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?
https://tld-list.com/tld/com have some understanding of how this works:
- There’s a non-profit organisation called ICANN at the top who basically controls everything and assigns TLD (top level domains like .com) and so on to registries.
- Registries host different TLDs and keep track of all domains under them.
- Registrar is an ICANN accredited company that can sell domain names. When you buy abcd.net from say Google domains, Google basically files your domain name with the .net registery.
As far as I know, you can’t buy a domain from ICANN directly because they don’t sell stuff? Only registrars can.
In practice there are registrars that charge you the actual price of the domain + a small registration fee (15 cents maybe) in a transparent way without any markup. An example is cloudflare.
Also in practice stay away from GoDaddy. They’re one of the most horrible companies I know. Porkbun, cloudflare, namecheap, namesilo, Google are all usually moderately priced good options. You can find details of all registrars for a tld and their prices using tld-list like: tld-list.com/tld/nameoftld.
Hope that helps :)
Also, be very careful about who ultimately owns the domain name that you’re buying.
I know of someone who “bought” a domain for a ridiculous price and it turned out that they didn’t actually own it. The company registered it in their own name so that he wasn’t able to transfer it to another registrar and had to continue to pay the high fees if he wanted to keep the domain.
Well shady.
Isn’t that parking? I don’t think this would be legal in many places given there wasn’t a completely egregarious contact he missed or something similar.
thanks for the tip! I’m not going to buy any domain, I was just curious about how they work
Just to expand on the other (excellent) answers.
Why can’t you buy a bottle of ketchup directly from Heinz? Well, Heinz only sell wholesale to other businesses, like supermarkets. That’s a simple model for them - not having to sell to end users. They don’t want to be in a retail business because it’s cheaper selling to other businesses.
Additionally, most people don’t want to go to the Heinz shop for their ketchup and the Hellmans Shop for their mayonnaise. Most customers want one place where they can buy all their condiments together.
Registrars buy domains wholesale from registries. So you can go to a registrar and buy a .com or .co.uk and email hosting and a blogging platform.
I don’t think there are any Registries which sell direct to end customers. They don’t want your £10 - they want a Registrar’s £10,000.
Q: So does ICANN have its own Doman Name Server (for those who dont know: list of domain and IPs, like a phone catalog) that the other commercial DNS’ (like local ISPs and Google DNS and cloudflare DNS) is connected directly to?
