What .ch actually is
The .ch registry is operated by Switch, the foundation that has run Swiss academic networking since the 1980s, under a mandate from the Federal Office of Communications. That matters more than it sounds: the extension is governed by Swiss law through the Ordinance on Internet Domains rather than by an ICANN registry agreement, so several rules people assume are universal simply do not apply here.
The most useful difference is the term. Most extensions sell you a registration that expires on a fixed date. At the .ch registry the registration itself has no end date — it runs until it is deleted or transferred. Registrars, including us, bill it annually and delete it if the bill goes unpaid, which produces the same experience from the outside, but it explains why .ch has no 45-day auto-renew grace and no redemption period in the gTLD sense.
Who can register one
Anyone. This is the single most common misconception about .ch, and it costs people time: there is no requirement to be resident in Switzerland, to hold a Swiss passport, or to be entered in the commercial register. Foreign companies register .ch names every day without an intermediary and without a trustee service.
The one condition worth reading is conditional rather than upfront. Where a Swiss authority acting within its competence asks, the registry will require a holder who has no valid Swiss correspondence address to designate one within 30 days. In practice this is used against abusive registrations, not against ordinary businesses, but it is a real term of the registry's general conditions and we would rather you heard it from us.
Renewal, and the thing that actually loses people domains
Registration and renewal are priced separately and both are shown above, live, before you commit. We show renewal on the same screen as registration on purpose: the standard trick in this industry is a first year at a headline price followed by a renewal at several times that, and a price you only discover twelve months later is not a price you agreed to.
If a .ch name is deleted — because a renewal was not paid, or because it was deleted deliberately — a 40-day transition period follows. During those 40 days no third party can register the name and your registrar can restore it for you on request. This window is more forgiving than the gTLD redemption process and it does not carry the punitive restore fee that .com does, but it is finite. Keep the billing contact on an address somebody reads.
