Contacts

A contact is the person or organisation behind a domain name. Every domain has four contact roles, and registries publish some of this data. Contacts are addressed by a handle code — a short identifier you can reuse across many domains.

The four roles

Value	Name	Who this is
1	Registrant	The legal owner of the domain. The most important role — ownership disputes and transfer approvals go to this contact.
0	Admin	The administrative contact, authorised to make changes.
3	Tech	The technical contact, for DNS and operational matters.
2	Billing	The billing contact.

You can use one contact for all four roles

Most resellers do. The registry requires four roles to be filled, not four different people. Where you send contact details inline, we fill the remaining roles for you — see Registering with contact details.

Handle codes

A handle code looks like this:

D-174829301847

• Always starts with D-.
• You will also see a role-scoped form such as D-R-1748293018. We create these automatically when one domain’s contact has to diverge from the others. Treat any handle as an opaque string — do not parse it.
• Maximum 20 characters.
• A handle belongs to your account. Another reseller’s handle is invisible to you.
• A handle can back all four roles on one domain, and can be shared across many domains.

Sharing a handle across domains has consequences

Updating a shared handle updates the contact on every domain using it, and each of those domains goes to its registry. That is usually what you want — one address change, everywhere. But if you need one domain to differ, give it its own handle instead of editing the shared one.

Contact field reference

These rules apply everywhere you send a contact — creating one, updating one, or registering a domain with contact details inline. Read this once; the endpoints below will not repeat it.

Field	Required	Max	Rules and what we do to your value
firstName	required	80	Letters, spaces, . and , only. Anything else is removed silently, and what remains must be at least 2 characters. "John99" becomes "John"; "99" becomes empty and is rejected.
lastName	required	80	Same rule as firstName.
companyName	optional	256	Letters, digits, spaces and .,'&()/- survive; other characters are removed. If you leave it empty we set it to “firstName lastName”. For an individual registrant, simply omit it.
eMail	required	256	Must be a deliverable address — see the warning below.
address	required	256	Letters, digits, spaces and .,:/#()- survive. Line breaks, tabs and runs of spaces collapse to one space. Minimum 4 characters. Send the street address on one line.
city	required	80	Letters, digits and spaces only. Minimum 2.
state	required	80	Same rule as city. If your country has no states, repeat the city. It cannot be empty.
postalCode	required	15	Letters, digits and spaces only. Minimum 2.
country	required	2	ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, uppercase. "TR", "US", "GB", "DE". Not the country name, not a three-letter code. See the warning below.
phoneCountryCode	required	3	Digits only. No + sign. "90" is correct; "+90" is rejected.
phone	required	16	Minimum 5 digits. We normalise it — see below.
fax, faxCountryCode	optional	15 / 3	Digits only. If either is invalid we clear both rather than failing your request. Omit them entirely unless you have a real fax number.
discloseFlag	optional	—	Omit it. Leaving it out means “do not touch WHOIS disclosure”. Only send true/false if you are deliberately setting disclosure at creation time. It is ignored when updating a contact — use domain privacy instead.
contactType	varies	—	Required in some places, absent in others. Each endpoint states it.

Always validate country before you send it

The country field must be a valid ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code. A value we do not recognise is not guaranteed to be stored as you submitted it, and an incorrect country reaches the registry’s public records. Validate against the ISO2 list in your own code — do not rely on the API to reject a bad value here. Common mistakes: "Turkey", "TUR", "turkey", "UK" (the correct code for the United Kingdom is GB).

The e-mail address must be real and monitored

This is the single most consequential field in the whole API. For most domain extensions, the registrant’s e-mail address has to be verified by clicking a link. If nobody clicks it within 15 days, the domain is suspended and stops resolving. Never use a placeholder, a no-reply address, or an address the customer does not read. See Contact verification.

Phone number format

We accept most formats and normalise them. The steps, in order: strip everything that is not a digit; remove the country code if the number repeats it; remove a single leading zero.

All four of these arrive as country code 90, number 5321234567:

"+90 (532) 123 45 67"
"0532 123 45 67"
"905321234567"
"5321234567"

The registry receives +90.5321234567. The one thing you must get right is keeping the + out of phoneCountryCode.