Hello fellow Lemmings! I hope this is the right place to ask this. I don’t understand how web domains work. Let’s say I want to buy the domain “abcdefghi.net”. I can go to a domain provider like haruba or godaddy and just buy it. but how can they, a private, sell me these domains? I’m not talking about the hosting, but just the domain. where do they register this domain I’m buying? isn’t it possible to register it myself instead of paying these services to do it for me?
In theory you could become a registrar and pay the icann’s fee per domain to sell domains to yourself for cheaper. In practice, becoming a registrar is prohibitively expensive because you have to pay ICANN 10k, and then spend a whole lot more on certifications and processes, and audits from auditors. I recommend staying away from GoDaddy as they are infamous for being very bad to do business with, personally I’d recommend gandi.net and google.domains. namecheap also has interesting offerings.
If you are a student, the Github Student Pack gives you a free .me domain for a year.
it’s “only” 10K? It isn’t so much if you think about it, I expected a lot more
10k is just the nominal fee, the real costs are in the certifications and audits.
the student pack just gives you a 1 year free promo code so you can pay to keep it.
Another vote for Gandi here - used them for years and absolutely no complaints.
That said, CloudFlare are a competent registrar as well and if you’re going to use them for your site anyway…
google.domains is being sold off to GoDaddy from what I read.
Edit: SquareSpace, not GoDaddy. I mis-remembered.
Indeed. I wrote my comment hours before the announcement. Gutted that I’m going to have to migrate.
It was SquareSpace, not GoDaddy. I misremembered.