Pro Tips for Purchasing Domain Names

I had a client ask me the other day where I buy my domain names from.

On the surface, that seems like a super simple question, but I realized that I actually have some strong opinions on the subject – not so much about where to purchase them from but about where you definitely should not purchase them from plus a few other tidbits of good advice I’ve garnered over the years.

Pro Tips for Purchasing Domain Names

Before we delve into that, let’s cover a little bit of terminology:

Domain Registrar – This is the company from whom you actually register or purchase your domain name.

TLD – this stands for Top Level Domain and references the extension at the end of the domain name – .com, .org, .net, etc. (It actually is a little bit more involved than that, but in the simplest terms, when someone says Top Level Domain or uses the acronym TLD, that’s more or less what they’re referring to.)

There have somewhat recently been a bunch of new extensions made available to the general public for purchase, so you can now register domain names such as mycoachingbusiness.blog or icantlivewithoutmy.coffee or whatiwanttodowithmy.life. You can really start to have some fun with your domain name with these new extensions.

I’m not sure yet how I feel about using them for your business – I think the jury is still out on their effectiveness and SEO value. But the possibilities are fun to imagine.

My general recommendation is still to go with a .com domain if you are able, but I know those can be hard to come by these days, especially for more common keywords, so it’s good to have options.

You can see a full list of the new TLDs available here: https://www.godaddy.com/tlds/gtld.aspx?catId=0&gtldphase=3

Web Host – This is the company where you host your website – where the physical files that make up your site live and where people to go to access your site. For instance, my web host is currently Bluehost, but over the past several years, I’ve used A2 Hosting for a lot of my clients and have really grown to love them and their customer service (which is critical factor to take into consideration when choosing your host).

Your web host is not necessarily the same place as your domain registrar (and I would argue that they should definitely not be the same, but I’ll get into that in a bit.)

DNS – Domain Name Servers – this is a setting associated with your domain name that directs web visitors where to find your web site (on your web host). When someone types a URL in the address bar of their web browser or clicks on a link from an email or on a website, their web browser goes out to a DNS server – which is like a great big address book for all the websites on the interwebs. It looks up the link you’re trying to get to and tells the web browser how to navigate to that specific website.

The DNS settings you add for your domain name are what create your entry in that great big address book.

So back to where you should buy your domain name.

There are lots of decent domain registrars out there. GoDaddy and Namecheap are two common ones I end up using with most of my clients. Namecheap tends to be slightly less expensive than GoDaddy.

CrazyDomains.com and Hover.com and Google.com/domains are all places I’ve seen recommended from sources I trust, so I imagine those are good options as well.

GoDaddy is the king of upsells which, although I use them personally, is one of their more irritating qualities. And they’re good at the upsell thing, too, so when you’re buying your domain, they make all of these things seem like no-brainers when in reality you probably don’t really need them.

A couple of rules to live by when buying domain names:

  1. Try and buy them all from the same place, so you have one account on one registrar where all your domain names are registered. This will make your life (and your web developer’s life) much simpler.
  2. Unless you have a really strong, compelling reason to do it, buying the privacy option is more or less a waste of your money, and it can be tough to untangle it from your domain name if you ever decide you don’t want it in the future. Plus, if your domain name is associated with your business, it actually looks a little fishy if you have your domain registration set to private. You want to be up-front and public with that information, including your physical address – everyone always freaks out about sharing their physical address. (If you’re using an email marketing service to send broadcast emails, you have to share your address there, too. It’s the law.) I promise that it doesn’t end up being as catastrophic as GoDaddy makes it out to be when they’re trying to upsell you on that service.
  3. Use an email address that you know is going to be around for a long time and that you will check regularly when purchasing your domain. Domain registrations typically come up for renewal annually, but if you purchased a longer period when you initially bought it, it might not come up for 2 or 3 years. And in technology time, that can be a really long time.

    Along with a renewal notice, once a year, you’ll also get a notification asking you to double-check that your contact details – email, phone number, and address – are all correct for your domain. The email you get about this can appear kind of spammy, but it’s actually a legal requirement as part of ICANN, the non-profit corporation that oversees all the domain registrars.

    So definitely do this because it’s in your best interest, too, to make sure that information is up to date – especially the email address.

    You absolutely DO NOT want to miss your window to renew your domain name, especially if it’s tied to your business somehow. You can be seriously hosed in trying to get it back if it expires and lapses. These days, when a website address isn’t renewed, some predatory company will likely snatch it right up, and make it super difficult and/or super expensive for you to get it back.

And then my big rule for the whole point of this article

Do not buy your domain name through the same company you use for web hosting.

This might seem like a nice, smart, efficient thing to do – keeping these two services in the same place. The web hosting companies even make this a really attractive thing to do by very often including the first year of your domain name registration in your web hosting package price. But what this does is ties you to that web hosting company which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Trust me – it’s not worth the $10 you might save doing this.

Changing web hosts if you need to – either because their service has gone in the crapper or simply because you’ve outgrown them – is not a terribly difficult thing to do.

You (or your web developer) have a lot of control over that process – you have easy access to your files and you can do all of this more or less without engaging the web host that you’re leaving except to cancel your account once you’re safely out the door.

Changing your domain registrar, on the other hand, is kind of a pain in the neck (only I don’t really mean “neck”).

Moving your domain registration requires a not-very-straightforward process of telling the one registrar that you’re leaving and taking some action to ‘release’ your domain name and then requiring the new registrar to initiate the transfer and indicating to them that you have indeed released the domain name for transfer.

And oh, by the way, there’s usually a timed window on all of this.

And if your domain is registered at the same place you’re hosting your website and you’re trying to get away from that host, you’ve got quite a few extra steps to get yourself untangled.

If you domain is registered with a separate registrar, it’s easy-peasy to move your web hosting. You just have to update your DNS records at your registrar and point it to the new location. No awkward breakup conversation with your old web host necessary.

So there you have it – a nice rundown of all the things you didn’t really want to know about registering your domain names.

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