Where to register a domain. Price comparison

Until recently, I had three problems with domain registration:

• Choose a domain and quickly check its employment.
  Any domain name registrar offers you a form in which you enter the desired word, asks to send it, wait a few seconds, find out if the name is free. Then repeat. If you are in a highly competitive niche where all vocabulary names are occupied, then you can spend several hours doing this exciting activity. For me, the domainr solved this problem for several years in a row. It checks domains as soon as you enter their names.
  
  
• Postpone a few successful domains to choose the best after.
  This is incredible, but almost no service other than namemesh allows you to add domains to your favorites. Unfortunately, he asks to register, as we all love it. On the websites of registrars, the problem is solved with the help of a basket. First we add everything to the order, then we throw out the excess. Long, inconvenient, no options before my eyes.
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• Buy a domain where it is sold and where it is cheaper.
  The problem of registrar accreditation primarily concerns newTLD domains ( .bike , .restaurant , .tools, and others). Your favorite recorder can easily have .travel , but not .work . Finding out who can register an already familiar .io domain for you is not a trivial task, let alone finding a place to make it cheaper.
  
  The registrar's task is to make a record of the domain in a single database and provide a set of services related to the address (DNS, SSL, and others). The current reality is that almost all registrars offer the same services, but they charge for completely different money. And if the difference of 300 rubles for the purchase of a .ru domain from different registrars is not particularly important, then register a dozen typo domains in the .net zone can cost from 3,000 to 13,000 rubles, depending on the registrar ( $ 8.99 / 650 r / $ 34.99 ) .

Three weeks ago the work on the next project was completed and I was in free swimming. Thinking about what to do next, I looked through the accumulated list of ideas. I wanted to do something simple, learn a couple of new technologies and solve a pressing problem. Suddenly, the puzzle has taken shape.

I suggest your heed Here is Domain .

The service answers the questions “can I register a domain somadomain.tld?” And “which registrar and at what price?” As easily and quickly as possible. In addition to favorites, a search that remembers what you are interested in and some statistics.

Who needs it?

With this phrase, a dialogue began with a colleague who owns a reseller platform and has several dozen domains.
- Who needs it? - he asked skeptically. - Ordinary people do not care, and professionals already know where the prices are.
- And you, for example, where do you get .com ?
- Here, at 412 rubles. I have great momentum, and therefore the maximum discount.
- Look, in this list , at least four registrars who sell .com cheaper than 412 rubles.
- Um, interesting ...

Details

It was very difficult to force myself to step over the perfectionist filter and show the project, which is at the alpha stage. On the other hand, it is better to understand beforehand whether the project is in the interests of the audience, than to achieve the ideal for half a year and understand that you are engaged in nonsense.

Whois

Before swimming into the abyss of dns, whois servers, IANA rules and ICANN, registrars and domain exchanges, my view of the industry was rather superficial. Problems began already at the stage of polling remote servers. Professionals may not read, but people who are not connected with server administration will be interested to know that answering the question “whether this domain is registered” is a very trivial task.

Firstly, each domain has a whois server at an address that is not associated with the domain. So the whois.monic.mo server answers questions about the .mo domain, and whois.ksregistry.net tells about .mini .

Secondly, information on some domains can only be obtained by requesting it by email (!) Or by typing a request on the site and filling in a captcha (hello, .es ). There are workarounds and I still think about them.

Third, the servers provide information in completely different forms and in different languages. Some servers have a hard limit on the number of calls to them (hello, .ru ). There are servers that deal exclusively with redirects to others, but their bases are often unreliable.

I was even taken aback when a colleague asked me, “What is the difficulty? Well, chew up the answer console command whois domain.tld ".

About IDN and new domains

An IDN is when part of a domain or the entire address is written in a language other than Latin. The story is rather new (unlike whois servers) and seemingly standardized. In practice, no one knows the uniform rules by which one or another name can or cannot be written. There are public tables , but they are not complete, they do not have an impressive part of the domains (hello, . ). In fact, in order to write a test for a correct name in the zone .ad , you need to find the site of the owners of the zone and it may be published rules.

In 2011, the New gTLD program was adopted on which it became possible to register any top-level domains. Strict standards appeared here, for example, on whois servers, but it became very difficult to determine the price of a domain at the time of pre-order or priority registration. Registrars display available domains in their interfaces, which will be such only in a few months. Prices for domains in the period of priority registration can often be found only by putting the address in the basket on the registrar's website.

About the name of the service

Despite the complexity and deviations from the standards in the domain market, the most difficult was to find a name for the service. What irony, the service to search for domains has been looking for a domain for almost a week. The fact is that the word domain as such is used in an incredible combination of parsed names. However, nothing surprising.

In an attempt to find the name, I even used the Textdreamer service. Dozens of $ 99 freelancers generate hundreds of titles. Oh, these incredible fruits of creative thought! My psyche was enough to finish reading this option and close the competition, stopping the counter on 710 proposed domains.

Interesting Facts

• Registrars one another smarter. For example, 1 & 1 will register almost any domain for you for $ 0.99. At the same time, it will require registration for several years at once. Obviously, the prices for further years are far from the market.
• Or, Domain.com will sell you a .rich domain for only $ 10, but the second year will cost $ 2,800.
• The largest difference among the national domains in terms of money for the domain .na (the difference is $ 1950). In percentage - .cf (a difference of 76 times), .cn (a difference of 23 times).
• The cheapest domains today: .info , .pp.ua and .pw
• A list of registrars with domains that they register is cheaper than anyone else.

What are your plans?

The first and most important thing is to understand if I am not bullshit and whether there is a real need for what I am doing. As soon as this stage is completed, I plan to take the following steps.

• More registrars are better. It often makes sense to add a local registrar just for the sake of cheap local domains. For example, エ ル ド メ イ ン sells .jp domains for about 920 rubles, while the closest competitor is more than 2,000.
• Now the interface displays only the fact of being busy and it is assumed that if the domain is busy, then go on, choose another one. Although, in fact, a huge number of domains are occupied by squatters and exhibited on various exchanges. If there is a domain on the exchange, I plan to immediately display its value.
• It is necessary to carefully divide the domains into those that support IDN and others. For those that support, it is correct to validate and warn if something is wrong. Now it works only for a few Cyrillic domains, like .site , .rf , .ukr and a couple of others.
• The next step is to make the search more intelligent. You can add prefixes, hyphens, postfixes, remove vowels, replace consonant fragments (x -> cs, s -> z), duplicate (data -> dadata) and other lexical tricks.

Other services

Here is a complete list of services that I found and which have something similar to what I did.

• Domparison Prices from many registrars for some popular domain zones.
• Namemesh You can choose a domain with prefixes, variations in spelling and in several zones. There are links and prices for four registrars.
• Domaintyper The closest idea for speed checking. Unfortunately, only a couple of recorders and a few zones.
• Bustaname Probably a handy utility for the selection. Unfortunately, only five zones and a few registrars.
• Domai.nr The project that inspired me to venture. I borrowed the interface idea from these guys.