Domain registrars

1. Learn it

• ▸You don't own a domain forever — you rent it yearly. Let it lapse and someone else can take it.
• ▸The registrar is the shop. Your hosting is somewhere else entirely, and the two are connected by DNS.
• ▸A .com is easiest for people to remember; .io, .app and .dev are normal for builder products.
• ▸Turn on auto-renew and privacy protection the day you buy, or your home address ends up in a public directory.
• ▸Cheap first-year offers often renew at three times the price. Look at the renewal cost, not the sticker.

Cost: Roughly $10–15 a year for a .com; more for short or trendy endings.

Pick a name you can say out loud

Write down three candidate names. Say each one down an imaginary phone line and write how the other person would spell it.

1. 1Search for your name at a registrar such as Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar or Porkbun.
2. 2Buy it with auto-renew and WHOIS privacy switched on.
3. 3You now own the address but nothing is at it — that's the DNS step, next station.
4. 4If you build here, you can also buy and connect a domain directly inside your project settings.

MessyDev never signs you up, spends your money, or touches your accounts. You do that part.

4. Use it

The moment you want to send someone a link that isn't a random preview address.