More about .eu IDN's


Now open!

EuroDNS is officially accredited by EURID, the .EU Registry to allow private individuals and companies to apply for Internationalized Domain Names.

To help all parties benefit from this great opportunity, EuroDNS is now accepting pre-registrations for ‘.EU’ Domain names composed with non-Latin characters.

This document – which integrates EuroDNS’ Terms & Conditions of Registration but does not wish to replace the Registry’s official documentation available at http://www.eurid.eu/en/eu-domain-names/idns-eu - aims to provide you some guidance on the topic.




What is an IDN

IDNs are domain names that contain at least one accentuated or one non-ASCII character. These characters include, for example, the French é, the Greek ὓ, the German ä.

IDNs are from the utmost importance for the .EU zone as almost every state member of the European Union is using non-ASCII characters in its alphabet.

Registration process

While the registration of IDN domain names under the .EU extension will only start on the 10th of December 2009, EuroDNS already allows you to submit your pre-registration requests now to increase your chances to obtain the very .EU IDN domain name you are willing to register.

On receipt of your pre-registration order, EuroDNS will place it in a dedicated queue following the first come first served principle and will endaevour to automatically submit it to the .EU registry on December 10 of 2009

There is no additonnal fee to benefit from EuroDNS pre-registration queue. However please note the pre-registration does not constitute a guarantee of registration from EuroDNS or EURID.

First come first served process

There will be no Sunrise period for .EU IDNs, only the time of submission will determine the allocation of the applied domain names. Multiple applications for the same domain name, will be processed on the basis of the “first come, first served” principle.

This implies that the first correct, up-to-date and accurate application will be granted the specified IDN domain name by the Registry.

Technical limitation

  • While several alphabets (Greek, Cyrillic…) are available (please refer to the Registry technical limitation) the mix of character sets in a single IDN domain is not allowed
  • An IDN shall hold at least 2 characters and may not hold more than 63 characters after it conversion into the ACE string (for more information on the ACE string please refer to the Registry FAQ
  • An IDN may not start with the characters xn--
  • No name can begin with or end with a dash (-).