Registering a .bt domain: who runs it, what they ask for, and what goes wrong

A .com is bought in four minutes from a form that asks for a card number. A .bt is not, and the difference is not bureaucracy for its own sake: the country-code domain is administered as a national resource, and the process exists to make sure the name ends up registered to a real Bhutanese person or organisation. Once you know what it wants, it is not difficult. Here is the shape of it.

If you have not yet decided whether you want .bt at all, read choosing a domain name first. This guide assumes you have.

Who actually runs .bt

Every country-code domain has a single registry — the body that keeps the master list of who owns which name — and one or more registrars, who sell names to the public and pass the registration to the registry. For .bt the registry is a government function, and the ordinary way for a business to register a name is through the registrar: Bhutan Telecom Limited, which handles .bt issuance.

That distinction matters when something goes wrong. If your name is not resolving, your registrar is who you call. If you are disputing who owns a name, that is a registry question. Knowing which body you are dealing with saves a week of being passed between them.

What you will be asked for

Expect to prove two things: that you exist, and that the name is yours to claim. In practice that means:

• For a business: your trade licence or business registration certificate, with the registered name matching what you are applying for or reasonably derived from it.
• For an individual: your Citizenship Identity Card.
• For an organisation that is not a business — an NGO, a school, a community group — the registration document from whichever authority registered it.
• A contact person with a working email address and a phone number. This is the address that will receive the renewal reminder, so it must be somebody who will still be there next year.
• The name servers the domain should point at, if you already know them. If you do not, it is fine to register first and set them later — see pointing your domain at your website.

The name itself is checked against the registered business name. A trade licence for Khamsum Enterprises will get you khamsum.bt or khamsumenterprises.bt without argument. It will not get you hotels.bt, and it should not: generic words and names of other organisations are the cases the registry is there to refuse.

Second-level or third-level?

.bt has two kinds of address. khamsum.bt is second-level — the name sits directly under .bt. khamsum.com.bt is third-level, under a category domain: .com.bt for commercial organisations, .org.bt for non-profits, .edu.bt for educational institutions, .gov.bt for government, and a few others.

Which should you take? For a business with the choice, the second-level name is shorter, easier to say aloud, and what most people now expect. The third-level categories still matter where they signal something — a school on .edu.bt, a charity on .org.bt — and some of them are restricted to organisations that qualify. Ask which categories you are eligible for; the price and the paperwork can differ between them.

What it costs

We are not going to print a figure, for the reason given in the domain-name guide: a price written on a web page is read as current for years after it stops being true. The registrar publishes the current fee, and it is the only number to trust.

What we will say is what to ask about, because the headline price is rarely the whole of it:

• The annual fee, and whether the first year is priced differently from renewals.
• Any one-off registration or processing charge on top of the annual fee.
• How payment is taken. Bank transfer, mBoB, or over the counter — and how long after payment the registration is processed.

How long it takes

Longer than a .com. The documents are checked by a person, so allow working days rather than minutes, and do not schedule a launch, a print run or an announcement around a domain you do not yet hold. Apply early; the name is useful to own before the site exists, and a site can go live at a free address like yourname.sites.bt in the meantime and move to the domain when it arrives.

The three things that go wrong

1. It is registered to the wrong person

A web designer, a nephew who is good with computers, or a former employee registers the domain in their own name “to save time”. Everything works for two years. Then they leave, or fall out with you, or simply stop answering, and you discover you do not own your own address. Recovering a domain registered to somebody else ranges from awkward to impossible.

The registrant must be your organisation. The contact person can be anyone; the owner cannot. Ask to see the registration record and read the registrant field yourself.

2. The renewal reminder goes to nobody

The contact email is a personal address belonging to someone who has since left, or a mailbox nobody opens. The renewal notice arrives, is not read, the domain lapses, and either the site goes dark or — worse — someone else registers the name. Use a role address (admin@, office@) that will outlive any one person, and put the expiry date in the organisation's calendar as well as the registrar's.

3. Nobody knows the login

When you need to change where the domain points — a new host, a new email provider — you need to be able to log in to the registrar's control panel or to reach a person there who will act on your instruction. If only the agency that built your site has that access, every change goes through them, at their pace and their price. Get the credentials, keep them somewhere two people can find, and test them once.

After it is yours

A registered domain does nothing until it is pointed somewhere. That is a separate, short job — pointing your domain at your website walks through it, including the four mistakes that account for nearly every “I changed it and nothing happened”. While you are in the control panel, set up the records for email on the same domain; a .bt address on your business card says the same thing the website does.