Registration costs

There is currently no charge for eligible institutions to register or renew an AC.ZA domain.

TENET absorbs the costs of operating the AC.ZA Registry as a public service to the higher education community in South Africa, and has done so for over twenty years. The costs of maintaining the Registry are subsidised by other services we operate, and many registrants are beneficiaries of those services. Indeed, operating higher-education-specific DNS registries or registrars is within the remit of most national education and research networks worldwide, and few charge for the service.

Could charges be introduced?

It is possible that we may introduce a nominal registration and/or renewal charge in future. Such charges would not be in an attempt to recover the costs of operating the service (given the limited number of registrations and closed target market, proper cost recovery would probably make the AC.ZA domain unaffordable). Instead, it would likely happen in one of three circumstances:

  • If the statutory regulator (ZADNA ) instituted a fee on non-commercial moderated domains as they currently do for commercial, unmoderated domains like CO.ZA or ORG.ZA;
  • As the only workable means of enforcing the requirement to keep up-to-date contact information, particularly if this becomes a statutory obligation ; or
  • If the administrative and reporting burden associated with operating the domain increased excessively.

Changes such as this could not happen without notice or consultation, since they would involve amending the Charter for AC.ZA . As far as possible within the regulatory framework, TENET would also try to ensure that no charge was applied retrospectively and that there were adequate transitional mechanisms.

Why do domains have a Registry Expiry Date set?

At present most AC.ZA domains renew automatically on the anniversary of their registration, and do not require any specific action to make this happen. In that sense, they do not expire unless we’ve explicitly told the Registrant this will happen (as is sometimes the case with provisional registrations where eligibility is not yet confirmed, or where a domain is being discontinued).

The ICANN-compliant registry data model we use requires a Registry Expiry Date be set. As this has no real meaning for most AC.ZA domains, we could simply set this for a very long time in the future (e.g. 2100/01/01). That would make the intent semantically clearer, at the expense of constraining us in future.

Future changes in policy may require specific actions to be taken on the anniversary of a registration. These might include an annual renewal charge per above, but may also include non-cost requirements such as annual confirmation of WHOIS data or continued eligibility. Either way, having a fixed date on which such actions happen would make things easier for Registrants, and spreading those dates through the year helps us.

For that reason, we’ve opted to set all AC.ZA domains to have annual renewal with automatic renewal enabled. This allows us the greatest flexibility to introduce changes in the future if they’re required.