About Check a Domain
An independent reference for domain names, with a working search attached.
What this site is
Check a Domain does two things. It lets you search for domain names and see live availability and pricing, and it documents what each extension actually is — who operates the registry, who is eligible to register, how transfers work, and what the rules say.
The second part is the reason the first part exists. There is no shortage of places to type a domain name into a box. There is a shortage of places that tell you, before you buy, that the extension you are looking at renews at five times its first-year price, or requires a local presence you do not have, or sits on the HSTS preload list and will not load over plain HTTP.
How we make money, and what that means
Domain registration is provided through our accredited reseller partner, and we earn a margin when you register through us. We think you should know that, because it is the reason to be sceptical of any registrar's advice.
Our response to that conflict is to publish the renewal price next to the registration price in every result, and to document the extensions we would advise against as thoroughly as the ones we would recommend. A reference that only says flattering things is not a reference.
Where our data comes from
- Availability and pricing come from our registry partner's API, queried live and cached only briefly.
- Registration records come from RDAP, the ICANN-mandated protocol that replaced WHOIS for generic extensions in January 2025.
- DNS records come from public DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers.
- Registry facts — operators, delegation dates, eligibility rules, transfer processes — come from IANA, ICANN, and the registry operators' own published policies.
Who runs this
Check a Domain is a service of Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess.
Hartzer Consulting has advised organisations on technical SEO, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, and internet investigations for more than twenty-five years, including expert witness work in matters involving domain names, search, and online advertising. DNAccess works on the other side of the same problem: domain portfolio management, premium acquisition, domain recovery, stolen and hijacked domain investigations, registrar disputes, and registry-level security including registry lock and DNSSEC.
That is the background this site is written from. It is why the extension pages spend as much time on eligibility rules, transfer mechanics, and registry policy as they do on price, and why the security and dispute guides go further than a registrar's help centre usually does. Most of what is documented here came from watching it go wrong for someone.
Corrections
Registry policy changes, sometimes with little notice. If something on this site is wrong or out of date, we would rather know. Write to us and we will fix it and say so.