GoKawiilPublished on 27 May 2025
tl;dr
In the US, can get a domain name like somename.city.state.us for free. If your town has its own domain, you can get nameservers from Amazon Lightsail, send the Interim .US Domain Template to the delegated manager for your locality to register one, then point DNS entries at your webhost.
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 must 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 need to hunt for an e-mail for the current incarnation of the registrar. For example, the e-mail listed for seattle.wa.us is [email protected] belonging to NW Nexus, which is now NuOz Corporation, so the e-mail I contacted was [email protected] .
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.
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