Why Buy a .JP Domain Name?
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.
Make your name your own
Have you ever typed your name into a search engine like Google or Yahoo! and been surprised by the number of people that share your name? I have.
In my case, two Americans have the rights to the .com and .net registrations of my name. My family name is the same as a global toy company, and my first name is so common that it’s been registered on almost every domain. So what can a foreigner living in Japan do to set themselves apart from the rest of the internet?
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.)]
- limited to only one per registered business
- must have at least one working office in Japan
.ne.jp [w/Alphabetic Name (¥9900/yr.)]
- 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.)]
- must be a registered non-profit organization in Japan
- limited to only one domain per year
.jp [w/Alphabetic Name (¥9900/yr.)]
- 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.
From the domain name server screen, simply enter the site you want to have people forwarded to and press “Submit”.
The changes will not be immediate, as the DNS changes need to ripple through the internet, but you will be able to have people use your new IDN in about 12 hours after setting the forwarding address.
Pretty easy, right?
Attach the Domain Names to Our Webhost’s Name Server
This option is the most complicated, but can be relatively straight-forward. First, you’ll want to check to see if your webhost will allow you to manually edit your site’s name servers. If you have access to something like cPanel, you would want to go to a screen that says something like “Addon Domains”.
From here, you can enter the new domain name, and what directory the site can be found in on your webserver. Once this is done, you’ll need to go back to the JP-Domains account page and change the two DNS servers to match those used by your webhost.
This is different for every company and, in some cases, can be different based on where your server is located. Suffice to say, I strongly suggest you confirm that you can modify your site’s domain information directly, or have someone at the company do it for you. It might take a few extra hours, but it’s better to have something done properly, than to lose access to your site completely.
That’s All There Is To It
Believe it or not, that’s all there is to it. When I first set up my two IDN’s with JP-Domains, I was up and running with the sites completely forwarded in less than half-an-hour. From there, it took about six hours for the world’s name servers to be updated with the new site addresses, and it was no problem for me to send Japanese friends to ジェイソン.jp, which seems to be easier to understand than some other site names.
If you’ve ever wanted to get a .jp or an Internationalized Domain Name, now might be the time.
