Register domain names: domain name registration, and what to do when the name is already taken

Domain registration is the act of reserving a name in a registry database for a fixed term, through a company ICANN has accredited to do it. Three parties are involved and confusing them is the source of most misunderstandings. The registry operates the database for one extension and sets the wholesale price: Verisign runs .com and .net, Public Interest Registry runs .org. The registrar is the company you actually pay, and it sets retail pricing, holds your DNS settings and bills you for renewals. ICANN sits above both, accredits registrars, writes the policy and collects a $0.20 transaction fee per domain year.

What you receive is the exclusive right to use that name and to point it wherever you like for the term you paid for. What you do not receive is ownership in the sense that word normally carries. A registration is closer to a renewable lease than to a deed, it expires, and it goes back into circulation if you let it. That is not a technicality: it is the single most common way people lose a name they had for years.

The scale of the system explains why registration feels so unsatisfying on a good name. There were 401.6 million registrations across the 1,438 extensions delegated in the IANA root zone at the end of the second quarter of 2026, with 163.6 million of them in .com alone. Every pronounceable one and two word combination in the popular extensions went years ago. That is why a serious search has to put the exact string to the registry that holds the authoritative record, rather than reporting a reseller's guess, and why it has to keep generating alternatives instead of stopping at a red X.

Search the exact name, confirm it is genuinely unregistered rather than quietly held, choose your registrar on the renewal price rather than the promotional first year, provide accurate registrant contact details, and pay. Then do the two things that people skip and later regret: turn on auto renew immediately, and register the name to an account and an email address that belongs to the organization rather than to whoever happened to be at the keyboard.

The registrant details matter more than they look. Under the ICANN Registration Data Policy, which came into force on August 21, 2025, the registrant organization field determines the legal holder of the name, and changing it counts as a change of ownership rather than an edit. Registrars are also required to validate the registrant contact details and will suspend a domain whose email address fails verification, so a typo in that field is not a cosmetic problem. If you ever need to check what is on record for a name, you can read the registration record through ICANN's public lookup.

If you have not settled on a name yet, working backwards is usually faster. Describe what the business does and let a generator propose candidates that have already been checked against live inventory, rather than brainstorming a list on paper and discovering afterward that every item on it went in 2007. And run a live availability check across the extensions you would actually accept before you fall in love with one, because the answer often decides itself.

Roughly $11 to $23 a year for the mainstream generic extensions, and the number is set almost entirely by which extension you pick rather than by which registrar you use. The registry fee is the floor. Verisign charges $10.26 per .com domain year and raises it 7 percent to $10.97 on November 1, 2026. Public Interest Registry charges $11.00 for .org, raised from $9.93 on June 1, 2026, its first increase in a decade. ICANN adds $0.20 on top of both. Everything above that is registrar margin.

Newer and country extensions are a different market entirely and the spread is large. Porkbun, which is useful as an anchor because it publishes identical registration, renewal and transfer figures, listed $11.08 for .com, $11.84 for .org, $12.52 for .net, $31.20 for .co, $51.80 for .io and $82.70 for .ai when this page was checked. Over a five year hold those differences are the whole cost of the decision, which is why it pays to look at what a domain costs across the extensions before you commit rather than after.

Two pricing traps are worth naming. The first is the promotional first year, which is where nearly all the marketing effort in this industry goes; always compare registrars on renewal price instead, because the sellers advertising a one dollar first year are usually the ones with the highest renewal. The second is the registry premium tier, which most newer extensions operate and which .com does not. On those extensions a good string can be priced as a premium name by the registry itself, meaning the elevated price applies to every renewal forever rather than just to the purchase. A cheap-looking search result can hide a permanent bill.

Then you have three routes rather than none, and which one applies is knowable in seconds. The holder may have listed the name for sale with an asking price or an offer form, which is close to an ordinary purchase. The holder may not have listed it, in which case you are making a cold approach to a stranger who was not planning to sell. Or the name may have lapsed and reached an expiry auction, where the price is decided by whoever else wants it that week.

