The OTE has been designed to facilitate testing without creating live data. As such, there are a number of important differences from production which you should be aware of which are detailed below.
TLDs and Pricing
The OTE contains a subset of the TLDs available in our production environment at any given time. The pricing for each TLD has been deliberately set artificially high as a reminder that this is a test environment. To view all TLDs currently enabled in the OTE environment please visit the OTE pricing page or call the TLD list API.
Automation and Test API
Most of the production automation is disabled in the OTE environment. In particular, incoming domain transfers are not processed automatically and domains will not automatically expire within the system when passing their expiry date.
To facilitate testing of incoming domain transfers and ITRP contact changes we provide a Test API only available within our OTE environment. This provides the ability to create both UK and GTLD domains for transfer in and allows you to simulate accept and reject of these transfers programatically.
Emails
To assist with your testing all emails sent from our system when triggered via an API call or using the OTE dashboard will be sent to your account email address. This includes any emails which would normally be sent to other parties e.g. Domain Registration emails usually sent to registrants.
Please Note: Within the OTE environment we use a non-production email server for sending our emails. This will likely result in the first few emails being spam filtered by your mail provider. Please ensure you check your spam folder when expecting confirmation emails.
Purchase lifecycle
As we are reliant on testing environments provided by our suppliers to provide a clone environment which accurately models the live workflow for our products, there are some instances where data is not retained indefinitely by our supplier and as such items within the OTE will cease to operate correctly. These rules are subject to change, but the following are known issues at this time:
G Suite subscriptions
All G Suite subscriptions created within the OTE environment will have a domain prefix of goog-test.netistrar.com. This allows for Google to correctly identify these as non-chargable test subscriptions. According to their documentation, Google remove test subscriptions every few days so it is likely that new test subscriptions will need to be created at the point of testing.
Please Note: When creating a G Suite subscription the contact details are transmitted to Google. This will result in a live email being sent to the identified contact despite being a test subscription. Please ensure that you use your own details during testing so as not to create confusion.