Buying a New Domain

If you do not have a web address yet, you can search for one and buy it without leaving your dashboard. Buying is limited to owners.

Searching

Open Domain and search for a name. You will see which endings are available — .com, .net and others — priced in the same currency as the rest of your account. Each result shows the first-year price and what it renews at, because those two are often very different.

Premium names, the ones registries price individually, cannot be bought here. If you have your heart set on one, your developer can arrange it.

Buying

A website has one address at a time, so you buy one name at once, and a website that already has one must remove it before buying another. Payment is taken from the card already on your account; if there is no card on file yet you are told to add one in billing rather than being left with a failed purchase.

Before you pay, you enter the details of the domain's owner: a name, an address, a phone number and an email. The domain is registered in that name, with you as its registrant. We stay its administrative, technical and billing contact, which is how we set it up and renew it for you. The details are filled in from your last purchase, and anything the registrar would refuse is marked before you are charged.

Domains are registered for one year. Private registration is included at no charge, so your name, address and phone number are not published in the public register. A few endings cannot be bought here, because they cannot keep those details private or need registry paperwork we do not collect; the search says so beside them.

What happens next

Everything else is done for you. The domain is registered, its nameservers are pointed at us, DNS records are created, a security certificate is issued, and your site and dashboard are moved onto the new address. You never have to edit a DNS record yourself.

You get an email when it is ready. The address may take a little longer to work everywhere, because nameserver changes spread across the internet gradually rather than all at once — that is normal and needs nothing from you.

If something goes wrong after you have paid

Registration can fail after the payment has gone through — a name taken moments earlier, or the registrar refusing it.

You are refunded automatically. You do not have to ask, and you should not buy it again to try to force it through.

After purchase

Your domain appears on the Domain page with the date it renews. See Domain Renewals for how renewals are charged and how to turn automatic renewal on or off.