Domain registrars

A domain registrar is where you buy a domain name and renew it every year: it records you as the owner with the registry, and usually also hosts the domain's DNS, hides your contact details from public WHOIS and forwards email and web addresses. Anyone with a website, an app or a company email address needs one. Registrars differ less in what a domain is than in what it costs over time: many sell the first year at a discount and renew at a much higher price, some add the ICANN fee on top, and restore fees for an expired domain range from tens to hundreds of dollars.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's price tables, carts, agreements, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the .com renewal price is shown before the cart, whether the ICANN fee is added on top, whether the restore fee is published, and whether the pages contradict each other.
• 3-year cost of one .com: the first year plus two renewals at US list prices, with any added fee, without coupons, new-customer offers or memberships; the arithmetic is shown.
• Renewal-price stability: how far the renewal price is above the first-year price, and whether a transfer in costs more than a renewal.
• Included essentials: free WHOIS privacy, DNS hosting with the option of other nameservers, DNSSEC, email and URL forwarding, and the transfer lock on by default.
• Checkout and renewal terms: paid add-ons pre-selected in the cart, multi-year terms, the restore fee, the grace period after expiry and the refund window.
• Exit and account control: a self-serve auth code, no transfer-out fee, DNS zone export, an API and security-key two-factor sign-in.

How fast DNS changes spread or a transfer completes depends on registries and other providers, so we do not score it. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.