Why .io is popular
.io became the technology sector's default second choice for an obvious reason: two letters that read as input/output to exactly the audience developer products are sold to, and an inventory where short, memorable names were still available long after .com's had gone. It is a genuinely good extension for a product, an API or a developer tool.
It is also a country-code TLD rather than a generic one, and that distinction is more than trivia. Country-code registries set their own policies. ICANN's gTLD consensus policies — the 60-day transfer lock, the standard expiry sequence, the uniform dispute resolution procedure — do not automatically apply to .io the way they do to .com. In practice Identity Digital, which owns the registry operator, runs .io close to industry norms, but 'close to' is not 'identical', so ask us rather than assuming.
The Chagos question, stated plainly
The 'IO' in .io is the ISO country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory. In 2025 the United Kingdom and Mauritius signed a treaty transferring sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. If the underlying country code is eventually withdrawn, the country-code TLD attached to it would in principle be subject to retirement.
What is actually true today: nothing has changed for .io registrations. Names resolve, register, renew and transfer exactly as before. IANA's established process for retiring a country-code TLD runs over a phase-out of at least five years, and there is precedent for codes persisting long after the political facts that created them — anything beyond that is speculation, and we are not going to speculate at you on a page where we are also asking for money.
Our position is simply that you should know. For a product with a normal commercial horizon this is not a reason to avoid .io. For a name you intend to be the permanent identity of an institution, a gTLD is the more conservative choice, and holding the matching .com alongside your .io costs little and keeps the option open.
Pricing and renewal
.io has always been priced above .com at wholesale, and the renewal is not a discounted introductory rate that jumps later — what you see above for renewal is what renewal costs. All four operations are priced live from the same engine that charges your cart.
The restore price deserves a look before you need it. Recovering a .io from redemption is expensive across the industry, and the redemption period is the point at which the name has already stopped resolving. Multi-year registration and a billing contact somebody actually reads are the two things that reliably prevent this.
