To facilitate your procedures as a domain name holder, here is some key information for properly managing your internet resource.
Up-to-date contact details
Every domain name holder must be contactable and must therefore have valid and up-to-date contact details. You must therefore ensure that you can always be contacted, by email or post, throughout the lifetime of your domain name.
The mechanism offered to natural persons by Afnic for the restricted distribution of information on holders and their administrative contacts allows you to comply with this updating obligation while at the same time remaining anonymous in the Whois directory.
It is important to report, through your registrar, any change in your details as holder or administrative contact (change of postal address, telephone number or email address). You do not usually have to worry about the technical contact, which is, in principle, the registrar with which you have registered your domain name.
Most registrars regularly offer you the opportunity to fill in or update your information using an online form. Don’t overlook these alerts. The absence of valid contact information, in particular an email address that you consult regularly, may prevent you from being notified by your registrar or Afnic of the end of the validity period of your domain name, or from being informed of the existence of a dispute. Having up-to-date contact details is also an obligation embodied in Afnic’s Naming Charter, which you accepted upon registering your domain name.
Renewing a domain name
A domain name cannot be purchased. Only an exclusive right of use is granted to you, for a defined period. In France, for the .fr, .re, .yt, .pm, .wf and .tf TLDs, this can be a renewal period of one to ten years, at your choice. Just like registration, renewal is carried out with your registrar and in accordance with the registrar’s procedures. It is therefore essential to contact your registrar before the expiry date of your domain name and to take the necessary steps to retain its use.
If your registrar has not heard from you at the time of expiry, it will send Afnic a request for deletion of the domain name.
Take the opportunity to also check the accuracy of your contact details and the administrative information registered in the Whois directory.
Life cycle of a .fr domain name
Assignment or transfer of a domain name
You can transfer your .fr, .re, .yt, .pm, .wf or .tf domain name to any other person eligible to register a domain name under these TLDs.
The request for transfer must be made to your registrar and requires your approval. Contact your registrar to ask about the procedure to be followed.
Deleting a domain name
The purpose of deletion is to bring about the ‘disappearance’ of the domain name itself, not of the internet resources to which it provides access via the DNS service. In order to relinquish your rights of use to a .fr, .re, .yt, .pm, .wf or .tf domain name, you must apply to Afnic through the intermediary of your registrar. Afnic will grant such requests, which do not require justification, free of charge, providing no request for a change of registrar, technical update or transfer of the domain name is already in progress.
When you delete a domain name, you lose your exclusive right to use it. This right becomes available once again and can be reassigned to any eligible party requesting it after a 30-day Redemption Grace Period.
As soon as your request is registered, we update the Whois directory indicating the period at the end of which the deletion will be considered definitive.
During this period, no request for registration from another holder or registrar will be accepted. The holder requesting deletion may, however, request, through the intermediary of his/her/its registrar, that the procedure be cancelled. Once this period has elapsed, the deletion becomes definitive and irreversible.
Changing registrar
You can change registrar at any time. However, make sure to check the contract with your current registrar and the transfer conditions. In practice, the contractual clauses do not prohibit you from changing registrar, but they do specify that you forfeit the amount of the fees that the registrar generally asks you to pay in advance and for the entire duration of the contract.
To make this change, several technical and administrative steps must be taken:
- Notify your current registrar of your request
- Choose a new registrar from among those appearing in the list of registrars under contract with Afnic for the domain names .fr, .re, .yt, .pm, .wf and .tf
- Make a transfer request to the chosen registrar. Note that this service is generally charged for and often associated with other services, such as hosting.
- Provide the new registrar with the secret AUTH_INFO code associated with your domain name. It can generally be found in the online management interface of your account provided by your current registrar. If not, the current registrar is obliged to provide you with it.
On receipt of your request, the AUTH_INFO code and your payment, your new registrar will send Afnic an official request for transfer. Only the new registrar can do this. In response, we will send your original registrar a notification of change. In theory, the current registrar has eight days in which to give its agreement to the transfer or to object to it and so obtain an additional non-renewable period of 22 days. But it can also accept the request automatically immediately on receipt. Once the eight-day period has elapsed without a response from the current registrar, the domain name is automatically transferred to your new registrar. The transfer transaction is invoiced by Afnic to your new registrar. It also has the effect of changing the expiry date of your domain name. Once completed, the change of registrar is immediately visible in the Whois directory.
If you transfer a domain name associated with one or more active internet resources (such as a website or an email address) and at the same time change your hosting, take account of the time it takes to propagate the change. The change needs to be propagated to all domain name servers (DNS) likely to redirect internet users’ queries. This operation consists in indicating to all DNS servers who has the authority to return the IP address of the server corresponding to the resource requested. This may take several days, the more so as the local cache records used by ISPs to accelerate navigation must also be updated. For domain names managed by Afnic, the entire process is completed in around ten hours on average. During this period, the previous registrar must retain the information allowing access to your resources.
DOA (Afnic Operation Request)
In case of a forced transmission of a domain name or the voluntary transmission of a term subject to prior review, it is necessary to download and fill out a DOA form (Afnic Operation Request) and send it to your registrar.