The Republic of Serbia has two equal national internet domains: .RS and .СРБ. The first is a standard country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD), while the second is the Cyrillic internationalized domain name (IDN).
Both domains are important for defining internet identity to everyone who lives and works in Serbia. Your domain name is part of your permanent, personally selected web and email address, through which anyone can easily find and recognize you on the Internet. Either a ccTDL or IDN can be registered in four easy steps:
1. Compose a good and allowed name
Your domain name must be technically allowed. An .RS domain can have any letter in the English alphabet (a to z) and any digit (0 to 9). No spaces or allowed, nor any punctuation marks other than the hyphen (-). A name cannot start or end with a hyphen, nor can it have two consecutive hyphens in the third or fourth position. The name must have at least two characters, and the maximum number of characters is 63.
.СРБ domains can have any of the 30 letters of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (a to š), and can contain numbers (0 to 9) and hyphens (-). It also must have at least two characters, but the maximum number is 30, because the ASCII Compatible Encoding algorithm used to convert to the Latin alphabet might exceed the 63-character limit. As a practical matter, a .СРБ domain shouldn’t have more than 20 characters.
2. Check if the domain name is available
The name you want can be yours only if it’s available for registration. This can be checked by querying WHOIS, a service which allows you to discover if the desired domain name has been taken. If it has, then the domain’s owner or registrar can be found at http://who.in.rs/.
3. Choose the right domain namespace
For .RS and .СРБ domains, registration is available within the scope of following five domain spaces, depending on the legal status of the user:
#* .RS and .СРБ are available for all interested users, individuals or groups, domestic or foreign;
.CO.RS and .ПР.СРБ are for legally-registered businesses, whether domestic or foreign;
.ORG.RS and .ОРГ.СРБ are for domestic or foreign government or non-profit organizations and legal entities;
.EDU.RS and .ОБР.СРБ cover educational institutions or organizations, which can also be domestic or foreign;
.IN.RS and .ОД.СРБ are for domestic or foreign individuals.
There are two other domain spaces for .RS and .СРБ, but they are normally not available to the public. These are .AC.RS and .АК.СРБ for the academic and scientific research network for the Republic of Serbia, while .GOV.RS and .УПР.СРБ are assigned to government authorities in the Republic.
4. Registering the domain
The final step is to register your domain. It is possible to perform the whole process of selection, registration and payment on www.istanco.rs. The whole process can be completed in a few minutes.