The .su domain is the country-code top-level domain assigned to the Soviet Union on 19 September 1990. The USSR dissolved a year later, but the zone stayed in the DNS root. Today .su is run by the Russian registry ROSNIIROS, belongs to Russia's national domain space and still accepts new registrations through accredited registrars.
What .su stands for and which country it belongs to
Country-code TLDs are derived from the two-letter codes in ISO 3166. SU was the code for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, SU was not deleted outright: it sits in ISO 3166 with the status "exceptionally reserved". That status is the technical reason the domain is still alive, because the root zone follows ISO 3166 when deciding which country codes exist.
In practice the zone is Russian. The IANA root zone database lists ROSNIIROS in Moscow as the sponsoring organisation and the Technical Center of Internet (TCI), the operator behind .ru and .рф, as the technical contact. Russian regulation treats .su, .ru and .рф together as the national domain zone.
A .su address says nothing definitive about where a site is based. The zone has long been used by Russian-speaking projects abroad, retro and Soviet-themed brands, and companies that simply found a short name free. Judge a site by its owner, hosting and content, not by its suffix.
A short history: how a Soviet domain outlived the Soviet Union
The timeline below follows the registry's own history page and its announcements.
- 1990 — the Soviet UNIX Users Group (SUUG) registers SU with InterNIC on 19 September.
- 1993 — administration passes to the newly created ROSNIIROS.
- 1994 — .ru is delegated; new second-level registrations in .su are halted and the zone is expected to be retired, as .cs (Czechoslovakia) and .yu (Yugoslavia) later were.
- 2001 — an attempt to reopen registrations starts at a price of USD 15,000 per name to deter cybersquatters, drops to USD 100, and is suspended again. Around the same time a group of Russian ISPs asks ICANN to mark .su for retirement; nothing comes of it.
- 2002–2003 — a trademark sunrise opens on 15 December 2002, followed by open registration on 27 June 2003.
- 2020 — ROSNIIROS takes over registry operations directly on 1 August.
- 2025 — internationalised names in Chinese, Korean, Thai and Hindi are added to the existing Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew scripts.
- 2026 — transfers between registrars by AuthInfo code (April), and new Russian registration rules for the national zone take effect on 1 September.
Is .su going to be shut down?
Reports of an imminent closure resurface every few years. In March 2025 the registry published a statement saying no retirement is planned and no formal step has been taken by ICANN. Its reasoning rests on the ccTLD retirement policy adopted within ICANN in 2022: a country-code domain is removed from the root only after its code is removed from ISO 3166. Because SU remains "exceptionally reserved", that trigger has not been pulled.
That is a statement of the current position, not a guarantee. .su is one of the very few ccTLDs tied to a country that no longer exists, and its status could be reopened by ISO or ICANN. If a site must stay reachable at the same address for a decade, treat .su as a secondary name and keep your primary brand on a mainstream TLD.
.su vs .ru vs .рф
All three are run from Russia and share the same back-end operator, but they differ in origin, character rules and how visitors perceive them.
| Aspect | .su | .ru | .рф (xn--p1ai) |
|---|---|---|---|
| In the root since | 1990 | 1994 | 2010 |
| Origin | Soviet Union code, now "exceptionally reserved" in ISO 3166 | ISO 3166 code for Russia | Cyrillic IDN ccTLD for Russia |
| Registry | ROSNIIROS | Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ | Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ |
| Allowed characters | Latin, Cyrillic and several other scripts (IDN) | Latin letters, digits, hyphen | Cyrillic |
| WHOIS server | whois.tcinet.ru | whois.tcinet.ru | whois.tcinet.ru |
| DNSSEC at TLD | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Recognition outside Russian-speaking audiences | Low; often read as a novelty or a risk signal | Clearly Russian | Hard to type on non-Cyrillic keyboards |
Can foreigners register a .su domain?
Historically, yes: .su was open to individuals and organisations regardless of residence, which is one reason it gained a following outside Russia. Registrations always go through a registrar accredited by ROSNIIROS; the registry does not sell names to the public.
