.CN domain registrations now free with a web hosting plan
The country-code Top-Level Domain for the People’s Republic of China – .CN, can now be offered for free with a web hosting plan.
This option represents a powerful marketing instrument for targeting the world’s largest Internet market.
Learn more about the benefits of offering .CN domain registrations on your hosting store and how to enable the free-domain-with-a-hosting-plan option with a click from your reseller hosting dashboard.
.CN – some historical details
Launched back in 1990, the .CN domain extension is managed by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).
The TLD’s administration in mainland China is handled by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
NeuStar – the domain name registry for .BIZ, .US, .CO and .NYC, has been assigned the task of marketing the .CN domain extension outside mainland China.
On 25 June 2010, the internationalized country-code Top-Level Domains .中 国 (means “China” in simplified Chinese) and .中 國 (means “China” in traditional Chinese) were launched.
Domain names under .公 司 (“.COM” in Chinese) and .网络 (“.NET” in Chinese) are only available on the domestic market, since they are not recognized by ICANN.
Why offer/register .CN domains?
According to the UN Broadband Commission’s latest State of Broadband report, China represents the world’s largest Internet market with a total of 721 million users.
Besides being huge, the Chinese market is also very ‘encapsulated’.
China is a very disciplined and tightly knit nation where respect for identity rules and this respect translates online.
Chinese users prefer to conduct searches in their own language and expect the sites they visit to be ending in a Chinese extension.
Apart from users, the .CN extension will also please local search engines, which are known to give .CN-powered sites higher search engine rankings.
The possibility to address a huge market puts you in a very favourable position.
You can now freely target local individuals, businesses and organizations.
You can encourage local businesses to register a .CN domain that features their brand before someone else does. This is the best way for them to secure their trademarks and combat copyright infringement.
Apart from its very well-developed local market (China is rated as the world’s number-one economy in terms of GDP),
China is also a global leader in gross value of industrial output with most of the world’s favorite products being manufactured namely there.
This makes the .CN domain extension a really attractive option for local companies operating on the global market and vice versa – for foreign entities doing business in China.
Also, .CN is a great option for fans of martial arts and of the diverse Chinese culture from anywhere in the world.
.CN domain registration details and requirements
.CN domains are open for registration to any individual, company or organization in the world.
They can include between 3 and 63 characters and must begin and end with a letter/number.
.CN domains can include letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9) and dashes.
Currently, ID protection services are not supported. All registrant information will be publicly displayed in the WHOIS database.
NOTE: For now, users can register .CN domains that consist of Latin characters only.
How to register a .CN domain
Once they’ve selected their desired .CN domain, users will be requested to supply the following information:
Registrant’s Document Type – an ID card, a residence booklet, a driving license or a passport (for individuals); a business certificate (Organization Code Certificate/Enterprise Business Certificate/Certificate of Public Institution or Organization with a Legal Person status) (for companies):
Registrant’s Document Number – this is the number of the document selected above;
Website Location – here registrants will need to specify if their .CN-powered site will be hosted in China or abroad; if the DNS server is located in China, the registrant must ensure that he/she has a valid MIIT ICP Number, as per the .CN registry’s rules;
Once the domain application form has been filled out and the order submitted, the registrant will be contacted by the Sales Department and requested to submit the following information:
For individuals:
Registrant ID: A copy of the registrant’s ID Card/Residence Booklet/Driving License/Passport;
For organizations:
Registrant ID: A copy of the registrant’s ID Card/Residence Booklet/Driving License/Passport (if the domain is registered on the name of a person);
Organization Code: A copy of the Organization’s Certificate/Enterprise Business Certificate/Legal Entity Registration Certificate (if the domain is registered on the name of an organization);
How to enable .CN and set it ‘free’ with a hosting plan
If you are not offering the .CN domain extension on your store, you can enable it with a click from your Reseller Control Panel (section “My Domains”).
If you have already enabled the free-domain-with-a-hosting-plan option, you will not need to do anything else.
If you have not taken advantage of this promo option yet, you can do so from the Shared Hosting Offers section of your Reseller Control Panel.
Tags: web hosting, tld extensions, ccTLDs