Hi,
Is it necessary to set up a company structure in Taiwan to run a website with a com.tw URL?
It would use a merchant account and advertise in Taiwanese newspapers.
Or is it possible to set up in my local country (Australia).
Regards
Michael G
[quote=“mkegruber”]Hi,
Is it necessary to set up a company structure in Taiwan to run a website with a com.tw URL?[/quote]That used to be the case but I don’t believe it is now, registrars like godaddy sell com.tw domains to anyone. I went for a .com through Miltownkid, thought it might be simpler. It’s hosted in the US somewhere too.
I can confirm that is true.
But does anyone know how to get an address with chinese characters in it… with com.tw or .tw at the end?
That’d be cool.
Kenneth
Hi,
So in theory, I can set up the whole thing offshore and not have to worry about a local “physical” presence in Taiwan? Considering my market will be Taiwan?
Regards
Michael G
I believe – though things may have changed in the last couple years – that this is only done on the Mainland, and requires special nameserver upgrades to work even there (for the domain name itself, that is. You can put what you like in the latter part of the URL).
I received an ad in the mail recently for something that looks like a website name service using Chinese characters, but I can’t type them in to get the site up.
The pinyin should be "http://fung(crazy)jungwen(Chinese).com.tw
Maybe someone can try it and see?
I believe – though things may have changed in the last couple years – that this is only done on the Mainland, and requires special nameserver upgrades to work even there (for the domain name itself, that is. You can put what you like in the latter part of the URL).[/quote]
Not so - a friend got one four years ago so it’s been possible for at least that long.
Randomly whacking in characters in to the address bar, I see that www.台灣.tw, www.中文.tw, www.台灣.com and www.台語.tw are all taken. For non-.tw sites, the characters are converted into alphanumerical entities, so www.台灣.com will actually display www.xn–kpry57d.com in the address bar once the site loads. For .tw sites, the characters are correctly displayed in the address bar - this is a local hack, and not supported by the ICANN (the internet regulators).
Asiababy’s www.瘋中文.com.tw doesn’t seem to be working, but www.瘋狂中文.tw does and leads to an advertisement for the Taiwan domain authority TWNIC.
I think it’s the browser / the language settings, my Opera continues to show the Chinese names even after loading but when I try IE7 it says something about the language settings, offering me to change them (currently it’s only configured for English).
Interesting. Does this work from computers in, say, the US?
[quote=“Brendon”]Interesting. Does this work from computers in, say, the US?[/quote]Not all of them yet, I think they have to upgrade the DNS servers. Having a name in the Roman alphabet pointing at the same address would be a very wise idea, also lets people who can’t type Chinese access it.
I believe – though things may have changed in the last couple years – that this is only done on the Mainland, and requires special nameserver upgrades to work even there (for the domain name itself, that is. You can put what you like in the latter part of the URL).[/quote]
OK. My experience. I bought a Chinese domain for my school now…
I found a company with links to NJstar called unicodedn.com to host my website and although it’s a little more expensive than regular domains, it works a treat. I set it up to use domain forwarding, as I couldn’t figure out how to get the domain to display properly.
Check this to see for yourself: 狄克森.com. I will experiment changing the DNS settings later, but for now, it’s fine! I can’t get the link to work properly in forumosa. So copy and paste it!
Doesn’t work at the internet cafe I’m in (moving, no ADSL). I think it’s a browser issue – IE6 here assumes it’s not a domain name and does MSN search on it instead. Same with “www.” prefixed.
Oh! It does work in FF2.0.6… the name resolves. In non-Chinese supported browsers it resolves to number representations of each character.
Unicodedn says:
You can use either Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2, NJStar Asian Explorer or Verisign plug-in for IE 6 to resolve multilingual domain names.
Thanks for trying! In IE7, it would resolve to 狄克森.com so the address appears as
Other forms include the chinese for com… which would be nice, but it’s not widely accepted yet.
You don’t need a special hosting service or special DNS servers. You just need to find the underlying punycode representation of the domain (the code that starts with xn–) and use that. It’s what everything outside of the web browser uses. The main issue is browser support because lots of people still use IE6 which requires a plugin. All other modern browsers support IDN and now that IE7 is out it’s only a matter of time before IE6 dies out. If you want to convert to/from punycode, you can use one of the online converters such as this one:
afilias.info/cgi-bin/convert_punycode.cgi
Once you have the 䕭.com format of the domain name you can use it just like you would any other domain name.