Registering a domain is the act of paying a fee to a domain registrar to use a domain name for a specified period of time. The registrant needs first to check the availability of the domain and then open an account with the registrant. The fee depends on the registrar and on the extension of the domain. For a .com domain with a cheap & reliable registrar, prices are as low as $6 to $9 per year. But, in order to survive, registrars tend to put ahead unattractive offers, destined to customers that are not familiar to the market prices. For example, enom.com asks for about $30 a year to register a .com domain name, but this falls to $9 with a reseller account, which is entirely free. The normal price for registering .com domain names is currently at $9 per year with Godaddy, but it falls at $6.5 when one subscribes to their Di$count Domain Club offer, which becomes profitable after only a few dozens of domain names owned. For country-code tld (.de, .es, .co.uk...) registration fees range from 0 (but generally these offers are limited to the inhabitants of the given country) to $xxx. The registrant can choose the number of years for which a domain name will be registered and then renew it before the expiry date.

Once a domain has been registered, it becomes immediately available if it is a generic extension (.com, .net, etc.) and after a few hours or a few days for country-codes tld. The registrant can choose to park the domain or develop a website. Developping a website needs to purchase a web hosting, which is not necessarily offered by the registrant. The price of web hosting solutions range from 0 to several hundreds of dollars, although free web hostings plans are usually sufficient for most websites.

 

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