.uz domain: how to register it and why you need one

A domain is the address people find you at. Hosting is the server the site itself sits on. They are two separate purchases, paid separately: the domain once a year, the hosting for whatever term you choose. WHY .UZ IN PARTICULAR Local trust. Someone in Tashkent choosing between dukon.uz and dukon-tashkent.something will almost always pick the first. A national zone reads as "this is a local company, it can be found", even when the buyer could not say why. Local search. Search engines treat the domain zone as one signal of which country a site is meant for. For a business selling only inside Uzbekistan, that counts in your favour. Protecting the name. A domain goes to whoever asks first. If your brand is already known offline, take the name in .uz before someone else does — buying it back afterwards is more expensive and not always possible. When .uz is the wrong choice. If you sell outside the country or build an international product, a national zone narrows your audience. Look at .com instead. Nothing stops you taking both and redirecting one to the other. WHICH ZONES EXIST Besides .uz itself there are com.uz, net.uz, org.uz and co.uz. Technically they are equal — the difference is only in how they read. A short .uz looks the most solid; com.uz is familiar for commerce; org.uz suits non-profits. At Orax all of these cost the same: $2.68 a year. HOW TO CHOOSE A NAME Say it out loud over the phone. If the other person has to ask again or spell it back, the name is bad. That is the main test and it eliminates most poor candidates. Be careful with transliteration. Uzbek words are written in Latin script more than one way — oʻ, o', o. People will type the simplest version. Either take a name without contested letters, or register several spellings and redirect them to the main one. Avoid hyphens and digits. "Sayt-24.uz" becomes "sayt hyphen twenty four dot uz" in conversation, and half your listeners will type it wrong. Check the name is not someone's trademark. A domain gives you no rights to another company's brand, and you will lose that dispute regardless of who registered first. HOW REGISTRATION WORKS AT ORAX Step one: the check. Enter the name in the Domains section — we ask a real WHOIS server rather than a cached list, so the answer reflects reality at the moment you asked. Step two: order and pay. The domain is paid from your Orax balance, which you top up through Payme, Click, Uzum, Paynet and the other usual methods. Step three: registration. The request comes to us and we handle the registration in the zone ourselves. It is not instant: the registry wants the owner's details and the paperwork takes time. We write to you once the domain is yours. What you will need. The registrant's details, personal or corporate. Some zones ask for those details to be confirmed. If something is missing, we ask before taking the money, not after. CONNECTING THE DOMAIN TO HOSTING A domain on its own leads nowhere — it has to be told which server serves the site. That is done with DNS records. If the hosting is also at Orax, it is all done from one cabinet: the service page has a ready-made setting that points the domain and its www form at your server in one click. There is a separate preset for mail — SPF and DMARC, so messages from your domain do not land in spam. If the hosting is elsewhere, enter that provider's nameservers or an A record. Changes do not spread across the internet instantly: usually a few hours, sometimes up to a day. While they spread, some visitors see the old site and some the new one — this is normal and passes by itself. ABOUT RENEWAL, AND WHY IT MATTERS MORE THAN IT SEEMS Losing a domain is worse than losing hosting. Hosting can be bought again and the site restored from a backup. A domain that falls free can be taken by anyone, and you will not get it back — at any price, if the new owner does not want to sell. So: take it for at least a year and switch on auto-renewal. And keep money on the balance when the date comes — auto-renewal without funds saves nobody. We warn you in advance, but the last word is yours. IF THE DOMAIN IS ALREADY WITH ANOTHER PROVIDER You do not have to move it. Pointing records at our server from your current registrar is enough — the site runs on Orax hosting while the domain stays registered where it is. Transferring makes sense when you want everything renewing from one place. You can check whether a name is free in the Domains section.