What a domain name is, and how to buy one without getting fleeced

Petr Kolonicz

Software engineer

5 August 2026 · 9 min read

If you are going to buy or renew a .com this year, do it before 1 November. Verisign, the company that runs the .com registry, announced on 23 April a 7% increase in the wholesale price, from $10.26 to $10.97. Every registrar will pass it on. At Cloudflare, which sells at cost, the sticker goes from $10.44 to roughly $11.15. Renew before the date and you lock the old rate for however many years you pay for, up to ten.

Small money on one domain. But Verisign’s contract lets it raise the price by up to 7% a year in four of the six years of each term, and this is the first of those four. Expect more.

The bigger risk is paying a few dollars in year one and $22 in year two because nobody read the renewal line. That happens to people who do not know who is selling them what.

Four companies, one domain

A domain name is a lease on a row in a database. You do not own example.com; you pay for the right to have your name written next to it for a year or more, and to say which servers it points to. Four companies can be involved, and people mix them up constantly.

Four companies, four jobs. The registrar sells you the name and the web host runs the site, and keeping those two in separate accounts is what lets you leave either one.

You never deal with the registry. It sets the wholesale price and the rules for one ending: Verisign runs .com, Nominet runs .uk, DENIC runs .de. The registrar is the shop, and the one you pay, adding whatever markup it likes. The DNS host and the web host can each be a different company again, and often should be; I usually run DNS at Cloudflare regardless of where a domain was bought.

When a web host or an agency says “we’ll handle the domain for you”, they become your registrar too, and leaving them later means prying the domain out of an account you do not control. Keep the registrar separate from the host.

What happens when someone types your domain

A browser asks a recursive resolver, which walks the root, the .com registry and the authoritative nameserver in turn, caches the answer for its TTL, then hands back the IP.

Your browser asks a recursive resolver, usually your ISP’s or a public one such as 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. If the resolver has seen the name recently it answers from cache and it is over in a millisecond. If not, it works down the tree to whatever nameservers your registrar has on file for you, which hold the actual records.

Every record carries a TTL, time to live, in seconds, which tells resolvers how long they may keep the answer. Defaults run from 3600, one hour, up to 86400, a full day. That is the whole story behind “DNS propagation”. Nobody pushes your change anywhere; resolvers hold the old answer until their timers run out, and you cannot hurry them.

So the trick, if you are planning to move a site: a day or two before, set the TTL on the records you are about to change to 300, which is five minutes. Wait for the old TTL to expire, then make the change. The switch now takes five minutes instead of a day. Put the TTL back up afterwards. You can watch the answer flip around the world with whatsmydns.net or dnschecker.org.

The five record types you will meet

A: maps a name to an IPv4 address, like 203.0.113.10.
AAAA: the same for IPv6.
CNAME: an alias for another name. This is how www usually points at a hosting platform.
MX: which servers accept email for your domain. Break these and mail stops arriving.
TXT: free text. Google and Microsoft ask for one to prove you own the domain; your email provider asks for a couple more so that your mail is not treated as spam.

Where to buy

Prices are for a plain .com as of September 2026. Wholesale is $10.26, plus an $0.18 fee that goes to ICANN, the non-profit that oversees the domain system. That holds until 1 November, when wholesale becomes $10.97.

Registrar	.com first year	.com renewal	WHOIS privacy
Cloudflare Registrar	$10.44	$10.44	free
Porkbun	$11.08	$11.08	free
Namecheap	around $7 to $9	around $14 to $16	free
GoDaddy	promos of a few dollars	commonly cited near $22	basic redaction free, full privacy $9.99/yr and up

Namecheap and GoDaddy show different prices depending on where you are and what is in your basket, so those figures come from aggregators. Read the renewal line at checkout before you pay.

Cloudflare Registrar

Cloudflare sells at the wholesale price with no markup: $10.44 for a .com, and the same $10.44 every year after. Privacy redaction is included, and there is nothing at checkout to upsell.

