Researched guides to finding, checking and buying domain names, and the infrastructure behind them.
Subscribe by RSSA practical, research-informed guide to choosing a domain name. Covers memorability, extensions, spelling, length, keywords, legal risks, and a scoring framework you can use today.
.ai became the default for AI companies and its price and scarcity followed. Now the US government calls AI "Super Intelligence", .si overtook .ai in daily registrations within a day, and the two compare very differently on cost, rules, availability and risk.
A .si domain takes a few minutes to register from anywhere in the world. Check that the name is free, compare registrar prices, register it, then point it where it needs to go. Plus what to do when the name you want is already listed for sale.
.ai is the default extension for AI companies, with a price to match: a two-year minimum term and renewals far above .com. What it really costs, who runs it now, and when it is worth paying.
Two letters, open to anyone in the world, and since the White House renamed AI to "Super Intelligence" in September 2026, the fastest growing extension on the internet. What .si is, who runs it, what it costs, and what the rush means for you.
Add a DMARC policy to your domain in Cloudflare: the exact TXT record, where to click, and how to move from monitoring to enforcement without losing mail.
Add a DMARC policy to your domain in GoDaddy: the exact TXT record, where to click, and how to move from monitoring to enforcement without losing mail.
Add a DMARC policy to your domain in Hostinger: the exact TXT record, where to click, and how to move from monitoring to enforcement without losing mail.
Add a DMARC policy to your domain in Namecheap: the exact TXT record, where to click, and how to move from monitoring to enforcement without losing mail.
Add a DMARC policy to your domain in Squarespace: the exact TXT record, where to click, and how to move from monitoring to enforcement without losing mail.
Add a TXT record in Cloudflare for domain verification or email: which fields to fill in, exact examples and the mistakes that make verification fail.
Add a TXT record in GoDaddy for domain verification or email: which fields to fill in, exact examples and the mistakes that make verification fail.
Add a TXT record in Hostinger for domain verification or email: which fields to fill in, exact examples and the mistakes that make verification fail.
Add a TXT record in Namecheap for domain verification or email: which fields to fill in, exact examples and the mistakes that make verification fail.
Add a TXT record in Squarespace for domain verification or email: which fields to fill in, exact examples and the mistakes that make verification fail.
Add or edit an SPF record in Cloudflare: the exact TXT record, where to click, the ten-lookup limit and the one-record rule.
Add or edit an SPF record in GoDaddy: the exact TXT record, where to click, the ten-lookup limit and the one-record rule.
Add or edit an SPF record in Hostinger: the exact TXT record, where to click, the ten-lookup limit and the one-record rule.
Add or edit an SPF record in Namecheap: the exact TXT record, where to click, the ten-lookup limit and the one-record rule.
Add or edit an SPF record in Squarespace: the exact TXT record, where to click, the ten-lookup limit and the one-record rule.
Add or replace MX records in Cloudflare so your domain receives email: exact values for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and the mistakes that lose mail.
Add or replace MX records in GoDaddy so your domain receives email: exact values for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and the mistakes that lose mail.
Add or replace MX records in Hostinger so your domain receives email: exact values for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and the mistakes that lose mail.
Add or replace MX records in Namecheap so your domain receives email: exact values for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and the mistakes that lose mail.
Add or replace MX records in Squarespace so your domain receives email: exact values for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and the mistakes that lose mail.
Change the nameservers of a domain in Cloudflare without downtime: what to copy first, where to click and why DNSSEC can break it.
Change the nameservers of a domain in GoDaddy without downtime: what to copy first, where to click and why DNSSEC can break it.
Change the nameservers of a domain in Hostinger without downtime: what to copy first, where to click and why DNSSEC can break it.
Change the nameservers of a domain in Namecheap without downtime: what to copy first, where to click and why DNSSEC can break it.
Change the nameservers of a domain in Squarespace without downtime: what to copy first, where to click and why DNSSEC can break it.
