tl;dr
Depending on where you live in the United States, you can get a domain name like blahblah.city.state.us (e.g. frederick.seattle.wa.us) for free. All of this costs nothing: first, get DNS nameservers from Amazon Lightsail, send the Interim .US Domain Template to the delegated manager for your locality, then point DNS entries at your webhost (or whatever you want to use it for).
What’s a locality domain?
A locality domain is a domain name that’s associated with a location in the United States, such as frederick.seattle.wa.us (which currently redirects to fredchan.org). Locality domains were first created in 1992, and the infrastructure has been maintained under government contract ever since.
To register one, you have to be a US citizen or permanent resident, an organization incorporated in the US, or an organization with a bona fide presence in the US that regularly engages in lawful activities or has an office in the US. (For the full verbiage, see the bottom of this form).
Step 1: Choose a locality domain
Registration of many locality domains have been delegated to various companies who actually handle the domain registration. See the list of delegated subdomains for domains you can register under, which also has the contact e-mail for the corresponding registrar as of 2009.
Since this list is quite old and some companies may have restructured/renamed, you may have to hunt for an e-mail for the current incarnation of the registrar. For example, the e-mail listed for seattle.wa.us is domainrq@nwnexus.com belonging to NW Nexus, which is now NuOz Corporation, so the e-mail I contacted was support@nuoz.com.
If you do not live in one of these localities, you can try registering a domain under gen.your-state.us, like next.gen.oh.us, which is officially for general independent entities. The contact should be in the same list.
If the locality domain you’re looking for isn’t on the list (i.e. registration has not been delegated), you’re probably screwed. The manager of all undelegated domains, NeuStar, will only allow local government agencies to register them due to government policy. This is supposed to be temporary, but the policy has remained since 2002.
Step 2: Acquire nameservers
When you get a normal domain, like fredchan.org, your domain registrar usually provides nameservers for you after you buy. These nameservers are where you put DNS records that point your domain to an IP address, like your web host’s IP address. However, in order to register a locality domain, you need to already have nameservers.
The only place I could find that provides free nameservers for non-top level domains (e.g. every locality domain) is Amazon Lightsail. Lightsail is Amazon’s low cost AWS web hosting service. You’re normally supposed to rent a web hosting server from them, but you don’t actually need to do that.
- Create an AWS account and go to the Lightsail console.
- On the left navigation panel, click
Domains & DNS. - Click the
Create DNS zonebutton. - Select
Use a domain from another registrarand type in the domain you intend to register later. - Click
Create DNS zone. - Take note of the domain names in the
Name serverssection. You need these when you fill out the domain registration form.
Step 3: Fill out the domain registration form
Now that you have name servers, you can fill out the Interim .US Domain Template v2.0. In this section, I’ll walk you through some of the trickier parts of this form, assuming you are registering a domain for yourself.
2. FULLY-QUALIFIED DOMAIN NAME:
This is the domain you want to register, e.g. frederick.seattle.wa.us.
3. ORGANIZATION INFORMATION
If you are a human being and not an organization, you can fill out sections 3a-e with your own address.
4. DESCRIPTION OF ORGANIZATION/DOMAIN:
Describe what you’re doing with this domain. For example, if you expect to host a website on it, you can say that. You can use it for purposes that you don’t write in the form later on as well.
5. Date Operational......:
You can use your birth date here.
6. ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT OF ORGANIZATION/DOMAIN and 7. TECHNICAL AND ZONE CONTACT
Both of these can be you. 6i, 7i, and 7j can all be your e-mail address, and if you don’t have a fax number, leave 7k blank.
8. PRIMARY SERVER: HOSTNAME, NETADDRESS and 9. SECONDARY SERVER: HOSTNAME, NETADDRESS
This is where you fill in your name server addresses.
Lightsail will have given you at least 2-4 name server addresses, of which you need to know the IP address of each. You can use an online DNS lookup tool to find their IP addresses or the dig command in your terminal.
Any of the nameservers can be the primary server. Then, for the rest of the servers, you can repeat section 9 as many times as you need until you’ve added all the nameservers.
10. US NEXUS REQUIREMENTS
Instructions for section 10 appear at the bottom of the form. For instance, if the domain is for personal use and you are a US Citizen, your application purpose is (iii) personal use, your Nexus Category is (category 11) Natural person who is a United States Citizen, and you leave Nexus Validator blank.
Step 4: Send the form and wait
Send the form to the domain registrar you identified before for your locality domain. When registering, I wrote “I’d like to register a new locality domain with the following information” and pasted the entire form contents into the e-mail, so they know what the form is for.
This can take days or possibly weeks, since they’re not usually automated. If successful, you’ll get an e-mail confirming that your domain has been registered.
Step 5: Finish setting up DNS in Lightsail
You can now go back to the DNS zone you created in Lightsail, and in the DNS records tab, create DNS records to point your domain to whatever server you want― web servers, Minecraft servers, FTP servers… anything!
For free web hosting, I use GitHub Pages, which has a guide to configuring custom domains. Different web hosts will have slightly different instructions, but they will all involve creating DNS records.
Once your DNS records are configured, you should be able to visit your new locality domain and see your website!
FAQ
Do I actually have to live in my locality domain’s area?
I’m not really sure. Honestly, I doubt anyone cares enough to actually check that you live at the address you supply in the registration form. I know someone who used to live in their locality, moved out of the country, and still has their locality domain. However, your mileage may vary.
Will WHOIS requests leak my address?
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
Special thanks
Big thanks goes to sleepless and Minh Nguyen for their guides on registering locality domains. After seeing their guides, I wanted to write my own that would clarify some of the questions I had while following them, which led to the creation of this article!