Getting an Argentina Website / Registering a .com.ar Domain

If you plan on selling your product or service in Argentina, it may help to have a website. If you already have a website in English, one choice would be to simply make a Spanish version. However, a smarter option would be to get an Argentina domain name and custom-tailor the site for the Argentina market.

The first step is to get a domain name in Argentina. Don't be fooled by VeriSign, Register.com, and the other US-based registrars who will try to charge as much as $50 per year for a foreign domain name. You can register as many Argentina domain names as you want for free directly with the Argentina Network Information Center. Even if you don't plan on actually using the domain name for several years, it would be helpful to reserve it now to prevent any other organization or person from taking the name.

Since domains are free in Argentina, there are a lot of people out there who will take all the domains they can get, hoping that one day you will have to pay them a large sum of money to buy the domain from them. By registering the domain yourself first, you can avoid all that hassle. Your ISP will need to configure their DNS servers to host the domain for you. If you don't have an ISP that will do this for you or you don't know how, allow me to plug my own firm, GeoDesign.

For a very small one-time fee, I will gladly host your domain on our DNS servers until you are ready to make use of it. We can either redirect it to your normal website or just have it pop-up an "Under Construction" page, whatever you prefer. We hope you'll consider us some day when you decide to create a site for the local market. I'm the only gringo (or yanqui, as they say in Argentina) here; everyone else at GeoDesign is a native porteño, so we have an excellent knowledge of the local market and how to connect with the Argentine people.

We'd also be happy to actually complete the registration process for you, if you don't want to deal with the Spanish web-forms that are on the Argentina NIC website.