Researched guides to finding, checking and buying domain names, and the infrastructure behind them.
Subscribe by RSS.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.
.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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.