How to Register a Domain and Choose a Good Name

Registering a domain sounds simple until you spend an hour hunting for a name that isn't already taken, find out that the perfect .com belongs to a squatter asking $3,000 for it, and end up buying a .io because "it sounds techy." It happens to most people. The process has more nuance than the "Register" button implies.

How domain registration actually works

Domains are managed through a hierarchy of organizations. At the top sits ICANN, which delegates administration of each TLD (Top-Level Domain) to specific registries. Verisign manages .com. Registro.br manages .br. The .io TLD is run by the Internet Computer Bureau of the Seychelles — yes, it's literally the official country domain of an island in the Indian Ocean.

You don't buy a domain from ICANN. You hire a registrar — an ICANN-accredited company that acts as intermediary. The registrar writes your name into the authoritative registry's database and maintains DNS records on your behalf. What you pay annually is essentially rent on that database entry.

This has one important practical implication: you can transfer your domain between registrars at any time (with rare exceptions). There's no technical lock-in, just occasional bureaucracy.

Which registrar to use

The real difference between registrars isn't the technology — a domain registered at Namecheap works the same as one at Google Domains. The difference is in:

Renewal price, not registration price. Many registrars charge $1–3 for the first year and $18–25 on renewal. The registration price is marketing; the renewal price is your actual ongoing cost. Always check both before registering.

DNS management interface. You'll change DNS records more often than you expect — SPF for email, CNAME for a staging subdomain, TXT for SSL verification. A bad DNS interface is recurring headache.

Support. When a domain accidentally expires or you need to transfer urgently, real support matters. Registrars with only a chatbot are a problem waiting to happen.

Registrars I use or recommend with confidence: Namecheap (solid value, decent interface), Cloudflare Registrar (charges at-cost with no markup, zero upsell, integrates with their nameservers), Google Domains for those already in the Google ecosystem.

Avoid: registrars that bundle the domain with mandatory hosting, charge for EPP code access (needed for transfer), or generally make it hard to leave.

Choosing a domain name

This is the part most people underestimate. A few rules learned from experience:

Short beats clever. A 12-character domain you can pronounce in one breath is worth more than a "creative" 20-character name nobody spells the same way twice. Say the domain out loud without explaining the spelling — if you need to spell it out, the name is already losing.

Avoid hyphens. my-tool.com is basically unusable for direct traffic. Nobody remembers where the hyphen goes. If the unhyphenated version is taken, consider a different TLD before accepting the hyphen.

Avoid numbers. tool4devs.com and tools4devs.com are two different domains causing perpetual confusion. The ambiguity between "4" and "four" is a self-inflicted wound.

.com still dominates. Outside specific niches (.io in tech startups, .gov for government), .com has memorability advantage and perception of legitimacy. If the .com is taken and the owner won't sell for a reasonable price, consider renaming before accepting the .net of the same name.

Alternative TLDs that work: .io is accepted in the tech world; .co works for global companies; .dev is solid for development tools (forces HTTPS via preload HSTS). New gTLDs like .app, .tools, .shop can work but require more branding effort.

Words with multiple spellings funnel errors. If your domain contains a word people commonly misspell, register the variants. The cost is low; the benefit is permanent.

DNS basics: the minimum you need to understand

After registering, you'll configure DNS records. The ones you'll use most often:

A — maps a domain or subdomain to an IPv4 address.

example.com.   A   203.0.113.42

AAAA — same as A, but for IPv6.

CNAME — an alias pointing to another name. Used for www to point to the root domain, or for subdomains pointing to external services (Vercel, Netlify, Heroku).

www   CNAME   example.com.
blog  CNAME   mysite.netlify.app.

Note: CNAME at the apex (example.com without subdomain) isn't allowed by the RFC. Cloudflare has a proprietary workaround called CNAME Flattening. Other registrars don't — you need an A record with a direct IP.

MX — defines mail servers for the domain. Without this, your domain doesn't receive email.

TXT — free-text field. Used for domain verification (Google Search Console, email providers), SPF records, DKIM.

NS — defines which nameservers are authoritative for the domain. When you move to Cloudflare for DNS, you update NS records.

TTL (Time to Live): how many seconds external DNS resolvers can cache a record. For planned changes (server migrations, IP changes), lower the TTL to 300 seconds in advance. For stable records, a high TTL (86400 = 1 day) reduces latency and load.

Domain registered — what next?

Two mistakes I see constantly after registration:

Not enabling auto-renewal. Expired domains are serious problems. If the domain is powering a real product, enable auto-renewal and keep the registrar's payment method current. The recovery window after expiration exists, but involves extra fees and potential downtime.

Leaving the domain on the registrar's nameservers. Registrars offer DNS as an add-on, not as their main product. Their DNS interface tends to be more limited and performance, inferior. For most cases, moving nameservers to Cloudflare (free, fast, excellent interface) is the right call right after registration.

Transferring a domain

If you need to move a domain to another registrar:

1. Unlock the domain at the current registrar (a transfer lock is active by default)
2. Obtain the EPP code (also called Auth Code or Transfer Key) — a transfer password
3. Initiate the transfer at the new registrar using that code
4. Wait for email confirmation (up to 5 business days, often faster in practice)

To check the current state of nameservers and DNS records during a migration — especially useful when TTL hasn't propagated yet and you want to confirm what different resolvers are seeing — I use IP Address Info.

Frequently asked questions

Can I lose my domain if I forget to renew?

Yes. The process has phases: first the domain expires (inactive but still yours), then it enters a "grace period" where you pay an extra fee to recover it, then "redemption" with an even higher fee, and finally it's deleted and becomes available to anyone. Timing varies by TLD. For .com, the full cycle from expiration to public availability can take up to 80 days — but don't count on that buffer. Enable auto-renewal.

What's the difference between a registrar and a registry?

A registrar is the company you hire to make the registration — Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, Google Domains. A registry is the organization that maintains the official TLD database — Verisign for .com, Donuts for many new gTLDs. You interact with the registrar; the registrar interacts with the registry.

Are .io domains at risk because of the Chagos deal?

The .io TLD belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). With the agreement to transfer Chagos to Mauritius, BIOT technically ceases to exist, which could lead to .io being retired as a ccTLD. In practice, ICANN has precedent for keeping TLDs from extinct countries around for years — .su for the Soviet Union still exists. The .io TLD will likely persist for decades, but if you're building something that needs brand longevity, the risk isn't zero.

Do I need to register all variations of my domain?

For most independent projects, no. For products with real traffic and an established brand, registering .com + .co.uk (if your audience is UK-based) + common misspellings is worth the low cost. The goal isn't to own every TLD — it's to cover the cases where a user ends up in the wrong place.

Right name, right registrar, DNS understood

The domain decision is permanent in ways most technical decisions aren't. You can migrate databases, swap frameworks, rewrite APIs — but changing the domain of a product with real traffic means months of redirects, updating external links, and losing accumulated SEO equity.

It's worth spending an hour choosing well before registering, rather than spending months living with the wrong choice. A good domain is one nobody has to ask how to spell.