.at

Last updated
.at
Dot-at domain logo.png
Introduced20 January 1988
TLD type Country code top-level domain
StatusActive
Registry nic.at
Sponsor nic.at
Intended useEntities connected with Austria
Actual useVery popular in Austria, also used for English-language domain hacks
Registered domains1,468,838 (December 2022) [1]
Registration restrictionsNone, except for restricted subdomains .gv.at and .ac.at
StructureRegistrations are directly at second level, or at third level beneath several second-level labels
Documents .at-Domain Registration Guidelines
nic.at - Terms of Use
Dispute policiesnone since October 2008 [2]
DNSSEC yes
Registry website www.nic.at

.at is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Austria. It was introduced on 20 January 1988 and initially administered by the University of Vienna, [3] before being taken over in 1998 [4] by nic.at, based in Salzburg. [5]

Contents

Second-level domains

The .at top-level domain has a number of second-level domains:

DomainIntended use
.ac.atReserved for academic institutions, especially universities
.gv.atReserved for the government as well as federal and state authorities
.co.atIntended for commercially oriented companies
.or.atIntended for all kinds of organizations
.priv.atIntended for private Austrian individuals

However, it is also possible to register directly at the top level.

Domains under .at, .or.at, and .co.at can be registered without restrictions. No residence  [ de ] or office in Austria is required. [6] Only .ac.at (administered by the Austrian academic network ACOnet) and .gv.at (administered by the Vienna City Administration on behalf of the Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs) are not freely registrable. The priv.at domain is operated by the association VIBE!AT.

Known domain hacks

Given the number of English words that end with -at, this presents the possibility for many domain hacks.

Many Austrian domain names were registered for English words that end with "at". Domain hacks treating "at" as a word in its own right (such as arrive.at) are widespread.

As of today, there are very few such domain names left available on the domain prime market as the result of domain name speculation.

Most of them can be bought on the domain secondary market. Only a few of these domain names are actually used.

Some known examples of the Austrian domain hacks are:

Properties

An .at domain may be between one and 63 characters in length, and registration is typically completed within minutes. Registrations of internationalized domain names are accepted. [7] Since 31 March 2004, the use of German umlauts and other special characters has been supported. [8] In mid-2007, it became possible to register domains consisting solely of digits, though this met with limited interest compared to other ccTLDs. [9] Since 2004, .at has supported internationalized domain names (IDNs), [10] including lowercase letters from the ISO 8859-1 character set as well as the characters œ, š, and ž from the Unicode Latin Extended-A range.

Since 15 December 2011, .at has implemented Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to ensure the authenticity and integrity of Domain Name System data. On 10 February 2012, the DS resource record for .at was entered into the root name servers, enabling signature validation. [11]

Since August 2016, it has been possible to register one- and two-character .at domains. Previously, due to technical requirements dating from 1993, only domains with at least three characters could be allocated. [12] [13]

Distribution

The registry nic.at conducts an annual survey among holders of .at domains. In 2012, this revealed, among other things, that over half of the surveyed companies owned more than six domains, with a quarter owning more than 30. [14]

Due to the liberal registration criteria, .at has experienced steady growth in recent years. In March 2012, exactly 1.1 million domains had been registered. [15] By May 2019, the number had risen to over 1.3 million, equating to 0.15 .at domains per inhabitant. While growth in the 2000s sometimes exceeded 100,000 new domains per year, only around 55,000 were registered in total from 2015 to 2018. [16]

See also

References

  1. ↑ ".at Statistiken". nic.at. Retrieved 2022-12-10.
  2. ↑ "Legal issues". Archived from the original on 2011-08-17. Retrieved 2011-08-08.
  3. ↑ Rastl, Peter (June 2000). "Es begann an der Uni Wien: 10 Jahre Internet in Österreich" [It all began at the University of Vienna: 10 years of the internet in Austria]. Universität Wien. Archived from the original on 2012-01-15. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  4. ↑ "Company History". www.nic.at. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  5. ↑ ".at Domain Delegation Data". IANA . Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  6. ↑ ".at-Domain". www.united-domains.de (in German). Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  7. ↑ "Charset & Converter". Archived from the original on 2006-05-10. Retrieved 2011-08-08.
  8. ↑ Hitzelberger, Florian (2004-03-25). ".at - Umlaut-Start am 31. März" [.at - Umlaut launch on 31 March]. domain-recht.de (in German). Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  9. ↑ Hitzelberger, RA Florian (2007-06-29). ".at - Ansturm auf Zifferndomains bleibt aus" [.at - No rush for number domains]. domain-recht.de (in German). Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  10. ↑ "Charset & Converter". Archived from the original on 2006-05-10. Retrieved 2011-08-08.
  11. ↑ "DNSSEC Deployment Report". rick.eng.br. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  12. ↑ "nic.at: Introduction of short domains". Archived from the original on 2016-07-16. Retrieved 2016-05-10.
  13. ↑ "Ein- und zweistellige .at-Domains werden ab August vergeben" [One- and two-character .at domains will be allocated starting in August]. Der Standard (in German). Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  14. ↑ "nic.at: Domainstrategie-Studie 2012" [nic.at: Domain Strategy Study 2012]. blog.united-domains.de (in German). Archived from the original on 2015-06-12. Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  15. ↑ Hitzelberger, Florian (2012-03-02). "Statistik - .at feiert 1.111.111ste Domain" [Statistics - .at celebrates its 1,111,111th domain]. domain-recht.de (in German). Retrieved 2026-01-02.
  16. ↑ ".at Domain". domaintechnik.at (in German). Retrieved 2026-01-02.
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