How do I add a domain that contains special characters?

If you receive the errors Name contains invalid characters and Only valid hostname characters are allows... when adding your domain name to your DigitalOcean account, your domain name likely contains non-ASCII characters such accents, which is common for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). To add your domain with non-ASCII characters, you’ll need to add a Punycode version of your domain name, as special characters aren’t directly supported by DNS. Punycode is a special encoding used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII, which is a smaller, restricted character set.

For example, if you wanted to add the domain екампле.цом to your DigitalOcean account, it would need to be added as xn--80ajbsgfv.xn--l1adx, which is екампле.цом after being converted to Punycode. After being added as xn--80ajbsgfv.xn--l1adx, users will be able to enter екампле.цом in their web browser and access your site. Attempting to directly register екампле.цом as a domain name in DigitalOcean would result in an error.

You can convert your domain to Punycode using a tool like PunyCoder.

Linux users can also install the idn package and convert a non-ASCII domain name to Punycode using these commands:

apt install idn
echo "екампле.цом" | idn

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