Domain names and .au eligibility

What this section covers, in the order you meet it

A domain is chosen, then registered, then pointed at a working site and email, then occasionally transferred, and eventually renewed or left to lapse. This section follows that order, because the questions people actually have follow it too — nobody asks about renewal before they have registered a name, and nobody asks what a domain name even is after they have been running one for years.

What a domain name actually is is the place to start if any of the vocabulary below is unfamiliar — 1,000 searches a month in Australia ask this directly, measured 3 August 2026 in research/outer-volume-au.json, which tells you the basic vocabulary is far less settled than suppliers using it assume.

Owned, or licensed for a term

This is the single fact that causes the most damage when it is missed. A .au domain is not bought once and kept forever — it is licensed for a term, under rules published by auDA, the .au Domain Administration Authority, and every registrant must have a genuine Australian presence to hold one. .com.au versus .au versus .com sets out how that presence is tested and what the three namespaces actually mean for a business choosing between them. The deeper legal detail — the current Match-or-Synonym eligibility test, and where it sits inside the wider .au Licensing Rules Review — is on Australian domain eligibility, and the two pages are written to be read together rather than to repeat each other.

What is here

What a domain name actually is — the basic vocabulary, for anyone starting from nothing.

Choosing a domain name for an Australian business — memorability, and the Match-or-Synonym eligibility test the .au namespaces actually apply.

How domain registration works, and what you are paying for — the practical steps, and the account details that matter more than the name itself.

.com.au versus .au versus .com — which namespace a business is actually eligible for, and why the choice is narrower than it looks.

Registrar, reseller and registrant are three different things — the one field in the registration record that decides control, and why it is so often the supplier’s name instead of yours.

Domain transfers explained — moving a name between registrars, and the different, harder process of moving it between registrants.

Domain expiry and renewal — what actually happens on the day a licence lapses, and the two habits that prevent it happening by accident.

Domain name servers and DNS explained — the address book that turns a name into a working website and working email.

Domains and email: the part people forget — the mail record almost nobody remembers to set until mail silently stops arriving.

Subdomains, redirects and parked names — three things that look like a domain but are not one, explained separately because confusing them wastes money.

Buying a domain someone else already holds — the aftermarket, and what actually changes when the name is not simply available.

Business names, trade marks and the Match-or-Synonym test — how the .au eligibility test actually reads against a real legal name.

Domain names, TLDs and the ICANN and IANA registries behind them

A domain name is a human-readable address inside the Domain Name System (DNS), delegated in a strict hierarchy. At the top sit generic top-level domains such as .com and .org and country-code top-level domains such as .au — together, TLDs — each assigned by IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, to the registry that runs it. Australia’s .au registry delegates the day-to-day work of selling and renewing domain names to accredited registrars, which is why your invoice comes from a registrar, not from the registry or from ICANN, the body that coordinates the whole domain name system globally. None of that hierarchy is visible in ordinary use, and none of it needs to be — until a transfer or a dispute forces someone to work out which layer actually controls the name.

Why this matters more than its search volume suggests

Almost nobody asks these questions until the domain is already a problem — expired, held in a former supplier’s account, or contested at the worst possible moment. The pages in this section exist to be read before that day, not during it. What a supplier commissioned to build a site should already be handling on a client’s behalf, rather than leaving to be discovered later, is set out on website design services. For where domain choice sits inside a web design project as a whole, start with web design in Australia.