.cloud domains: what to know before you register

The IANA root database names ARUBA PEC S.p.A., an Italian company, as the sponsoring organisation for .cloud. The same company is listed as "Operator" on the underlying ICANN Registry Agreement, signed 16 April 2015. It's a standard base gTLD contract, nothing sponsored or community-restricted about it. No corporate parent for Aruba PEC S.p.A. turned up in the sources checked for this guide.

The actual grunt work, running the database of who owns which .cloud name, falls to Tucows.com Co. on the back end. Tucows is listed as technical contact in the IANA record, and the name servers sit on Tucows' trs-dns infrastructure. Policy, what can be registered, how premium names get priced, still belongs to Aruba PEC S.p.A. as registry operator, within whatever limits its ICANN agreement allows.

Three roles matter here if you're buying a name. The registry (Aruba PEC S.p.A., running on Tucows' infrastructure) holds the master database for every .cloud domain and sets wholesale prices and naming rules. A registrar, GoDaddy or EuroDNS say, is the accredited retailer you actually hand your money to, and it handles the purchase, renewal and support. The registrant is you, whoever's contact details sit on the registration. Your contract for billing and support runs through the registrar, not the registry, so that's who you call when something breaks.

Anyone can register a .cloud domain. No eligibility checks, no residency requirement, no need to prove you work in tech. The registry treats .cloud as a fully open gTLD, so a person, a company, a club, whatever, can grab one on a first-come, first-served basis. You don't have to show any connection to cloud computing at all, according to GoDaddy's registration guidance.

There are still technical rules baked into the registry itself. Names must run between 3 and 63 characters, numerals are fine, hyphens are only allowed mid-name, and internationalised (IDN) characters aren't supported, per EuroDNS's published specification. These limits sit at the registry level, so they apply no matter which registrar you buy through.

What changes registrar to registrar is everything layered on top of that baseline. Some ask for account verification, some offer WHOIS privacy and some don't, some lock your domain by default. None of this touches who's allowed to register, it just shapes the buying experience. Read the registrar's own terms rather than assuming they mirror the registry's open policy, because they often don't.

Moving a .cloud domain between registrars works the same as it does for any other gTLD. The losing registrar issues an authorisation code, and the standard ICANN transfer rules kick in, including the 60-day lock after a new registration or a change of registrant, unless the registrar has opted out of that particular lock. Nothing specific to .cloud changes this.

The registry's minimum term is one year, with renewals in one-year increments, per EuroDNS's registry information page. A registrar comparison site puts the maximum term at ten years, but the registry itself doesn't confirm this in the sources checked here, so take it as likely rather than certain.

What happens at expiry isn't spelled out by the registry in this dossier. EuroDNS lists no separate reactivation fee beyond the standard renewal charge, which points to a fairly simple lapse process at that registrar, but that's one registrar's practice, not a published registry-wide grace and redemption schedule. If you need certainty on restore costs and deadlines, check with your registrar before letting a name lapse. Don't assume the generic 30/30/5-day pattern used by many other gTLDs applies here unchanged.