The basics
Registrar
A registrar is a company accredited to sell domain names and manage them for you, such as GoDaddy or Namecheap. You register and renew a domain through one.
What Registrar means in practice
The registrar takes your order, passes it to the registry, sets the nameservers you choose, and offers tools such as renewals, transfers and a transfer lock. Prices and extras differ between registrars even for the same name.
Your registrar is the company to confirm with before you rely on a name being free or yours: it can see the live state, including holds and renewal rules, that a public list cannot.
Why it matters
The registrar controls renewal, transfer and the grace periods after expiry, so it is the first place to look when a name expires or disappears.
Try it
- Domain Health Check Expiry date, transfer lock, DNS, SPF and DMARC email security, and blocklists for a .com.
- Availability Checker Check up to 50 names at once: taken, available, or about to drop.
Related terms
- Registry A registry is the organisation that runs one top-level domain and keeps the master database of its names. Verisign is the registry for .com.
- Transfer lock A transfer lock is a setting at the registrar that stops a domain from being moved to another registrar without the owner's approval.
- Expired domain An expired domain is a name whose registration period ended without being renewed. It is not released at once: it passes through several grace periods first.