Domain registration in the UAE

The short version

If you are a business in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or anywhere else in the Emirates and you want a domain and a server, there are two separate purchases and they do not have to come from the same supplier. The domain is a registration with whoever is accredited to sell that extension. The hosting is a server in a region you choose. They meet at the nameservers, and neither one locks in the other.

We can sell you the second half and most of the first. The one thing we cannot sell you is the country extension itself, and it is better that you read that here than discover it in a checkout.

Why .ae needs a different registrar

.ae is the country-code extension for the United Arab Emirates. Country-code extensions are not sold the way generic ones are: each is administered by an authority in that country, and only registrars that authority has accredited may register names in it. For .ae that authority is aeDA, the .aeDomainAdministration.

We are not aeDA-accredited. That is a licensing and business fact, not a technical limitation and not something a support ticket can unlock. It also means we cannot tell you with authority what the current eligibility requirements are — registration policy for .ae, including any documentation such as a trade licence for particular namespaces, is set by aeDA and applied by its accredited registrars, and it changes without consulting us. Ask an accredited registrar, or check aeDA’s own published policy, and treat anything a non-accredited hosting company tells you about .ae eligibility — including this page — as background rather than gospel.

What a UAE business can register here

Everything except the country extension. The ones a business in the Emirates most often takes are:

• .com — $13.49 the first year, $13.49 to renew. The extension nobody has to spell and the one international customers will guess. More on .com.
• .net — $16.99 then $14.99 a year. A credible second choice when the .com of your trading name is gone. More on .net.
• .io — $46.49 then $67.49 — a steep renewal for a short name. Well understood by technical audiences and worth reading the caveats on. More on .io.
• .cloud — $5.49 the first year and $27.49 at renewal — a large first-year discount, and one to budget carefully for. More on .cloud.

WHOIS privacy is free on every extension whose registry permits it, at registration and at every renewal — worth knowing if you would rather your commercial address were not in a public database. DNS records are yours to edit, auto-renew is on by default with an email before every charge, and leaving is self-service: unlock the domain and copy the auth code from the panel.

Running a .ae on hosting in Dubai

This is the shape most UAE customers end up with, and it works perfectly well. A domain and the server it points at are independent: the registration lives with whoever is accredited to sell it, and the nameservers decide where the traffic goes.

1. 1Register the .ae with an aeDA-accredited registrar, meeting whatever documentation requirements they apply.
2. 2Deploy a server in our Dubai region — every plan we sell is available there at the same price it costs anywhere else.
3. 3Point the .ae’s DNS at that server, either by setting A and AAAA records at your registrar or by delegating the nameservers.
4. 4Register the matching .com with us as well, if the name is free, and redirect it. It is cheap insurance and it covers the customer who types the wrong thing.

Nothing about that arrangement is a workaround. Plenty of large organisations keep their country domain at one supplier and their infrastructure at another, precisely because it stops a single supplier holding both.

Choosing between .ae and .com

When the country extension is worth the extra supplier

If your customers are in the Emirates and your business is local — a clinic, a contractor, a retailer, anything where trust is regional — a .ae signals that you are here in a way a .com does not. Local search behaviour and local expectation both favour it, and for a business whose entire market is the UAE, the extra registrar relationship is a small price.

When .com is the better answer

If you sell across borders, if your customers are as likely to be in Riyadh or London as in Dubai, or if you expect to raise money or hire internationally, .com travels further and costs less to hold. It also has the smallest gap between first-year and renewal price of anything on our list, which makes the long-term budgeting trivial.

The honest recommendation for most UAE businesses is both, if the budget stretches: the .ae for local credibility and the .com held defensively, with one redirecting to the other. What you should not do is build a brand on a name whose .com is owned by someone else and hope it never matters.

Practical points before you buy

• Read the renewal, not the first year. Several extensions discount registration heavily and charge many times that at renewal. Our price list prints both numbers side by side for exactly this reason.
• Use an address you will still read in three years. Registry confirmations, expiry notices and transfer approvals all go to the registrant email. A departed employee’s mailbox is how domains get lost.
• Tax is worked out at checkout. Our prices exclude tax; what applies depends on where you are and whether you give us a business tax number, so it is calculated at checkout rather than guessed at on a marketing page.
• Region and residency are different questions. Hosting in our Dubai region puts the data at rest in the UAE. What that means for your contractual or regulatory obligations is a question for your advisors, and we are not going to pretend a region selector settles it.

If you are unsure which extension to commit a brand to, or whether your workload belongs in Dubai at all, ask us before you buy. The answer is sometimes that you need a registrar we are not — and we would rather say so than sell you the nearest thing we happen to stock.