These two sit at opposite ends of the market. Cloudflare sells domains at cost and makes no profit on them. GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world and monetises everything around them. Neither is wrong, and the right answer depends on one question.
The 48-hour figure is from an era that ended. Verisign now updates the .com zone every three minutes, and your record changes are limited only by the TTL you set. There is one genuine exception, and it is the one nobody mentions.
Both are the sensible alternative to GoDaddy, both include privacy free, and both are cheap enough that price alone will not decide it. The difference shows up in renewal structure and in what each includes without asking.
Four parties are involved in every domain and most people can name one. Knowing which is which tells you who to contact when something breaks, why some problems cannot be fixed by support, and what you are exposed to if a company disappears.
Checking one domain is trivial. Checking four hundred is where tools quietly break, because registries rate-limit, timeouts get reported as available, and you find out at checkout.
Agencies do not have a registrar problem, they have a custody problem. Whose account holds the client’s domain, what happens when the relationship ends, and who gets the expiry email. Pick for that and the rest follows.
Browser errors look interchangeable and are not. Some mean the name does not exist, some mean it resolved fine and the server refused you. Knowing which family you are in eliminates most of the search.
Your domain loads, but it is not your site. A parking page, a default server page, an old version, or in the worst case somebody else’s content entirely. Each cause looks the same in a browser and each has a different fix.
Work from the outside in: registration, then nameservers, then records, then the server. Nine times out of ten the answer is in the first two steps, and the fix takes minutes once you know which one it is.
Verisign is raising the wholesale .com price 7% to $10.97. Every registrar pays it and every registrar will pass it on. It opens a new four-year cycle that could reach $13.45 by 2029, and there is one thing worth doing before the date.
The extension debate is usually argued on vibes. Here it is argued on cost: over five years the same domain runs about $55 in .com, $235 in .io and $414 in .ai, and that is before anyone mentions credibility.
The hour after checkout is the cheapest time to prevent every common way a domain is lost. Twelve steps, most of them free, most of them under a minute.
Two completely different products share the name "domain monitoring". One watches whether your website responds. The other watches whether you still own the domain. Here is how to tell them apart and which tool fits which job.
The pitch is that an aged domain hands you years of authority for the price of a registration. Sometimes it does. More often it hands you nothing, and occasionally it hands you a problem you cannot undo.
DNSSEC signs DNS answers so a resolver can prove they were not tampered with. Roughly one domain in twenty uses it. Here is what it protects against, what it costs you, and the failure mode that keeps adoption low.
The internet added 9.1 million domains last quarter. That headline hides the churn underneath it: on .com and .net alone, somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000 names stop being renewed every single day.
Run the same domain through three availability checkers and you can get three answers. The reason is not a conspiracy, it is that most tools guess from DNS instead of asking the registry. Here is how to get a definitive answer.
Every short .com word is registered. That is a fact, not a setback. The names that work now are built with a handful of repeatable techniques, and most of them start from a word you have not thought of yet.
Most domains never sell, and the ones that do sell to someone who was already looking for them. Here is how the market actually works, what the platforms take, and how to avoid the scams aimed at people trying to sell.
The UK agreed to hand the territory behind .io to Mauritius, and a wave of articles announced the death of the extension. Two years later .io is operating normally, the treaty has stalled, and the real timeline is nothing like the headlines.
A scan of 24 well-known brands in June 2026 found 591 live lookalike domains, and nearly half could send email. The registrations are cheap, legal to make, and usually invisible to the brand until something goes wrong.
GoDaddy is the largest registrar in the world and Namecheap built a brand on being the cheaper one. On the first year that is barely true. On renewals, which is what you actually pay, the gap is wide.
Three DNS records decide whether anyone can send email pretending to be you. Without them your domain is spoofable by default, including the domains you never send mail from.
We sync live prices from four registrars every night. Across the nine most popular extensions, the cheapest first-year price is almost never the cheapest domain. On .ai the gap over five years is $716.
Most portfolios fail in the same six ways: a card that expired, a domain nobody owns internally, a lock that was never on. A practical annual audit you can run in an afternoon.
