ds

.net.za

Country-code top-level domain for South Africa — names are registered at the third level, under .za

WHOIS

Register
—first year
Renew
—a year
Transfer
—to move it
Registrars
—quoting it
Lookup
WHOISanswers for it
DNSSEC
Signed1 DS record in the root
Level
Thirdmybrand.net.za

Check a name

One command, straight against the registry — no account, no page to load.

Fills the command and the registrar links below in with your own name. The page is static — nothing is looked up here, and nothing you type leaves the browser.

ds mybrand --tld net.za

Add --where for the registrars and the registry's rules, --registry for the server that answered, or --all-info for everything at once.

What it costs

No registrar in the price table bundled with ds quotes .net.za, so the CLI prints no figure beside it — one of 927 such TLDs. That is a gap in the table as often as it is a TLD nobody sells. See Prices for supplying your own table with --pricing-file.

Who can register

No eligibility rule is on file for .net.za, which is not the same as a promise that it is open: the list is hand-maintained and covers the restricted TLDs a registrar is likely to offer you. Check the registry's own page before counting on a name. 81 TLDs do carry a rule — see Who can register.

How ds answers for it

RDAP first, WHOIS second — the same order for every TLD. .net.za has no RDAP service, so the answer comes from WHOIS text on port 43.

WHOIS
net-whois.registry.net.zaQueried on port 43, from the bundled whois.json. The name is called free when the reply contains Available — text matching, which is why RDAP is preferred where it exists.

ds mybrand --tld net.za --registry prints whichever of these answered. If a bundled WHOIS host has gone stale, IANA is asked who serves .net.za today. See Accuracy notes.

The registry

From IANA's delegation record for .za — .net.za is a zone under it, so the registry, the servers and the dates below are .za's. .net.za is a country-code TLD.

Run by
ZA Domain Name AuthorityBased in South Africa. Delegated 1990-11-07, record last updated 2025-04-16.
Registry site
www.zadna.org.zaWhere the registry documents .za — its rules, its accredited registrars, and any launch phases. Not a shop: registries sell wholesale to registrars, not to you.
Name servers
nsza.is.co.zaza-ns.anycast.pch.netza1.dnsnode.netThe 3 authoritative servers for the .za zone — what the root delegates to. Nothing ds queries directly; they are what makes a registered name resolve.

What it is

Derived from the root zone and ICANN's registry list — each one is a fact with a source.

  • country-code IANA Root Zone Database types it "country-code"

In the root zone

The delegation itself, read out of the root zone — serial 2026090900, on 2026-09-09. The registry section above is IANA's record of what .za was delegated to; this is what the root actually answers with when a resolver asks it where .za lives. .net.za is not in the root zone — nothing below the top level is. It resolves because .za does, on .za's servers.

Delegated to
  • za1.dnsnode.net194.146.106.782001:67c:1010:19::53
  • nsza.is.co.za196.4.160.27
  • za-ns.anycast.pch.net204.61.216.552001:500:14:6055:ad::1
The 3 name servers the root hands out for .za, with the glue addresses that come with them — 2 of them answer over IPv6. None of this is what ds queries: these servers know which names exist, not who registered them.
DNSSEC
Signed — 1 DS record in the root
  • key 45749RSA/SHA-256 · SHA-2563E2B0B7E6063CA11400FA4B54D8A530888234CD0EB3B5FBF820C0750784DA84E
Each one is a fingerprint of .za's own signing key, published by the root and signed with the root's key — which is how a resolver that trusts only one key can prove an answer under .net.za came from its registry and was not tampered with in transit. It says nothing about who owns a name or whether one is free.

Ask the root yourself — no registry involved, and the same records this section was built from: dig +norec @a.root-servers.net za. NS and dig +norec @a.root-servers.net za. DS.