Everything You Need to Know About German ccTLDs

Germany’s ecommerce sector is booming.

According to Spherical Insights, the country’s citizens spent a staggering $104.57 billion on ecommerce purchases in 2022. And the market is far from peaking – the same company estimates a compound annual growth rate of 11.8% for the country’s ecommerce sector between 2022 and 2032. That would place the sector’s value at $319.6 billion by 2032.

All the more reason for you to establish an online presence in Germany.

You can do that with the .de Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) extension. By registering one of these extensions, you demonstrate that your ecommerce site is based in Germany and – crucially – that it can be trusted by German shoppers.

That leads us to a question:

How do you register a .de extension? Read on to discover the answers, which vary depending on the specific .de extension you want.

The Basic Requirements for .de

There are three versions of the .de extension that you can register:

• .co.de
• .com.de
• .de

The first two come with no real rules attached, at least when it comes to who can register. You don’t need to provide identification or maintain a physical presence in Germany to have a .co.de or .com.de extension.

But the rules get tighter with a .de extension.

As this is Germany’s main ccTLD, it requires anybody who tries to register one of these domains to have a local presence in the country. For a business, that means maintaining a physical company presence, whereas individuals usually need to have a home address and telephone number. Of course, that could be a problem for a company that wants to sell its products in Germany – perhaps online – without renting out office space in the country.

Thankfully, there’s a solution – a trustee service.

Trustee services are operated by domain registrars, which will maintain a physical presence in a country so they can register domains on your behalf. Think of them as intermediaries – they act as your presence in Germany so you can still get a .de domain without absorbing the cost of setting up in Germany.

What Other Rules Apply to .de Domains?

Apart from the need to have a presence in Germany – which you don’t have to worry about with .co.de and .com.de extensions – there are a handful of rules you have to follow for all .de ccTLDs.

That starts with the minimum registration term – one year on all domains. So, you can’t register a .de ccTLD for a couple of months to experiment with it. You have to commit for at least 12 months.

There are also character restrictions on the domain name you associate with the ccTLD.

Any name you create must be between one and 63 characters, with most standard letters and numbers included. You can also use hyphens in the domain name, barring the first and last characters, which must be numbers or letters. You also can’t have a hyphen in the third or fourth position of your domain name. The .de ccTLD also restricts or prevents the use of several “special” characters, such as ampersands and hash marks.

However, several accented characters – also known as IDN characters – are allowed.

This includes characters that use umlauts – which are double-dotted marks over characters – as these are commonly used over vowels in Germany to denote how the vowel is articulated.

How to Register Your .de Domain Extension

You have two options when registering a .de ccTLD.

The first is to go directly to DENIC – the organization responsible for overseeing domain registrations in Germany. It allows you to use its “whois” service to locate an available domain, as well as register directly via it using the DENICdirect Service. However, there are some caveats to this. A .de extension is typically more expensive via DENICdirect than it would be via a registrar. Plus, you get no extras – you only get the domain name with no hosting or web space options for mounting a website.

Your other option – which you’ll need if you want a .de extension and don’t have a presence in Germany – is to use a .de domain registration service like Register.Domains. These services handle the “whois” requests and registration on your behalf, as well as acting as a trustee in cases where you might need one. You’ll usually find you can package your registration with other services – such as web hosting and email subscriptions – to keep your overall costs even lower.