Buy a URL: purchase a web address, buy a website URL, and register your website address

One piece of it, and it is a smaller piece than most people expect. A URL is assembled from several parts that belong to different owners. The scheme, https://, is a protocol shared by the whole internet and nobody sells it. The path, the /buy-a-url portion, is a page on a server you run, so you create it for nothing the moment you have somewhere to put it. Query strings and the fragment after a hash are generated by software, not purchased.

The one part with a price on it is the registrable domain: a name and an extension, joined by a dot. That is what a registrar sells you, that is what appears in the public registration record, and that is the thing an aftermarket seller is negotiating over. Everything else in the address either comes free with it or is not anybody's to sell. Once you understand that split, the pricing stops looking arbitrary, because you are no longer trying to price a whole address, you are pricing one word and one suffix.

This also settles a question that trips up a lot of first-time buyers: no, you do not buy a separate URL for each page. Buy the domain once and every address beneath it belongs to you, an unlimited number of them, at no extra cost. A shop with four thousand product pages pays for exactly one registration. If the split between the parts is still fuzzy, it is worth reading which part of a URL is the domain name in full, because that single distinction explains most of what follows.

The process is short when the address is unclaimed and considerably longer when it is not, and the search result decides which of those you are in rather than you choosing. The sensible first move is to check whether the address is free before you fall in love with it, because the answer changes both the price and the timeline. NameBest puts the string to the registry itself, so a single search tells you which of the two situations you are in, and values the ones nobody holds. If you want the longer walkthrough of buying a domain name, with each route priced and timed separately, it has a guide of its own.

For an ordinary unclaimed .com in the United States, roughly $11 to $23 a year. That figure is what a web address costs to register, and the spread inside it is not registrar greed, it is arithmetic: Verisign charges every registrar a wholesale fee of $10.26 per .com per year, ICANN adds a $0.20 transaction fee, and the rest is the registrar's margin. The wholesale figure rises 7 percent to $10.97 on November 1, 2026, so retail will drift up with it. As a reference point from a registrar that publishes flat pricing, Porkbun listed .com at $11.08 and .org at $11.84 when checked in August 2026.

Extensions other than .com are priced by their own registries and the spread is wide. The same August 2026 check showed .net at $12.52, .co at $31.20, .io at $51.80 and .ai at $82.70, and .ai is sold only in two year terms so the smallest purchase you can make is double the annual figure. None of these are introductory rates, which matters, because the single most common billing surprise is a cheap first year against a much higher renewal. Look at what it renews at in year two before you look at the first year price at all, and compare registrars on renewal price rather than on the number in the advertisement.

Buying a web address somebody already holds is a different market with no price list whatsoever. Sedo, one of the larger aftermarket platforms, reports a median sale around $549, and plenty of names change hands well above that. There is no rule and no ceiling, because the seller is a person rather than a registry. Put an appraisal estimate next to any asking price you are shown, and work out a number before you name one, so the first figure in the conversation is not simply whatever the seller decided to type.

Assume it will be. There were about 401.6 million registered domains across the 1,438 extensions delegated in the IANA root zone at the end of Q2 2026, with .com and .net alone accounting for 179.1 million, so anything short and pronounceable in .com went years ago. Taken is not the end of the conversation though, and a registrar that simply returns a red cross is giving you the least useful version of the answer.

A registered address sits in one of four states, and each one has a different route attached. It might be actively used by a business that will never sell. It might be parked and quietly available, which is more common than people assume. It might be publicly listed for sale with an asking price already on it. Or it may be one of the many addresses running through the expiry cycle because the holder stopped paying, in which case it will surface in an auction long before it ever returns to the open pool. You can buy it from whoever holds it now in the first three cases and bid for it in an auction in the fourth. Before choosing, find out who holds it and how much of the registration term is left, because an address with four years still on it is a negotiation rather than a waiting game.

The alternative is to change the address rather than fight for it. Trying a different extension is the usual move, and it costs you less than people fear: Google has said repeatedly that the extension is not a ranking factor, so a .co or a .io is not a search handicap. Whether it is a branding handicap depends entirely on who your customers are. If you would rather test a batch of ideas quickly, let a generator suggest alternatives and check them in bulk instead of typing them one at a time, and browse the wider list of extensions to see what the name is available in.

The address will end up on invoices, in email signatures, on the side of a van, and read aloud on phone calls, so the test that matters is whether somebody can hear it once and type it correctly. That rules out more candidates than any keyword strategy will. Hyphens get dropped, numbers get spelled out wrong, and clever misspellings send your customers to somebody else's site.

For a US business, a .com web address is still the default, for one unglamorous reason: it is what people type when they half remember a name. If the .com is gone and the alternative is a long hyphenated .com, take the shorter address in another extension. Do check the name against the USPTO trademark register before you buy, because an address matching a live mark in your own industry is a legal problem you are purchasing rather than a bargain you found.

One practical note that saves a lot of confusion later: buying the address does not put a website on the internet. You are buying the address half of a website, while hosting is the machine that stores and serves the files, and a working site needs both, usually from two different companies. If that boundary is unclear, the difference between a domain and hosting is worth ten minutes before you buy anything, because plenty of people pay twice for the same thing without meaning to.