Get a domain name: obtain a domain, get a website domain, and secure or reserve a domain name

You search the exact name in the exact extension you want, and the result tells you which of four routes you are on. Unregistered names are bought from a registrar at a published yearly price and are working the same day. A name somebody already has means buying it from the person who holds it, winning it at auction if it is lapsing, or catching it with a backorder if it drops. The routes are not interchangeable and you do not get to pick, which is why the sensible move is to search the name first rather than plan around a price you have already imagined.

The unregistered route is genuinely simple and the whole thing takes about five minutes. It means registering it with an ICANN accredited registrar, paying, giving real contact details because ICANN requires them, and pointing the name at wherever your site will live. What people underestimate is the second half of that sentence. A domain and a website are separate purchases from separate companies, so the registration on its own puts nothing on the internet. You are buying the address half of a website, not the building. If you would rather see each route priced and timed one at a time, the step by step walkthrough of buying a domain name covers the same ground at more length.

The registered route is a negotiation rather than a transaction, and the first job is finding out what you are dealing with. Some names are actively used by businesses that will never sell at any price. Others are parked and quietly gettable. A surprising number are already listed with an asking price attached. Before you send anybody an email, look up who holds it and how long the current registration term has left, because a name with four years still on it means the holder is committed and a name expiring in six weeks means you may simply be able to wait. NameBest answers the first of those questions rather than the last: the console generates candidates from your brief and puts each one to the registry live, so a name that comes back taken is struck through and the alternatives around it are already checked. Names running through the expiry cycle deserve particular attention, because a holder who has already stopped paying is the one seller who needs no persuading.

Register it in the business name, in an account the business controls. This sounds like paperwork and it is the single most expensive detail on this page to get wrong. Under the ICANN Registration Data Policy in force since August 2025, the registrant organization field is what determines the legal holder of a name. If a freelancer or an agency registers it under their own details, they are the holder, and getting it back later is a change of ownership rather than a favour, complete with a 60 day transfer lock attached to it.

Check the name against the USPTO trademark register before you pay, not after. An available domain that matches a live mark in your own industry is a legal problem you are buying rather than a bargain you found, and the UDRP process that resolves those disputes can order a transfer with no compensation. The test cuts the other way too: if your own business name is already trademarked, a squatter holding the matching domain is on much weaker ground than they think.

For a US company a .com is still the default, for one unglamorous reason. It is what customers type when they half remember a name, and it is what they assume when somebody reads an address aloud on a phone call. If the .com is gone, a short name in another extension usually beats a long hyphenated .com. Google has said repeatedly that the extension is not a ranking factor, so this is a branding decision rather than a search one. If the obvious candidates are all gone, let a generator suggest alternatives and check a batch at once instead of typing them in one by one. Browse the wider list of extensions before you settle, and remember that email and hosting are bought separately, so the difference between a domain and hosting is worth understanding before you are billed twice for what you thought was one thing.

Not in any meaningful sense, and this catches people out constantly. There is no reserved state in a domain registry. A name is either registered or it is not, and the only way to move it into the first category is to pay for it. Registering a name for one year is the reservation, and at roughly the price of a sandwich it is the cheapest insurance in this entire process. Anything advertised as reserving or holding a name is either a registration under a different label or a marketing hold that gives you no rights at all.

The thing that comes closest for a name somebody else already holds is a backorder, which is a standing instruction to attempt a catch the moment a lapsing name drops. It is a queue rather than a guarantee, catch rates run somewhere between 10 and 40 percent depending on how contested the name is, and a genuinely desirable name will attract several drop catchers at once. If the name is merely expiring rather than dropping, it will usually surface in an expiry auction first, so bid for it at auction is the more realistic route and the backorder is the fallback for names nobody bothered to bid on.

One practical consequence worth planning around: do not announce a company name before the domain is registered in your account. Search volume on a fresh brand name is a signal, and names that suddenly get searched repeatedly have a habit of getting registered by somebody else first. Search quietly, register the same day, then announce.

You hold an exclusive right to use it for a term, and the term is what you are actually buying. Registrations run from one year to ten at a time for most generic extensions, and there is no purchase that makes a name permanently yours. Anyone offering to sell you a domain forever is describing something that does not exist in the registry. What makes this workable is that renewal is unconditional. Nobody can outbid you for a name you already hold, the price is whatever your registrar charges at renewal time, and you can keep going indefinitely. If the boundary between the name and the rest of the address is fuzzy, what you are really buying inside a web address is worth five minutes before you spend anything.

Three ICANN rules govern what you can do with a name once you hold it, and none of them can be waived by a registrar no matter how nicely you ask. You cannot transfer a name within 60 days of first registering it. You cannot transfer it within 60 days of a previous transfer. And changing the registrant, which includes correcting a name that was registered under the wrong entity, triggers a 60 day lock of its own. Plan around them rather than discovering them the week you need to move something. When you do move a name, moving it to another registrar later is a routine process that takes about five to seven days.

The most common way people lose a name is not a hostile takeover, it is an unread email. ICANN requires registrant email verification within 15 days of registration or the name can be suspended, and expiry notices go to the same address. If that address is a former employee's inbox or a mailbox on the domain itself, the failure mode is circular and quiet. Put a real, monitored address on the registration, keep auto renew on, and check once a year that the details are still true.

An unregistered .com runs roughly $11 to $23 a year in the United States, and the spread inside that band is arithmetic rather than greed. Verisign charges every registrar the same $10.26 wholesale fee per .com per year, ICANN adds $0.20 per registration year, and everything above that is the registrar's margin and whatever it bundles in. That wholesale figure rises 7 percent to $10.97 on November 1, 2026 under the current .com registry agreement, so retail prices will drift up behind it. Porkbun, which publishes flat pricing with no first year discount on .com, listed it at $11.08 when we checked in August 2026.

Other extensions are priced by their own registries and the range is much wider than most people expect. The same August 2026 check showed .net at $12.52, .org at $11.84, .co at $31.20, .io at $51.80 and .ai at $82.70, and .ai is sold only in two year terms so its smallest possible purchase is double the annual number. The figure that actually matters is not any of these, it is what it renews at in the second year. A cheap first year against a triple price renewal is the oldest pricing pattern in this industry, so compare registrars on renewal price and treat the promotional number as noise. The comparison of Namecheap and GoDaddy renewal pricing shows how wide that gap gets between two registrars selling the identical product. What a name costs to register is only the opening payment of an indefinite series.

A name somebody already holds has no price list whatsoever, because the seller is a person rather than a registry. Sedo, one of the larger aftermarket platforms, reports a median sale of around $549, and plenty of names change hands far above and far below that. The useful discipline is to arrive with your own figure. Put an appraisal estimate next to whatever is being asked, work out a number before you name one, and be willing to walk to a second choice, because the alternative is negotiating against a number the seller invented.