Since 1 September 2026, domain registration in Russia's national zone is governed by new rules approved by the Russian government, and the registry has tied changes in .su to them. In .ru and .рф, individual registrants already confirm their identity through the Gosuslugi public-services portal. Whether and how a foreign individual can pass the checks a .su registrar now applies is something to confirm with that registrar before paying. Practical steps that do not change:
- Check that the name is free — see how to check domain availability.
- Pick an accredited .su registrar. Not every registrar or hosting company sells .su, so check the registry's list or the registrar's TLD catalogue; choosing a registrar covers what to compare.
- Enter accurate registrant details. In a dispute, ownership is proven with documents; a name registered under someone else's details is hard to recover.
- Point the name to your DNS provider's nameservers and enable DNSSEC if the provider supports it.
Prices are set by each registrar. Compare the renewal price, not just the first-year offer.
Renewal, expiry and transfers
A .su registration runs for the paid period shown in WHOIS as paid-till. After that date a redemption window follows during which only the previous registrant can renew, but the website and email may already have stopped resolving. The free-date field shows when an unpaid name returns to the pool. Auto-renewal plus an independent reminder is the cheapest insurance — see domain expiry monitoring.
Since April 2026, moving a .su name between registrars works with an AuthInfo code, the same mechanism used in most gTLDs: request the code from the current registrar and enter it at the new one.
Reputation: the part that affects email and trust
This is where .su differs most from a mainstream TLD for an international audience. Some security vendors and corporate mail gateways weigh a domain partly by the reputation of its whole zone, and small or unusual zones tend to get a stricter look. For a legitimate business that has two consequences:
- Email. Mail from a .su domain with missing or broken SPF, DKIM or DMARC is more likely to be filtered than the same mistake on a .com. Configure all three and monitor DMARC reports from day one.
- Links. Recipients who do not recognise the suffix may hesitate to click. A consistent brand, a valid TLS certificate and an HTTPS-only site help more than anything specific to the TLD.
The registry runs an abuse policy and can suspend names used for phishing or malware, as in .ru. The suffix is neutral: .su hosts long-running legitimate projects and throwaway malicious pages, like every other zone.
How to check a .su domain
Ownership and dates. Run the name through the WHOIS lookup or query the zone's server directly on Linux or macOS:
whois -h whois.tcinet.ru ripn.suA trimmed response for the registry's own site:
domain: RIPN.SU
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED
registrar: RUCENTER-SU
created: 2003-06-26T20:00:00Z
paid-till: 2027-06-25T21:00:00Z
free-date: 2027-07-29Private individuals appear as Private Person. The registry has also announced that from 5 October 2026 .su WHOIS shows a link to the registrar's contact form instead of the registrant's email and phone. For other ways to reach an owner, see how to find out who owns a domain.
DNS and DNSSEC. The DNS lookup shows nameservers, MX and TXT records. From a terminal:
# Linux, macOS
dig NS su
dig +dnssec DS su
dig MX example.su
# Windows PowerShell
Resolve-DnsName -Name su -Type NS
Resolve-DnsName -Name example.su -Type MXSafety of an unknown site. Before opening an unfamiliar .su link, run the URL through the malware and phishing check.
Frequently asked questions
What country is .su?
It was the Soviet Union's code. Today the zone is administered from Russia by ROSNIIROS and counted as part of Russia's national domain space.
Does the .su domain still exist?
Yes. It is delegated in the DNS root, signed with DNSSEC, and open for new registrations through accredited registrars.
Why was .su not deleted like .yu or .cs?
Because SU stayed in ISO 3166 as "exceptionally reserved" and ICANN's retirement policy only applies once a code leaves ISO 3166. An active Russian registry and a steady base of registrants did the rest.
Can I register a Cyrillic name in .su?
Yes. .su accepts Cyrillic and several other scripts at the second level, unlike .ru, which is Latin-only.
Is a .su domain bad for SEO?
Search engines do not penalise a TLD as such. The practical risks are lower recognition among users and stricter treatment by some mail and security filters, both manageable with correct email authentication and a clean site.
