.studio domains: registry, eligibility and buyer rules

The IANA delegation record names Dog Beach, LLC, address c/o Identity Digital Inc., as the sponsoring organisation for .studio. The ICANN registry agreement for .studio, a Base, Non-Sponsored agreement dated 11 February 2015, names the same outfit, Dog Beach, LLC, as the contracted operator. Dog Beach sits under the corporate umbrella of Identity Digital Inc., which provides the administrative and technical contacts on file with IANA.

The delegation history is worth knowing: .studio first went to United TLD Holdco, Ltd. in July 2015, then moved to Dog Beach, LLC in June 2021, as IANA's transfer report shows. The actual backend work, nameservers, RDAP lookups, all the plumbing running under nic.studio, is handled by Identity Digital's systems, which registrar sources such as Porkbun confirm.

Strip away the jargon and it's three layers. The registry (Dog Beach, LLC, via Identity Digital) holds the ICANN contract and keeps the authoritative record of who owns which .studio name. Registrars, firms like Namecheap, Gandi or Porkbun, are the shops you actually buy from and manage your domain through. The registrant is just you, the person or organisation whose name is stamped on the registration. ICANN sits above the lot as the policy body the registry agreement answers to.

.studio carries no registry-level eligibility restriction. Truehost confirms this: registration is open to anyone, no residency requirement, no industry tie, no company status check. Other registrars say the same thing, which means there is no verification hoop to jump through, unlike a sponsored or restricted TLD.

The registry does impose syntax rules, though. A .studio domain has to sit between 1 and 63 characters, built from letters, numbers and hyphens, and it can't open or close with a hyphen. GoDaddy's documentation and Safenames both spell out the identical rule.

Anything past that baseline, identity checks at checkout for certain payment methods, default WHOIS privacy settings, premium-name markups, comes down to the registrar, not the registry. Premium pricing is set at the registry's own discretion, according to DNSimple. So a short or dictionary-word .studio name can carry a non-standard price tag well before you reach the ordinary registration fee.

Transfers between registrars follow the standard ICANN process used across every gTLD. You unlock the domain at the current registrar, grab the EPP authorisation code, and approve the move at the new one. A domain cannot normally be shifted within 60 days of first registration or a previous transfer, and a registrar lock (clientTransferProhibited) will also block things until the current holder removes it.

Registration terms run from 1 to 10 years, but Namecheap's own terms table shows a maximum renewal period of just 1 year. So even if you lock in a long initial term, the domain still lands on an annual renewal cycle at some registrars once that first term is up. Minimum registration and renewal periods are both 1 year.

Since .studio is a non-sponsored gTLD, it sits under ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy, which mandates a 30-day Redemption Grace Period after deletion. During that window the previous registrant can restore the name through their registrar. What the sources we checked do not give is a .studio-specific restore fee: that number is set by each registrar rather than the registry, and none of the sources reviewed here list one. If you're counting on restoring a lapsed .studio name, check your own registrar's redemption pricing rather than assuming a figure.

Registrar write-ups and industry roundups agree that .studio gets used mostly by photographers, designers, production houses and small creative agencies for portfolio sites, which fits the extension's meaning well enough. EuroDNS's roundup of creative-business extensions names anotherviision.studio as an example of a photography and audiovisual portfolio built on the extension, and Name.com's list of .studio examples includes sites such as acreativeaffair.studio. Porkbun's registrar page frames the extension around coding, editing, livestreaming and portfolio work, which matches how it gets marketed elsewhere.

None of the sources reviewed document registry-imposed HTTPS or HSTS requirements for .studio, and none flag particular spam-filter or email-deliverability problems with the extension either. Treat those as open questions to check with your own mail provider rather than settled facts. Because "studio" is a plain descriptive word, it works best as the primary domain for a name that already includes it, a photography or design business, say, rather than as a redirect target for an unrelated brand. The practical naming tip: don't repeat the word. "brightside.studio" reads better than "brightsidestudio.studio", which just duplicates the extension's own meaning back into the name.