At the start of 2008 there were over six-and-a-half billion people on the Earth, with just over 1.3-billion of us on the Internet. At the same time, there are almost 100,000,000 top-level domains registered, quite a few of which are held by private citizens. What does this mean to the average person? It means that if we want to protect our brand or our name on the Internet, we need to move quickly.
Why not buy a .jp?
Invest in a .jp domain name
Japan is a funny country when it comes to rules. Anything that can be governed will be governed. This is true with everything from ketchup to nuclear power to domain names. In order to have a .jp, certain conditions need to be met.
Note: Don’t let these prices scare you! Keep reading for cheaper alternatives.
.co.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
limited to only one per registered business must have at least one working office in Japan .ne.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
Can be owned by citizens or businesses no limit on number of domain registrations must have a Japanese address .or.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
Must be a registered non-profit organization in Japan limited to only one domain per year .jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
Can be owned by citizens or businesses no limit on number of domain registrations must have a Japanese address With these prices, it’s no surprise that people aren’t picking up .jp domains as quickly as we see with other country-specific extensions. But it doesn’t always have to be this expensive.
Buying an IDN Multilingual Domain
Since 2004, it’s been possible for us to purchase Internationalized Domain Names using non-alphabetic characters. This means that if you wanted to buy something like ジェイソン.jp, you could. The advantage here is that very few Internationalized Domain Names have been purchased using westernized names converted to Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Hebrew, Hindi, Arabic and Chinese characters. That said, with so many people who use these writing systems coming online all the time, it’s only a matter of years before all the common or otherwise desirable names are taken.
Luckily, there are places where we can purchase top level Japanese domains and, as luck would have it, they’re often cheaper than buying the Romanized TLDs.
Get TWO .jp domains for $40
JP-Domains, a Canadian company that helps with Japanese domain registration for foreigners and non-residents, currently offers one of the best deals on the web. As of this writing, they’re offering customers two IDN .jp domains for a price of $40 USD. Considering how a single Romanized .jp is $99 USD per year, it’s hard to complain with the price. Of course, if you absolutely must have a Romanized .jp address, you can buy one for the low(er) price of $69 USD per year.
With the weak US dollar, though, these prices may go up substantially in the near future.
Attaching an IDN to Our Website
We can attach an Internationalized Domain Name to our website one of two ways. We can either forward all visitors to our main site (e.g.: http://ジェイソン.jp will take you to http://www.j2fi.net/), or we can buy the name and then edit the name servers through our account’s control panel to point to our webhost’s name servers. The first option is quite simple, but I’ll show you how to do both.
Forwarding an IDN with JP-Domains
When you click on the “Edit Name Servers” link in your left panel, you should see the same thing on your screen as the image below (click for a larger picture). From here, you simply need to click on one of the DNS addresses.
