Domains

What it is

A domain you buy here is registered in your name at the registry that runs its extension. We are not that registry. We place the order through a registrar accredited for the extension: .ro, .com.ro and .info.ro always go to ROTLD, and other extensions go to Namecheap, NameSilo or Dynadot, whichever of them carries that extension at the lower price. The registration and the contact details on it are yours. You can point the name at any nameservers you like, or leave it on ours and host the zone here. What you pay us for a year is that registrar's price for the extension plus our fee, so it follows the registrar rather than staying fixed.

Registering a domain

1. Sign in and open Domains in the panel, at /panel/domains/, then Register a domain.
2. Type the name you want. We ask the registrar that carries the extension whether it is free. For .ro, .com.ro and .info.ro that question always goes to ROTLD and is never asked anywhere else. For other extensions we ask the cheapest registrar first and move on to the next one if that call fails. Each answer is cached for 60 seconds.
3. Choose the term. One to ten years, subject to the registry's own rule: some registries set a minimum term, and some only accept terms in steps, so that only every second year is a valid length. The form refuses a term the registry would reject rather than spending the order on it.
4. Choose whether you want whois privacy. The option is only offered on extensions that support it.
5. Fill in the registrant contact. Name, address, country, phone and email are required and are what the registry stores as the owner of the domain. A Romanian registrant on a .ro domain must also give a CNP or CIF, and a Romanian company must give its trade register number as well. Contacts can be saved and reused from Domains, then Registrant contacts, at /panel/op_domain/registrants/.
6. Pay the order. The registration is placed after the payment, not before it.
7. Wait for provisioning. We register the name, set our nameservers on it, and read the real expiry date back from the registrar.

Registrars do not list a brand new domain the moment they accept it. For roughly the first minute a lookup for the name comes back not found, so the expiry date, contacts and nameservers shown immediately after registration are what we asked for rather than what the registrar has confirmed. We retry the lookup after 60 seconds, then after 2, 5, 15 and 30 minutes, and a nightly job picks up anything still unconfirmed. The values correct themselves and you do not have to do anything.

The renewal price is not frozen at the price you first paid. We read each extension's price from its registrar twice a day and the price on your domain service follows it, up or down. A renewal that costs a different amount than last year is that mechanism working, not a billing fault. The pricing page is the only place with current numbers.

We email an expiry reminder 60, 30, 14, 7 and 1 day before a domain expires.

Transfers

Transferring a domain in

You need the authorization code, also called the EPP code, from the registrar the domain is at now. Get it there first. We have no way to fetch it for you.

For everything except .ro, open Domains, then Transfer a domain, at /panel/domain_transfer/. Enter the name and the code and pay the transfer invoice. Paying opens a support ticket carrying your request, and where the registrar exposes it we start the transfer over its API at the same moment. The transfer finishes when your current registrar releases the name, which is not something we control. We then create the domain in your account, set our nameservers on it and read its details back from the registrar. Only extensions that have both a renewal price and a transfer price can be moved this way, and internationalised names cannot be submitted through the form at all. You can cancel a transfer yourself while it is still unpaid; once it is paid, ask support.

Transfers of .ro, .com.ro and .info.ro are free and are not invoiced. Enter the name and the ROTLD authorization key on the same page and the transfer runs immediately, with the domain appearing in your account as soon as ROTLD accepts it. If you submit a .ro name on the paid form it is refused and you are pointed at the free path.

Transferring a domain out

There is no button for this. Nothing in the panel gives you the authorization code for a domain you want to move away, so ask support and we will send it to you.

For .ro we check every .ro domain we manage against ROTLD once a day. When ROTLD says the domain is no longer ours, we mark it as transferred away, stop issuing renewal invoices for it and refuse the Renew action on it. Nothing is terminated automatically and no email goes out, so a .ro domain you moved elsewhere stays listed in your account until you or we close the service. If the mark is wrong, support has to clear it.

The opposite case is deliberate as well. If the registrar cannot be reached to answer whether a domain is still yours, we assume it is and invoice it anyway. A registrar outage will never quietly stop renewing a domain you still own; the cost of that choice is that a domain which really has left is only noticed by the daily check, and only for .ro.

Changing the holder of a .ro domain

Handing a .ro domain to a different owner is a separate, paid operation on the domain page, not a transfer. It needs an authorization key that the current owner generates at rotld.ro, plus the full contact details of the new holder.

DNS

Every domain we register is set to our nameservers during provisioning: ns1.pidginhost.net, ns2.pidginhost.net, ns3.pidginhost.net.

You can replace them from the domain page. Two nameservers are required and five is the maximum. If you submit a mixture of ours and someone else's, ours are removed from the set and Free DNS is switched off for that domain, because a zone answered from two places is a zone nobody can debug.

While the domain is on our nameservers you can host its zone with Free DNS, at /panel/freedns/. Activating a zone asks for an IPv4 address to seed it and then gives you a record editor. The record types it accepts are A, AAAA, CAA, CNAME, MX, SRV and TXT, and nothing outside that list can be added or edited there. Turning Free DNS off puts back whatever nameservers the domain had before you turned it on. A domain that is already the main domain of a shared hosting account is not eligible, because cPanel already serves its zone.

Separately from the zone, the domain page lets you register nameserver hosts under your own name, up to five of them. This is the glue record a registry needs if you want to run ns1.yourdomain.com yourself. Domains held at Namecheap accept a single IPv4 per host; at the other registrars a host can take an IPv4 or an IPv6, plus a second address.

If a domain service is suspended for non-payment, or terminated, we put the nameservers back to the registrar's defaults. Our nameservers stop answering for the name at that point, and any Free DNS zone on it is removed on termination.

Limits

Most of these are registry or registrar rules, which means neither you nor we can change them. The table says which is which.

Going over the availability-check limit returns "Too many domain checks. Please try again later." Repeated overruns add a five-minute cooldown and then a thirty-minute block, both of which clear on their own.

Changing a contact's email address is the one contact edit that does not take effect immediately. The rest of the contact goes to the registrar straight away, and the new address is held until the confirmation link sent to the old address is used.

What needs support

• Getting the authorization code to move a domain away from us. There is no self-serve path for it.
• Transferring in an internationalised (IDN) name. The form refuses it and tells you to contact us.
• Finishing an incoming transfer. The domain and its service are created here by hand once the losing registrar releases the name.
• Cancelling a transfer you have already paid for. Up to the moment of payment you can cancel it yourself.
• Adding a domain registered somewhere else to Free DNS. Only domains registered here appear in the Free DNS list on their own.
• Clearing a .ro domain that was wrongly marked as transferred away. While the mark is on, the domain is not invoiced and cannot be renewed.
• Raising the availability-check rate limit for an account or an IP address.
• Recovering a domain after it has expired at the registry. Whether that is possible at all, and for how long, is the registry's rule, not ours.

Where to go next

• Domain registration
• Prices for every extension we carry