How to Buy a .si Domain: Registrars, Prices and Rules

October 1, 2026. To buy a .si domain, search for the name at any registrar accredited by Slovenia's registry, Register.si, pay for a year, and point it at your website. Anyone in the world can register one, with no Slovenian address or company required. First-year prices start at about $11.45 to $11.99, but renewals cost more at most registrars, and two of the biggest names, Namecheap and Spaceship, did not sell .si at all when we checked today. Demand has exploded since President Trump said the US would call AI "super intelligence", or SI: Register.si counted 13,497 new .si domains in the last 24 hours, against 3,515 in the whole of August. Before you join the rush, know the catch the sellers skip: Google treats .si as Slovenia's country domain, not as a generic one like .ai.

Why everyone suddenly wants a .si domain

.si is the country code domain of Slovenia. It entered the internet's root zone in 1992 and is managed by the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES), according to IANA, through the Register.si registry. It was a quiet national domain until September. On September 19 Trump shared a poll about renaming AI, and on September 22 he told the UN General Assembly that the US would say "Super Intelligence" instead. Netcraft found that .si registrations overtook .ai in the 25 hours after the speech, and that about 52 percent of the .si names bought at Dynadot between the poll and the speech were already listed for resale. On September 29 an executive order made SI the official federal term, and registrations jumped again.

1. September 4: about 190,000 .si domains existed, based on an archive of Register.si cited by Domain Name Wire.
2. September 28: 219,000, after 4,311 registrations in 24 hours, also per Domain Name Wire.
3. October 1: 241,200, with 46,066 new domains in the last month and 13,497 in the last 24 hours, on Register.si's live counter.

The registry sounds calm about it. Spokeswoman Klara Herman told AFP there has been "a strong but stable increase" in requests since the speech, and the registry has advised holders of trademarks and company names who do not yet own a .si domain to register one as soon as possible.

Who can register a .si domain

1. Anyone, anywhere. Individuals and companies from any country can register. OVHcloud's eligibility note puts it simply: open to all natural or legal persons, without geographical restriction.
2. First come, first served. Register.si processes complete applications in the order it receives them, under section 5.2.1 of its general terms.
3. Name rules. A name must be 2 to 63 characters, cannot start or end with a hyphen, and cannot have two hyphens in the third and fourth positions. Reserved names are off limits.
4. Your promises. You confirm the name does not infringe anyone else's rights and is not contrary to law, public order or morals. Trademark owners can challenge a registration through the registry's alternative dispute resolution procedure.
5. Privacy is built in. If you register as an individual, only your email address is published in WHOIS, under section 13.3 of the general terms, which is why most registrars do not sell a privacy add-on for .si.

Where to buy a .si domain

Register.si lists 92 accredited registrars, mostly Slovenian hosting companies plus international names such as INWX, OVHcloud, Dynadot, Openprovider, Netim, Name.com and 101domain. Some retailers, including Hostinger, sell .si without being on that list. These are the one-year prices we found on October 1 on TLD-List, which compares registrars, checked against OVHcloud's own page:

Prices vary more than tenfold: Gandi listed .si at $126 for the first year. Three large registrars were not options at all. Namecheap's search returned "Unsupported TLD" for .si, Spaceship said ".si is currently unavailable", and Cloudflare Registrar does not list .si among its supported extensions. Dynadot's own search returned an error for our test name, a reminder that registrar systems strain during a rush.

How to register a .si domain, step by step

1. Check availability. Search the name on Register.si's lookup or at your chosen registrar. If a name shows up for sale on an aftermarket, someone already owns it and sets the price.
2. Choose on the renewal price, not the first year. Keeping a .si domain for five years costs about $63 at INWX's prices and about $410 at 101domain's.
3. Register with accurate details. Use a working email address: Register.si warns that failing to keep email contact with a holder can lead to the domain being deleted.
4. Point the DNS and turn on auto-renew. Renewals can cover one to five years at a time.
5. Lock a valuable name. Ask your registrar for Register.si's Registry Lock, which blocks every change except renewal until the registry verifies a written request with a phone call.
6. Know the exit. You can return a new .si domain within 16 days of registration, but only if it has not been activated, which the registry treats as the moment name servers are submitted.

What a .si domain costs compared with .ai

A .si domain is cheap because the registry is cheap. Domain Name Wire reports that Register.si charges registrars 10 euros per domain wholesale, which means September's rush brought it roughly 300,000 euros in extra revenue. Netcraft priced a .si domain at about $11 a year, against about $180 for the two-year minimum registration on Anguilla's .ai. The cost that matters more is the aftermarket: a short or obvious .si name bought by a speculator in September will be priced at whatever the seller thinks the SI hype is worth.

Is a .si domain worth it for an AI brand?

For a business that serves Slovenia, yes. For an AI startup selling in the US, UK or Australia, think twice, for three reasons:

1. Google treats .si as a Slovenian site. Google's documentation says country code domains give "a strong signal" that a site is meant for a certain country, and it publishes a short list of country codes it treats as generic. .ai, .io and .co are on that list; .si is not. A .si site can still rank elsewhere, but it starts with a geographic signal pointing at Slovenia.
2. The SI trend may not last. As Domain Name Wire put it, continued growth depends on whether anyone other than the US government starts calling AI SI. Most of the industry still says AI.
3. Typos cut both ways. S sits next to A on a QWERTY keyboard, so Netcraft warns that criminals can register .si lookalikes of .ai brands. If you own a valuable .ai name, registering the matching .si is cheap insurance against typosquatting.

If you do launch a brand on .si, how AI assistants and search engines describe you matters far more than the extension. Our AI search optimization service covers that, and our guide on getting ChatGPT to recommend your business explains what actually moves it. For the policy behind the rush, read our report on Trump's Super Intelligence order and our explainer on what super intelligence means.