Are country domains required to be hosted in their respective countries?
 

I hope I'm explaining it right. If you have a .us for the US or .fr for France, does that domain have to be hosted on a server in the corresponding country?

We have a .my (Malaysia) for our soon-to-be-launched delivery website and my partner thought he heard that in Malaysia anyway, all .my domains must be hosted on servers in Malaysia. I've Googled and couldn't find anything.

Anyone?

Thanks!

From how i understand it, some countries care and some dont. Ive seen some that will require you to have a corporation, or an entity in that country. Going even further, here in Barcelona there is .cat for Catalunya. To obtain .cat your site "one needs to belong to the Catalan linguistic and cultural community on the Internet" It's pretty weird.

Correct. also unfortunately for the OP .MY domain names are restricted to Malaysians - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...-level_domains

Some do and some do not.
For instance, in China if you want to use some of their processing. You must host the website in country. However there are now ways around that also.
So i think it comes down to the way you setup your business and where you process the revenue. Some companies will demand that the servers be in the same country.

You can make up a company and address. You don't need to host there. 99% of domain names are hosted elsewhere and owned by Americans.

Yep, America is the only country on this planet.

The registrar must know this also the planned hosting company. Probably has more to do with billing for the delivery service than anything else. Dual language support? I bet your service would be popular with tourists.

Only one that matters

Each country has their own set of rules, you'll find most of them here

Beyond this, you'll find third party services that help you circumvent local restrictions by providing local presence, etc. (companies like ascio and a few domain registrars do this as well)

Domain REGISTRATION is sometimes restricted (nationality, incorporation...), Domain HOSTING never is, you have control of the DNS you have control of the hosting.

you can host these anywhere but often times you have to be a resident to own them.