Can You Have Periods in Domain Names?

Conventional domain names begin with "www."Fotolia.com"> The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) manages generic and country code top-level domain names. The parts of a domain name include "www" (World Wide Web), your registered domain name and then either the two (e.g., .ca, .uk, .au) or three-letter generic (e.g., .com, .net, .org) name.

Conventional Domain NamesDomain names can only consist of ASCII letters, digits and hyphens, according to ICANN. The only acceptable use of periods are preceding or following the domain name. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) consists of the basic Latin alphabet along with the European-Arabic digits. These domain names are referred to as "LDH-labels," which stands for letters, digits and hyphens.International Domain NamesInternational Domain Names (IDN) were introduced so that languages that use non-Latin-based alphabets or digits could be used. The acceptable characters for these domain names use the Unicode character set. You can only use an IDN, however, if the domain name server includes an ASCII form of the domain name as well.Other RestrictionsAlthough domain names can include hyphens, they should not begin with one. Domain names should also be less than 63 characters in most cases. Some domain names have shorter length restrictions so check before you try to register your domain name. It is recommended that you do not exceed 26 characters, not including the two or three-letter extension, as some browsers do not support them well. References ICANN: Glossary ICANN: IDN Basics Register: General Extensions