Whois

What is WHOIS?

WHOIS (“Who is who”) is a web service which allows you to find out who the holder of an Internet domain name is. This service also allows you to check whether the Internet domain name you want to register for yourself or for your company is available.

You can check whether a local domain name, with the .rs extension, is available or find out who has already registered it via the WHOIS service, on the RNIDS website. This WHOIS database is publicly accessible and contains information on the holders of .rs domain names registered within the rsTLD registry, which is the central .rs domain name database managed by RNIDS.

Useful notes:

Bear in mind that domain names (at least for now) cannot contain Serbian letters (š, č, ć, đ, ž) or punctuation marks (except hyphens -). A .rs domain name can contain numbers (0-9), letters of the English alphabet (a-z) and hyphens (-). Domain names cannot begin or end in a hyphen (-) and cannot have two consecutive hyphens. No distinction is made between lower and uppercase which means it does not matter whether you type a website address in small or capital letters.

Domain names must have at least two characters and a maximum of 63. However, a very long domain name is not practical because it is difficult to remember and mistakes are very likely to be made when typing in the domain name. It is generally accepted that domain names need be no longer than 20 characters.

You can check whether an international domain name is available or has already been registered on the InterNIC website, at www.internic.net/whois.html.

An advantage of the .rs domain is the availability of a large number of potentially interesting terms snapped up long ago under international domain extensions (.com, .org, .net, etc.). By choosing a .rs domain, you are geographically defining the territory at which your website is primarily aimed. This is important for Internet search engines, such as Google, when a user searches specifically for a website with content from Serbia.