NOM.ZA

NOM.ZA has been running, for free, paid for out of pocket, for more than 20 years.

Due to the increase in spam and attempts at destablising the system, the costs of running NOM.ZA have increased dramatically over the past few years. This cost has reached a point whereby it has become too much to cover.

In the interest to keep NOM.ZA free to register, we're trialing an ad-supported method. If this works, great! If not, we'll need to relook at how to continue to fund the project.

We know it's annoying, but considering our commitment to ensure a free sTLD, we don't see much choice.

We thank you for your understanding!

NOM.ZA has moved!

Our previous hosting provider has been sold and merged into a new service provider, and NOM.ZA needed to move. This was not an easy process, but for the most part, NOM.ZA was stable (at least from a DNS resolution perspective). We are happy in our new home and plan to stay here for as long as possible!

As you may have noticed, a few changes have been implemented to give NOM.ZA a new look. We've added some extra security features and hopefully made the registration process a lot simpler and more effecient (for example, by adding drop-downs to select previously registered contacts).

We hope you like it!

Prior to the NOM.ZA portal, domains were registered via e-mail. Records however have not been kept on these legacy domains with regard to registrant, administration or technical contacts. NOM.ZA will be deprecating these domains (removing them from the NOM.ZA zone file and making the domains available for registration again.)

This will solve two problems:

Free up unused domains
Associate domains with registrants

Any domain that does not have an associated account, will be put on hold for 6 months after which, it will be made available again for registration. If you can prove custodianship of the domain, you will be allowed to register an account and attach the domain to your account. In other words, we will keep the domain on hold for 6 months to ensure the domain is not registered by someone else. The domain will then be made available for open registration if no claims are made on the domain name.

Domains will be put on hold starting 2020 June 1. Domains will be completely freed up for open registration starting 2020 December 1. No claims on these legacy domains will be processed after 2020 November 30 23:59 UTC.

NOM.ZA has previously only secured the login page (to encrypt your username/password). We've changed things a little to ensure that all traffic is now encrypted using SSL certificates.

Sadly, this means that https://nom.za/ no longer works, as, even through it's not specifically prohibited in RFC 6125, Certificate Authorities don't want to create an SSL cert on an sTLD and browsers refuse to adhere to them. Until we can find a way to actually allow this, the annoying prefix of www will have to be used.

The NOM.ZA zone is officially signed under the .za ccTLD even though ZADNA/ZACR/DNS had not planned to do so.

The Policy and the Deployment Plan (which excluded nom.za) can be found on the ZACR Website.

A WHOIS server (compliant with RFC 3912) is now available for IPv4 clients on whois.nom.za. This service will transition to IPv6 only when the greater internet has adopted IPv6 and is no longer reliant on old technology. For a more complete WHOIS service, please use our web based WHOIS service.

The above was created to be compliant with ZA SLD General Policy dated 1 April 2015 from ZADNA

Please note that 'hostmaster' at 'nom' dot 'za' is now deprecated.

Please use 'dns-admin' at 'nom' dot 'za' in future for any queries relating to domain registration. No registrations will be accepted from/to this email.

Yes, it's been a long time coming, but we've finally launched our new registration portal.

The portal can be found by going to: Manage Domains.

Please note that you will no longer be able to use the old portal to manage your domains. So please update your details and register your existing domains on the the new platform.

NOM.ZA hereby wishes to announce the following changes, affective 1 April 2012:

Registration details may be made available in limited form on the NOM.ZA WHOIS service. By registering a domain, the Registrant grants NOM.ZA permission to display these details.

Further Fine Print: The registrant has a bona fide intention to use the domain name on a regular basis on the Internet. The Registrant is not seeking to use the domain name for any unlawful purpose, including, without limitation, injuring the reputation of a person, nor for the purpose of confusing or misleading them, whether they are natural or incorporated. The Registrant acknowledges and agrees that these conditions prevailing in the registration and the use of NOM.ZA domain names may change from time to time and that, upon thirty (30) days posting on the Internet at news, these policies may be modified or amended.

NOM.ZA is now a signed domain and part of the ISCs DNSSEC Look-aside Validation Registry. Feel free to see DNSSEC DLV for more information.

What the above means, is that zone records from NOM.ZA are trusted because they will always have a signature proving that they come from the source they say they do.

There are still more changes to come and tighter controls will be put in place to avoid abuse and ensure that NOM.ZA is kept safe and secure, while being free.

To combat spam and phishing attempts from scammers using the nom.za domain registration addresses, we have added SPF records to the NOM.ZA zone. Feel free to see RFC 4408 for more information.

The SPF mechanism is currently set to a SoftFail but will later be changed to Fail.

There are still more changes to come and tighter controls will be put in place to avoid abuse and ensure that NOM.ZA is available and kept free.

Due to the enormous amount of abuse and automated bots, we have had to change the registration form to check various parts of the registration. Javascript is now required for registration. We have updated the forms to show error messages more clearly, and trust that this will allow registrants a clearer understanding of the process.

There are more changes to come and tighter controls will be put in place to avoid abuse and ensure that NOM.ZA is available and kept free.

On February 27 NOM.ZA had an outage. Seems the old equipment finally gave in. Thanks to Posix Systems for their generosity and weekend work, we now have a new server up and running.

More good news, is that NOM.ZA is available on IPv6!! We now have the ability to register domains on both IPv4 and IPv6 stacks. Enjoy !

Due to an amazing 3891 SPAM messages received by

in 2 days, we have had no choice but to remove the e-mail registration service. A great THANK YOU to all those involved in trying to make our lives more difficult in being one of the last registries that offer free registrations!

Fear not however, as our wiley SysAdmins have created a web-based registration request system, which will take the place of the previous e-mail based registration process. The new system can be found by clicking the Registation link.

We thank (with sincerity) all those who have helped keep NOM.ZA free and fair all these years, and congratulate the few who still see the requirement for co-operation on the electronic battlefield. To the spammers, all we have left to say, is "Shame on you !"

NOM.ZA has officially been recognised as an ISPA member. Due to this, we will adhere to the ISPA Code of Conduct.

If there are any questions and or queries regarding this, please do not hestitate to contact us.

To whom it may concern,

NOM.ZA is a second-level domain under the .ZA namespace catering for such individuals who wish to register a domain for personal use and do not have the financial means to apply for other domains within the .ZA namespace. NOM.ZA is currently also run with no compensation given to those involved in it's upkeep and administration, relying on infrastructure not owned by itself.

It has, since it's inception, been a free domain with no charges whatsoever placed on the registrant, with the condition that the domain is purely for personal use and never used for financial gain.

We believe that technology should be available to ALL South Africans - even those who cannot afford it.

The current policy does not cater for such a second-level domain and would effectively disable this domain from use if it were to come into effect. As previously mentioned, NOM.ZA caters for those individuals who cannot afford a domain; By asking NOM.ZA to adhere to a payment schedule, it will be forced to close down entirely, leaving an even larger gap in the current status quo where technology and advancement is a privilege of the rich only!

Being run by individuals for individuals, NOM.ZA does not have a company profile or HR section. Introducing this would incur costs, which would effectively negate the domain and it's current operations.

This statement serves as a plea to refine the policy to mutually include second level domains that cater for those who cannot afford the luxury of extra financial burden.

Terms and Conditions are available HERE

Kind Regards,
NOM.ZA Hostmaster