Some information I gathered while registering an International Domain Name (IDN), and a short “how-to”, to help you get started registering your own IDN.

After failing to register sne.eu, I’d been on the hunt for an interesting domain hack, I eventually stumbled across uɥoɾ.com, which I snapped up immediately. In doing so, I learned a little about registering an IDN, which I thought might be of use to others.

When a lot of the code that runs the Internet was written, it was based on the assumption that domain names would only be made up of letters, digits and hyphens. However the Internet is now international and, we require some way of including accented, Greek, Chinese, and Cyrillic characters, among many others. “Uncommon” characters can be represented in unicode, which is what IDNs are made of.

The Domain Name System (DNS) itself doesn’t understand unicode, in fact it’s never aware of the unicode characters. IDNs are a “hack” on top of DNS: the unicode characters are translated by web browsers using an algorithm called Punycode.

Once the IDN to be registered is known, it can be run through the Punycode algorithm, and the resulting (non-unicode) domain registered. Verisign have a Punycode converter that can be used: Verisign IDN Converter. For example, running uɥoɾ.com through the Verisign IDN Converter, we get the somewhat ugly xn--uo-vgb5h.com, which is what I registered, allowing anyone to “type” uɥoɾ.com into a browser and have it take them to the correct website.

You also use the ugly domain to set-up the domain on your web-server.

If you want to register an “upside-down domain”, try typing your text into this upside-town converter.