Registering is always cheaper, so it is worth confirming that the name really is gone before you spend anything. Some names read as taken while sitting inside an expiry window, and some read as free while still in redemption, which is why a checker that distinguishes the states is worth more than one returning a red X. When the name genuinely is held, buying it from the person who holds it is the ordinary path rather than an exotic one, and the practical questions are what to pay and how to pay it safely. Get an appraisal first, work out what to offer from recorded comparable sales rather than from asking prices on names that never sold, and use escrow so the name moves into your account before the money releases.

Two more things save money at this stage. Always check the history before you buy on any aged name, because a domain that carried a spam operation five years ago arrives with baggage no appraisal figure shows. And if the name is currently sliding through the expiry cycle, you can put a drop watch on it here and a backorder at a drop catching service instead of watching a calendar, though be honest with yourself about the odds: good names are usually caught in the first seconds after they drop. If you want the full comparison, we set out the three routes to buying a name separately.

Take the .com if the exact name is free at registration price. It is the cheapest mainstream extension to hold, it is what people type by reflex, and it saves you from spelling out the extension on every phone call for the life of the business. That advice is dull and it is still right. There is a second reason: registering a .com also avoids the premium tier problem entirely, because every available .com prices at the ordinary registry rate regardless of how good the string is.

The decision gets interesting when the .com is gone and the holder wants five figures. There a .org domain is the natural choice for a nonprofit, an association or a public-interest project, and it is often available when the .com is not, since there are just over 12 million .org registrations against 163.6 million .com. For a company, weigh taking a .co name, which reads as company and needs no explanation, against the .io extension, which signals software to technical audiences and nothing to anyone else, and against names ending in .ai, which are expensive and tie you to one category. Do not assume .net is the obvious fallback until you have seen how .com and .net compare, and if you are weighing the nonprofit angle specifically, we cover the difference between .com and .org in detail.

Whatever you take, one defensive habit is worth the money. If your name carries commercial traffic, register the matching .com when it becomes gettable and redirect it, because a share of visitors will type it out of habit and land on whoever holds it. At around eleven dollars a year that is the cheapest insurance in the business, and it also means you can sell it later or simply keep the door closed.

One to ten years, your choice, renewable indefinitely. Longer terms lock in today's price against future registry increases, which is a real consideration now that .com is on a schedule of up to 7 percent in each of four years out of a six year term and .org no longer has any contractual cap at all. Nothing about a long term restricts you: you can still move it to another registrar after the first sixty days without losing the remaining time.

When a registration lapses the name does not become available the next morning. It runs through a sequence that takes roughly seventy five to eighty days. First an auto renew grace period set by the registrar, commonly up to forty five days on .com, during which an ordinary renewal restores it. Expiry auctions typically list a name around day twenty six of that window and close around day forty three. Then a Redemption Grace Period of thirty days, mandated by ICANN, in which only the former registrant can recover it and only by paying a restore fee, commonly $80 to $150 at retail. Then five days of Pending Delete, in which nobody can do anything, and then the name drops back to the pool.

ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires your registrar to warn you roughly a month before expiry, roughly a week before, and within five days after. Those notices go to the registrant email address and nowhere else, which is the entire reason to keep it current. If you have just discovered a name of yours has lapsed, you almost certainly still have time, and renewing today is cheaper than working out which stage you are in.

Not in the way people mean by ownership. You hold an exclusive, renewable right to use the name for the term you paid for, recorded in a registry database, and that right ends when the term ends. Courts and registries have gone back and forth on whether a domain is property, but for practical purposes the answer that matters is simpler: keep renewing and it stays yours indefinitely, stop renewing and it goes to someone else. There is no way to buy a name outright and no maximum term beyond ten years at a time.

What you can do with that right is broad. You can point it anywhere, use it for email, move it to another registrar after sixty days, transfer it to another person or company, or sell it later at whatever price somebody will pay. Two locks are worth knowing about because they surprise people at the worst moment. A newly registered name cannot be transferred to a different registrar for sixty days, and a change of registrant triggers its own sixty day lock. Plan a sale around those rather than discovering them mid-transaction.

One consequence of the record being a database entry rather than a title deed is that your contact details are the evidence of who holds the name. Since the ICANN Registration Data Policy took effect the public record shows the registrant organization, state and country, with almost everything else redacted, while the registrar, creation date, expiry date and status codes remain public for every domain. If a dispute ever arises, the registrant organization on file is what gets examined, so it is worth being right the first time.