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?
In theory you could become a registrar and pay the icann’s fee per domain to sell domains to yourself for cheaper. In practice, becoming a registrar is prohibitively expensive because you have to pay ICANN 10k, and then spend a whole lot more on certifications and processes, and audits from auditors. I recommend staying away from GoDaddy as they are infamous for being very bad to do business with, personally I’d recommend gandi.net and google.domains. namecheap also has interesting offerings.
If you are a student, the Github Student Pack gives you a free .me domain for a year.
it’s “only” 10K? It isn’t so much if you think about it, I expected a lot more
If you are a student, the Github Student Pack gives you a free .me domain for a year. cool! after the 1 year you can pay to keep it or just let it go?
10k is just the nominal fee, the real costs are in the certifications and audits.
the student pack just gives you a 1 year free promo code so you can pay to keep it.
I 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 :)
thanks for the tip! I’m not going to buy any domain, I was just curious about how they work
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.
If I remember correctly, whoever sells domains is essentially giving you an IP they have access to. You’re essentially buying 123.456.1.10 and pointing it to abcdefghi.net (domain name). When you buy it, and set it to the domain name you chose, then the seller (go daddy) will update ISP DNS providers and such so that people who type in abcdefghi.net will go to 123.456.1.10, AKA your site.
I hope that’s right XD
It’s the other way round. You are buying the right to edit which IP the domain points to.
Okay, yeah. you’re right I think?
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?
