DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Back in the U.S.A.

In true cosmopolitan spirit, we covered international domains first. But what if you’re from the good ol’ U.S. of A.?

If you’re in the U.S., where you belong depends mainly upon what your organization does, how you’d like your domain names to look, and how much you’re willing to pay. If your organization falls into one of the following categories, you may want to consider joining us:

• K-12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) schools

• Community colleges and technical vocational schools

• State and local government agencies

That’s because these organizations have historically registered under us, according to the namespace design documented in RFC 1480. In that design, a high school, for example, would register under k12.<state>.us, where <state> is the two-letter postal abbreviation for the state in which the school is located.

However, even these organizations don’t need to follow this rigid structure. Many K-12 schools, community colleges, and government agencies register subdomains of org or even com. The registry that runs us has relaxed the restrictions placed on us registrants, too: now you can register in either the “locality space” (<state>.us) or the “expanded space.” In the “expanded space,” you could register (for example) acme.us rather than acme.co.us.

Many people, however, prefer the better-known generic top-level domains. For information on registering in one of those, read on.

The generic top-level domains

As we said, there are many reasons why you might ...