

IDN:                ACE-String:
österreich.at   xn--sterreich-z7a.at
bücher.at        xn--bcher-kva.at
äöü.at             xn--4ca0br.at

How much does an IDN cost?

The prices for IDN are the same as for "regular" domains.
You can find the current prices an infos about billing here.

Which additional characters are allowed?

With the implementation of IDN 34 additional characters became available. These are the small letters of the ISO 8859-1 character string as well as the three characters œ, š and ž from the Unicode character group Latin Extended-A. A list of the new characters can be found here.

Do the new characters include special characters like "&" or "€"?

No. The use of these special characters is still not possible after the implementation of IDN. A list of the new characters can be found here.

What is the maximum / minimum character length of an IDN?

The maximum length allowed for the domain name is 63 characters, the minimum length is limited to 3 characters. Please note that the maximum length applies to the coded form of the IDN (ACE-sting), the minimum length applies to the IDN itself.

Example:

IDN:  Length: ACE-length(= coded form):
ä        1          7
ää      2          8
ääö    3          10

How can an IDN be converted into the ACE-string?

A converter is needed for converting an IDN into an ACE-string. A converter is available on the nic.at homepage here.

Which browser do already support IDN?

At the moment, there are only a few browsers or e-mail programs that support IDN. However, it is assumed that many producers will make their programs IDN-compatible in the near future. You can find a list of browsers that support IDN here.

Can IDNs be entered in nameservers?

No! Entries in Nameservers may only consist of the previously allowed ASCII-characters. Thus, the ACE-string must be entered instead of the corresponding IDN.

What are ASCII characters?

ASCII is short for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". ASCII is the most frequently used character string for the binary display of data.

Can the new characters also be used for the domain holder?

No! The new characters can only be used in domain names.

A part of the website doesn't work correctly or creates an error message.

Such errors can occur, if old cookies from nic.at or www.nic.at  are still present in your browser-cache. Therefore please delete all old cookies and try the transaction again after a restart of your browser. The deletion of cookies varies from browser to browser. After this, the error should not occur anymore.

As an alternative solution, you could also try disabling cookies in your browser. In any case, please be sure to restart your browser after modifying the options.

If you should still encounter any problems, feel free to contact our nic.at IT-Team .