.hu is the ccTLD for Hungary. It is managed by the Council of Hungarian Internet Providers (CHIP).[1]

Rules and Restrictions[edit | edit source]

A domain applicant can be a natural person (private person) or a legal person (eg a company, association, municipality, etc.).

Citizens and legal entities of any country can apply for a domain name under a second level public domain (eg something.co.hu).

To register a domain, the domain applicant (or the administrative contact person) must have a Hungarian postal address. Some of the registrars provide this as a service.

The following natural persons with non-Hungarian citizenship can apply for a .hu domain name:

  • citizens of the European Union, the Council of Europe, the European Economic Area (EEA) or the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) member states, as well as the countries bordering Hungary, can apply for the domain directly under .hu (eg something.hu). The list of countries can be found here.
  • any natural person holding a permit for domiciliation in Hungary.

Domain Applicants must be natural persons over 18 years old except in cases of legal succession specified in law (e.g. heritage).

The following legal entities from outside Hungary can apply for a .hu domain name:

  • any legal entity
    • established by virtue of law;
    • entered in the Register of or registered with an authority or court; or
    • filing its respective application with the competent authority or court and commencing its operations pursuant and according to the law prior to such entry or registration,

in the territory of the European Union, of the Council of Europe, an EEA or EFTA country or a neighbouring country of Hungary. The list of countries from which a .hu domain can be registered can be found here.

  • furthermore, the beneficiary of a trademark either registered with the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office or protected otherwise that is also applicable in Hungary.[2]

Second-level Domains[edit | edit source]

The full list of second-level domains under .hu is:

.co.hu .2000.hu .erotika.hu .jogasz.hu .sex.hu video.hu
.info.hu .agrar.hu .film.hu .konyvelo.hu .shop.hu
.org.hu .bolt.hu .forum.hu .lakas.hu .suli.hu
.priv.hu .casino.hu .games.hu .media.hu .szex.hu
.sport.hu .city.hu .hotal.hu .news.hu .tozsde.hu
.tm.hu .erotica.hu ingatlan.hu .reklam.hu utazas.hu

Only domain names that are the trademark of the applicant can be chosen under tm.hu.[3]

Characters[edit | edit source]

The domain name can be a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 63 characters. Note that if a domain name contains accented characters, the maximum number of characters will be less than 63 because the systems store the accented characters encoded (with the so-called punycode encoding) and an accented character takes up more character space.

Characters that can be used in a domain name under .hu:

  • the unaccented lower case letters (a-z) of the Latin alphabet;
  • the Hungarian accented lowercase letters (á, é, í, ó, ö, õ, ú, ü, ű);
  • numeric characters (0-9);
  • the hyphen (-).

Additional terms and recommendations:

  • domain names cannot begin or end with a hyphen;
  • domain name cannot contain two consecutive hyphens as the third and fourth characters;
  • the standard does not allow non-alphanumeric, special characters (e.g. %, !, $) and only lowercase letters can be registered.
  • a .hu domain cannot contain accented characters belonging to languages other than Hungarian (e.g. French, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc.);
  • the use of domain names beginning with a numeric character is not recommended in RFC1035, so although their registration is not prohibited, it is not recommended either. The registrant is solely responsible for the functionality of such domains or for any damage resulting from their use.[4]

References[edit | edit source]