.al

.al is the ccTLD for Albania. It is managed by the Electronic and Postal Communications Authority of Albania (AKEP) (in Albanian, Autoriteti i Komunikimeve Elektronike dhe Postare).

History

The establishment of the ccTLD .al began on April 21, 1992, initiated by the University of Tirana, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Informatics. The technical setup was carried out by CNUCE in Pisa, Italy, under the direction of Francesco Gennai. The registry's formal profile was defined in 1998 when the Albanian Telecommunication Regulatory Entity (TRE) became the "Sponsoring Organization", establishing the rules and procedures for delegating domain names to users. After, a new DNS system for the .al ccTLD was implementated of a new DNS, a the “master server” from Pisa, Italy, was reloated to AKEP in Albania. This transfer, supported by Gennai, strengthened Albania's capacity to manage the domain locally. The final stage of this process involved implementing software for the administration and management of domain names.

Rules

To register a domain under the .al zone, one must make sure the domain you want to register is not:

• part of the List of Prohibited Names, which contains words and/or phrases that are considered sensitive for public use, which includes blasphemy, insults of various types, racism, etc;
  • part of the List of Reserved Names;
• a trademark/patent registered by this directory: http://dppi.gov.al /.

Second-level Domains

The following second-level domains are available for registration: ".com.al", ".net.al", ".org.al", ".gov.al", ".mil.al" and ".edu.al".

Characters

Domain names include letters from A to Z, numbers from 0 to 9 and the minus sign "-".

The domain names cannot be registered when they:

• consist of one character;
• start or end with minus "-";
• consist of more than 63 characters;
• begin with any two alphanumeric characters followed by two minuses ("xy–" format).

Country code top-level domain