The limitations are real, and Cloudflare does not advertise them. It only sells the endings on its own supported list, which covers the big international ones and a limited set of country endings, and it does not support internationalised domain names, so anything with accented characters is out. Check the list first, because a missing ending can neither be registered there nor transferred in. It forces you onto Cloudflare’s nameservers, which is fine for a small site and a conflict if your hosting provider insists on running your DNS. And support is by ticket only: if the domain your business runs on breaks at 9am on a Monday, you wait.

Porkbun

Porkbun charges $11.08 for a .com, register and renew the same, privacy included. That is 64 cents above Cloudflare for a registrar that supports far more TLDs, lets you use any nameservers you like, and has a support team that answers. The good reputation among developers is earned.

They still play the first-year game on some TLDs: .dev is around $7.75 to $8.75 in year one and renews at $12.87. Read the renewal line even here.

Namecheap

Namecheap is the middle of the market. First-year .com around $7 to $9, renewing around $14 to $16, which is roughly a third to a half over wholesale. WHOIS privacy is free for life on eligible TLDs. For the markup you get a huge TLD selection and decent support, so it is a reasonable home for a pile of odd TLDs.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy’s pricing is designed to confuse you. The headline .com is a few dollars, the renewal is commonly cited near $22, and the checkout is a gauntlet of pre-ticked extras, each on its own auto-renew. Basic WHOIS redaction is free; full privacy is $9.99 a year and up. I do not recommend them, and I move clients off them when I get the chance.

If you want a country ending

Most country endings are run by a national registry with its own price list and rules, and the big international registrars often do not sell them at all. Before you buy, find the registry’s published wholesale price, usually on its website, so you can see what your registrar is adding on top. Then read the registry’s transfer rules, which are frequently more generous than the international ones below.

The traps

The renewal cliff. Every first-year discount in the table above is a bet that you will not read the second line, and you usually cannot buy several years at the promo rate.

Privacy as a product. Since 2018 most registrars redact personal data in public WHOIS by default. Charging $9.99 a year for “full privacy” on top of that is charging for something the cheaper competitors include. You can see what a domain exposes with ICANN’s lookup tool.

The 60-day lock. Under ICANN’s transfer policy, an international domain like .com or .net cannot be moved to another registrar for 60 days after a new registration, a transfer, or a change of registrant. That last one bites people: fix a typo in the owner’s name and you may have locked yourself in for two months. The GNSO Council approved a rewrite in March 2025 that cuts this to 30 days, but it is not in effect yet, so plan on 60. Country endings run on their own registry’s rules, and many have no such lock at all.

Expiry and redemption. Miss the roughly 40-day renewal window after a .com expires (the site may go dark sooner, depending on the registrar) and it enters 30 days of redemption: DNS stops, and recovery costs a fee, typically $70 to $150, on top of the renewal. Then it drops, and there are companies whose whole business is grabbing dropped domains the second they come free.

After a .com expires: roughly 40 days to renew at the normal price, then 30 days of redemption with DNS off and a recovery fee on top, then it drops and anyone can register it.

Auto-renew, both ways. Turn it on for the domains you care about and keep the card current. An expired card is the most common way I have seen people lose a domain. Turn it off for the extras you did not ask for, because they renew too.

Checkout bundles. Email hosting, a “premium” DNS tier, an SSL certificate you do not need, a site builder trial. A registrar that pre-ticks these is telling you how it makes money. Untick everything and buy the domain.

What I would actually do

For a .com, or any other international ending like .net or .org, register or renew for several years before 1 November at a registrar that charges the same price every year. Cloudflare if you are happy running DNS there, which for a small site you should be. Porkbun if you want your own nameservers or a person to talk to. Both are within a dollar of wholesale and neither has a cliff.

For a country ending, buy from a registrar that sells close to the registry’s published wholesale price, then point the nameservers at Cloudflare or wherever you run DNS.

Do not let your web host or web designer register the domain in their own account. When a client comes to me with that arrangement, unwinding it is the first thing we do.

Turn on auto-renew and put the expiry in your calendar anyway. If you want a second source, ICANN’s beginner guides cover the same ground from the people who write the rules.

You have until 1 November. After that a .com costs 71 cents more a year, and Verisign is allowed to do it again next year.

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