Domain Name Registration
Domain name registration is the act of reserving a name on the Internet for a certain time frame, often a year. It’s crucial to understand that you cannot buy a domain name that will last forever; instead, it will only belong to you for as long as you renew it.
To use a website, email, or other online service, a domain name must be registered. It’s not necessary to register a new domain name every time, however. Many businesses let you to use their major domain (ex. yahoo.com, gmail.com) for emails or subdomains of their domain names for websites.
The primary benefit of registering a domain name is that it gives you a distinct and recognizable identity. A domain name’s owner information becomes public once it is registered.
The cost to register a domain name varies significantly depending on its extension. For instance, certain country-specific domain name extensions are five times more costly than the most popular.com domain name extension.
Procedure for Registering a Domain Name
A domain name registrant has to register their domain name with an ICANN-accredited registrar in order to reserve it in a gTLD. The registrar will verify if the domain name is open for registration and include the registrant’s details in a WHOIS record. Using a registrar’s resellers is another way to register domain names.
The primary roles of the parties that are typically engaged in the process are shown in the figure below.
The individual or entity that registered the domain name is known as the registrant. The domain name registrant often applies online to a domain registrar or one of their resellers to do this. The terms and conditions of the registrar with whom the domain name is registered, such as following a particular code of conduct or protecting the registrar and registry from any legal or civil action brought as a consequence of using the domain name, are binding on the domain name registrant. These terms and conditions include obligations on the part of domain name registrants, such as paying registration costs and providing correct data on time.
For a domain name to be accessible on the Internet, its registrant must also have their name displayed on name servers in addition to registering the domain name. If the registrar does not provide this service, or if the registrant has chosen to forego the registrar’s service, then the registrant of the domain name is in charge of obtaining or running their own name server.
A person or organization may sometimes hire a proxy service provider to register domain names on their behalf if they do not want their details to be published in WHOIS. Here, the domain name registrant—rather than the final client—is the service provider.
ICANN-accredited firms with registries certification to sell domain names are known as registrars. Both their agreements with the registries and the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN bind them. The Registry Administration Act (RAA) delineates the registrar’s duties, which encompass maintaining the WHOIS database, submitting information to registries, enabling public WHOIS searches, guaranteeing that the registrant’s details are escrowed, and adhering to RAA regulations concerning the expiration of the domain name registration tenure.
Some people who want to register domain names could choose to do so via a reseller. These companies provide additional services like web hosting, email accounts, and so forth and are associated with registrars. Resellers are not ICANN accredited; instead, they are constrained by the terms of their agreements with the registrant or registrars whose services they offer. Nonetheless, the registrar that they are reselling on behalf of will continue to be responsible for the domain names sold by the reseller and serve as the sponsor for the domain name registration.
Registries are in charge of keeping each TLD’s registry up to date, while registrars are hired to handle the day-to-day operations of selling domain name registrations. The registries are responsible for a number of tasks, such as receiving registration requests from registrars or directly from domain name registrants, keeping a database of the information required for domain name registration, and supplying name servers for the dissemination of zone file data—that is, domain name location data—across the Internet.
The non-profit organization in charge of assigning IP addresses and domain names is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). It has contractual agreements with registries and registrars that form the basis of the WHOIS system, and it is in charge of maintaining the root server and TLD name system.