I have country specific domain names. Where can I host them?

Country specific domain name like .co.in or .co.uk for commercial sites in India and the U.K., respectively, can be hosted anywhere. That is you can procure web hosting from any server in any part of the world.

However, certain country specific domain names might have restrictions imposed by the government of that country. Additionally, you would need to check with your prospective web hosting company if they are capable of running web sites for that specific domain name.

Where to buy country specific domain names?

Not all domain registrars offer all country specific domain names. And this depends on the popularity and other issues of the country code top-level domain (ccTLD). For example, .co.uk is used often by businesses and commercial organization in the U.K. and is available from many domain name registrars including Network Solutions. The .co.in, which was available to the public only a couple of years back, can be procured from a few companies like Net4Domains.in.

You might have different reasons to opt for a country specific domain name including:

• Unavailability of .com (and/or .net and .org) domain name
• Popularity of ccTLD names in your country
• Your web site targets prospects who reside in your country
• Price

In any case, it is a good idea for businesses and commercial organizations to book a country specific domain name even if they have a dot-com web site in place. For instance, if you run a company in the UK and own www.yourbusiness.com, getting www.yourbusiness.co.uk is a smart thing to do. However, it's not necessary to procure web hosting and put a web site on this domain. It would be quicker (and cheaper) to simply set up forwarding on this domain name so visitors are automatically redirected to your present web site. Purchasing a country specific domain name that is based on your present .com name will will safe-guard your company name as well as its reputation.

Benefits of country specific domain names

A country specific domain name by its very nature means that it is targeted to a particular country. It is speculated that local search engines (such as Google.co.uk or Google.co.in) might give a ranking boost to a web site with a country specific domain name. So if most of your countrymen use local search engines, a country specific domain name would be a good alternative to a more general domain name like a .com. Also for search queries containing that country's name, the web site might appear higher in the results.

Additionally, several search engines determine the country to which a web site belongs by the location of the web hosting server. If a country specific domain name is hosted in the same country it might provide a double benefit.