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