ICANN received more than 1,600 applications for new top-level domains before the window closed in August, the first expansion of the domain system in over a decade. Here is what was applied for, when they arrive, and what it means for everyone else.
Before a domain is stolen, one field changes: clientTransferProhibited disappears. Your site stays up, DNS is untouched, and nothing tells you. ICANN gives you 60 days to notice, and expects you to notice on your own.
You cancel a cloud service but leave the DNS record pointing at it. Someone else claims that service name and now controls a subdomain of your domain, with a valid certificate and your cookies.
Automated appraisal tools are trained on completed sales, which means they are good at the names that sell often and unreliable on the names people actually ask about. Here is how to read a valuation and what really sets the price.
Nine record types cover everything you will ever need, and four of them cover almost all of it. Here is what each one does, the mistakes that break sites and mail, and why deleting the wrong line fails silently.
In April 2026 attackers social-engineered a national registry directly and took a domain that had every normal protection enabled. Around 1.2 million dollars vanished. Here is how hijacking actually works, and the version nobody notices.
One is the address. The other is the building. They are sold together so often that most people never learn they are separate purchases, and that confusion is what makes migrations painful.
A business email at your own domain costs about a dollar a month and takes twenty minutes. Here is exactly how it works, what every provider charges in 2026, and the one record that decides whether your mail lands or vanishes.
In early 2024 roughly 12.6 million free domains stopped resolving at once. Their owners had done nothing wrong. Here is what free domains really are, the legitimate ways to get one at no cost, and when free is genuinely fine.
Domains fail silently. Nothing tells you when a nameserver changes, when a certificate is about to expire, or when the name you have been waiting three months for finally drops. Here is what to watch and how.
The transfer itself is six steps and mostly waiting. The part that breaks sites is what does not come with it. Here is the full sequence, the timing rules that can block you, and the settings you must copy across first.
On 28 January 2025 ICANN dropped the requirement to run WHOIS at all. If your tooling still queries port 43, it is reading a service nobody is obliged to keep running. Here is what changed and what to use instead.
AI.com went for 70 million dollars. Every name in the top ten is a .com, most are a single dictionary word, and half sold in the last four years. Here is the list, what is missing from it, and the pattern underneath.
There are 401.6 million domains registered and .com holds 163.6 million of them. Here is what each serious extension is actually good for, the truth about .io, and the renewal pricing that turns a 2 dollar domain into a 44 dollar one.
GoDaddy registered 7.9 million new .com domains last year and still finished smaller than it started. The market leader is shrinking while at-cost registrars grow. Here is who is actually winning, and who you should use.
How to confirm whether a domain actually changed hands, what to do in the first hour, and why the registrar field in the public record is the fact that settles it.
Letters, digits and hyphens, and that is the entire ASCII list. Then there are emoji domains, Cyrillic lookalikes and the encoding that makes accented names possible. Here are the real rules, and the trap hiding inside them.
An expired domain is not a free domain. It goes through roughly 80 days of stages, only one of which is published anywhere, and at the end of it the good names are gone in milliseconds. Here is the whole timeline.
A domain name is a lease on a pointer, not a purchase of a place. Here is what you are actually renting, who the three parties are, and exactly what happens in the half second between someone typing your name and your site appearing.
Most guides tell you to run a WHOIS lookup and stop there. Since 2018 that lookup usually returns a redacted record. Here is what is still public, what it tells you, and the legitimate ways to reach an owner whose name is hidden.
There are over 1,500 extensions to choose from and .com holds 163.6 million registrations, more than every country extension on earth combined. The reason is not tradition. It is that people type it without thinking.
A blocked transfer is almost always a lock, and usually one your own registrar applied. Here is every status code and time-based rule that can stop a transfer, who controls each one, and how to tell which is holding your domain.
What actually makes a brand name memorable? We dig into the peer-reviewed psychology behind naming, separate fact from myth, and give you a practical framework for evaluating your own name.