This weekend I discovered Kenya sells “co.ke” domains. Obviously the only thing to do was register “diet.co.ke”, and put up a fun little landing page!

diet.co.ke

diet.co.ke’s code is open source, and someone has already submitted a PR fixing a few UI bugs. I’m not intending to make it anything more than the current little animation, short and sweet:

Warnings

For anyone else starting a similar project, a few warnings:

Buy directly

Most registrars will charge unreasonable amounts for a .co.ke domain. For example, OnlyDomains charges $35 to purchase, and $70 to renew. 101Domain charges $58 to purchase, and $72 to renew. So, it must be an expensive domain to buy right?

Nope. It’s 1200 Kenyan shillings from a Kenyan registrar, this is around $9. After taxes etc the domain cost me $11, I have no idea how registrars can justify charging 5x the actual cost!

Kenyan registrar

The .co.ke registrar (at least, the “webhost kenya” one I found) is… not perfect. It took 18 hours after paying for the domain to actually gain access to it, and nameservers / DNS changes have been extremely slow. I’m still waiting for some final propagations 48 hours later, although that isn’t entirely the registrar’s fault!

Updating nameservers and other changes were a little confusing, with things like success messages showing where they shouldn’t:

Whilst writing this article the management site also appears to have gone down completely for a bit, not what you want from the place that controls your domain:

Cloudflare

Cloudflare don’t support .co.ke domain registrations. You can still use Cloudflare, but the domain can’t be transferred to them:

Conclusion

No real conclusion, except I hope you like diet.co.ke!