Why a .fi address still matters here
A .fi address tells a Finnish customer that they are dealing with a business that operates in Finland. That signal is worth real money in a market where people are careful about who they buy from online.
It also removes a question. A cleaning company in Espoo with a .fi address is obviously local. The same company on a generic address has to prove it somewhere else on the page.
None of that means you should skip the .com if your name is also traded abroad. It means the .fi is the one you register first, and the one you never let go.
Who can register a .fi domain
Anyone, in short. Traficom's own wording, checked on traficom.fi on 20 September 2026, is that companies, organisations and private persons, regardless of their domicile, can all have fi-domain names registered for them.
So you do not need a Finnish company, a Finnish address or a Finnish person to hold one. A Swedish firm selling into Finland can register its .fi name today.
Names are given out on a first come, first served basis. There is no queue, no review of who deserves the name, and no advantage in having a company of the same name. Whoever registers it first holds it.
What a .fi name may contain
The character rules are set by Traficom and they are short. A .fi name can use the letters a to z, the numbers 0 to 9 and the hyphen, and it may also use å, ä and ö along with the characters of the Sami languages spoken in Finland.
The length is 2 to 63 characters. A name cannot begin or end with a hyphen, and the third and fourth characters cannot both be hyphens. The exception is the encoded form of a name that contains å, ä or ö, where that hyphen pair is exactly how the encoding works.
These were the rules published on traficom.fi on 20 September 2026. They change rarely, but your registrar will tell you immediately if a name breaks one.
.fi domain registration in practice, step by step
The whole thing takes about ten minutes. Check that the name is free, check that it does not step on somebody else's protected name or trademark, choose a registrar, order the name, and point it at your hosting.
You will be asked for the holder's details, which is the company or the person who will own the name. Get this right at the moment of ordering, because correcting it later is a form and a wait rather than a click.
The domain usually works within minutes of the order, although the change of name servers can take a few hours to be visible everywhere. If you are registering as part of setting up a new business in Finland, do it the same day you settle the name.
How registration works through a registrar
You buy the name from a registrar, not from Traficom. As Traficom puts it, a registrar registers the domain name on your behalf and performs all related actions, such as renewing of domain names.
Registrars are ordinary companies, usually hosting providers or web studios, and they set their own prices and their own service levels. The name itself is the same name whoever you buy it through.
Judge a registrar on three things. Whether you get a control panel you can log into yourself, whether renewals are automatic and clearly invoiced, and whether a human answers when a name server change goes wrong on a Friday afternoon.
What Traficom does and what it leaves to you
Traficom keeps the register and sets the rules. It does not sell names, it does not check your business idea and it does not decide whether a name suits you.
What it does do is act on unlawful names. A .fi domain must not infringe a protected name or trademark held by somebody else, and Traficom can intervene when a holder has clearly taken a name that belongs to another party.
The checking is left to you before you register. Traficom's advice is to consult the public registers to make sure that the name does not infringe someone else's name or trademark protected in Finland or in the EU.
Protecting your name
Register the obvious variants, not every variant. The correct spelling, the most likely misspelling, and the version with and without a hyphen if your name naturally splits in two. Three or four names is usually enough.
If your company name is also a trademark, the trademark is the stronger protection and the domain is the practical one. They do different jobs and one does not replace the other.
Point the extra names at the main one with a redirect rather than building anything on them. Duplicate sites on separate domains cause search problems and double the work forever.
Should you register the .com as well
Yes, if it is free and cheap, and no, if somebody already holds it and wants a fortune for it. A Finnish business serving Finnish customers loses nothing by running on .fi alone.
Buy the .com when you sell abroad, when your name is easy to confuse with a foreign brand, or when your customers are the kind who type .com out of habit and will land on a competitor.
Do not buy a long tail of extensions out of anxiety. The annual fees add up, and the names you were worried about are rarely the ones anybody would actually register.
Whose name goes on the domain
The company's, or yours if you trade as a private person. Never the agency's, never an employee's personal account, and never the brother in law who set it up in 2019.
This sounds obvious and it is the most common ownership problem we meet. A business that cannot log into its own domain cannot move hosting, cannot fix email and cannot leave a supplier it has outgrown.
Check it today. It takes two minutes and the fix is easiest while everybody is still on good terms. We wrote about the whole question in who owns your website and your domain.
Moving a domain to another registrar
You can move a .fi name to a different registrar and keep it running the whole time. The site does not go down because of a transfer, as long as the name server settings stay the same through it.
You will need to be the registered holder, or to have the holder's agreement, and your new registrar will tell you which authorisation they need from the old one.
Transfer first, change hosting second. Doing both in the same hour is how people end up with a dead website and two suppliers each explaining that it is the other one's problem.
What happens if it expires
The site and the email stop, and after a grace period the name goes back on the market. Traficom's wording is that after a registration lapses, the domain name becomes available for anyone to register after a grace period. Ask your registrar how long that window is for your name, because it is the difference between an inconvenience and losing the address entirely.
Somebody else can then register it, including a competitor or a trader who resells expired Finnish names. Getting it back after that is a negotiation, not a right.
The prevention is boring and it works. Automatic renewal, a card that has not expired, and the renewal notices going to an address that somebody reads rather than to a person who left the company.
DNS, and why the email breaks before the website
Your domain does two jobs, it points visitors at the website and it points mail at your mailbox. Those are separate settings, and a careless change to one takes out the other.
When somebody moves your site to a new server and copies over only the web settings, the website appears to work perfectly while your invoices quietly stop arriving. It is the single most common self-inflicted outage in small business hosting.
Before any move, write down the current settings, including the mail records and the authentication records. Ten minutes of notes prevents a very bad Monday.
Ä and ö in a domain name
They are allowed and they mostly work, but think twice before making one your only address. A customer in a hurry on a foreign keyboard cannot type your name, and it is awkward to read out over the phone.
The usual answer is to register both, the version with the Finnish letters and the plain one, and to run the site on the plain version with the other redirecting to it.
Where the accented name matters most is print and word of mouth in Finnish, so having it is worth the small annual fee even if it is not the address on your invoices.
Buying a name somebody already holds
First find out whether it is in use. A name that points at a live business is not for sale in any practical sense. A name that has pointed at nothing for years often is.
Approach the holder directly and briefly, as a person rather than as a company with a budget. The moment the seller knows a business wants it, the price changes.
Set a limit before you start, and have a second name you would be happy with. Most of the time the second name plus the money you saved is the better outcome.
A ten minute routine once a year
Once a year, check four things. That the holder details are still your company, that the renewal card is valid, that the notices go to an address somebody reads, and that you can log into the registrar's panel yourself.
Write down which registrar holds the name and who has the login, and keep it somewhere that survives a change of staff. The domain outlives every website you will ever build on it.
If you would rather not think about it at all, this is part of what a maintenance arrangement covers, which we describe in hosting and upkeep.