GUIDELINES FOR CHOOSING A DOMAIN NAME

                          For Top Level Domain Names 

COM, .NET and .ORG Domain Names


.COM - to be used for commercial and personal sites 

.ORG - recommended for not-for-profit organizations 

.NET - recommended for companies involved in Internet infrastructure 

.EDU - educational institution 

.MIL - military 

.GOV - government agency 

     Use only letters, numbers, or dash ("-") 

 Note: .com, .net and .org domain names exceeding a total of 26 characters are supported by most web browsers. However, certain web browsers, email
 programs, and other Internet related applications may not support domain names over 26 characters. Shasta Marketing's servers so support the long
names. 

   The following rules apply for .com; .net; .org: 

 The only valid characters are letters (A-Z), numbers (0-9), and the hyphen "-"

 Single letter names are not allowed (eg. "x.com")

  No spaces are allowed between letters

  Domain names cannot be more than 67 characters including the "dot" and 3 character extension

  Valid extensions are: .com, .net, .org

 Domain names cannot include spaces

 Domain names are not case sensitive


  Who can register a .COM, .NET and .ORG domain name? 

 Guidelines for which types of entities should register in each of the three TLDs were provided in RFC 1591. It was suggested that .COM be used primarily
for commercial businesses, .NET for network related organizations and .ORG for nonprofit groups. In addition, the guidelines recommended .EDU for
4-year degree granting institutions and .GOV for United States government agencies.

 NSI originally tried to follow these guidelines as closely as possible. This required manual processing of all requests to identify the type of organization
requesting each name. This worked fine when the registration request volume was small, but it became an operational and customer service problem as
requests began to rapidly increase. This first happened in the .COM TLD and later in the .NET and .ORG TLDs.

 The manual process not only resulted in slow customer service, but also created several other problems. Registrants, who were dishonest in describing their
organization type, were rewarded with a registration while those who honestly reported their type of organization were denied if they did not meet RFC
1591 guidelines. Also, it became increasingly difficult to clearly define what a network or nonprofit organization was. The definition of Internet Service
 Provider (ISP), which was initially one category that qualified a company for a .NET name, became increasingly blurred. And the definition of nonprofit was
 complicated by the international nature of the Internet. Moreover, to implement processes to reliably validate organization types would have been extremely
costly and still not fool proof.

 Consequently, in the case of .COM, .NET and .ORG, a decision was made to rely on registrants to choose the TLD. So NSI does not presently screen
applications for organization type in the .COM, .NET or .ORG TLDs. They are still screened by NSI in the .EDU category and by the General Services
 Administration in the .GOV category.