Buying a domain without the year-two surprise

The price you pay to register a domain is almost never the price you keep paying. The number that matters is the renewal, and most registrars bury it behind a cheap first year.

Where to buy

A registrar is just who you rent the name from. A few worth knowing:

• Cloudflare Registrar: sells at wholesale cost, no markup, the same price every year. You have to use Cloudflare's DNS and it doesn't carry every extension, but for a .com it's the cheapest honest option.
• Porkbun and Namecheap: clear pricing, free WHOIS privacy, no aggressive upsells.
• GoDaddy and its lookalikes: fine technically, but the checkout is a minefield of add-ons and the renewal jumps hard. Buy elsewhere, or at least uncheck everything.

The year-two trap

That "$0.99 first year" is marketing. The same name often renews at $15 to $20. Before you buy, find the renewal price, not the promo. The extension matters just as much:

• .com is boring and stable, roughly $10 to $15 a year everywhere.
• .io, .ai, .dev and friends look sharp and cost more, often $35 to $60+, and they tend to climb.
• The ultra-cheap new extensions like .xyz or .online usually renew far higher than they sell.

Pick the extension you can afford to renew for years, not the one that's cheap this week.

Small things that save money and headaches

• Turn on auto-renew. A domain you let lapse can be grabbed and resold back to you for a lot more.
• WHOIS privacy should be free. If a registrar charges for it, that tells you what kind of registrar it is.
• Skip the bundled hosting, email, and "protection" upsells. You can add those later and cheaper, separately.
• New registrations and transfers are locked for 60 days by ICANN, so buy where you actually want to stay.

Buy the name, point the DNS, set a reminder for the renewal date. That's the whole job.