About Check a Domain
A 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.
What you can check, rather than take on trust
Plenty of domain sites call themselves independent. It is an easy word to print and a hard one to verify, so here is what this site claims instead — four things you can confirm for yourself in a few minutes.
- No registry pays us anything. Not for placement, not for a favorable page, not at all. There is no extension on this site whose write-up was bought, and the ones we advise against are documented as thoroughly as the ones we recommend.
- We rank no registrar and name none as best. The registrar guide describes the criteria and leaves the choice with you, because a ranking published by a site paid on referrals is not a ranking.
- The renewal price is always shown beside the first-year price. That is the number a discount-led seller has an interest in keeping quiet, and it is the one you will pay for the rest of the name's life.
- Every paid link is marked as one — in the visible text
beside it and in the page's own markup, as
rel="sponsored nofollow". View the source of any page and check.
What we are not is disinterested. We earn a commission when somebody registers a domain through a link here, and the next section says exactly how. Both things are true at once, and you are better served by knowing the second than by being told the first.
How we make money, and what that means
Two ways, and both of them are worth stating plainly, because they are the reason to be skeptical of any advice a domain site gives you.
Availability and pricing shown on this site are queried live from our accredited reseller partner's API. The buttons that say register, transfer or backorder are affiliate links to Dynadot, an ICANN-accredited registrar, and we earn a commission if you buy through one. It costs you nothing extra, and it is disclosed next to every one of those buttons as well as here and on our affiliate disclosure page.
Our response to that conflict is structural rather than promissory. We publish the renewal price beside the registration price in every result, because the renewal is the number you will pay for the rest of the name's life. We document the extensions we would advise against as thoroughly as the ones we would recommend, and several pages on this site exist specifically to tell a reader not to buy something. We name no registrar as best, because the right registrar depends on what you are doing. A reference that only says flattering things is not a reference, and a reference that is paid to flatter is worth less than nothing.
Where our data comes from
- Availability and pricing come from an accredited reseller partner's API, queried live and cached only briefly. That is a different relationship from the registration links, which go to Dynadot — see our affiliate disclosure.
- 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 writes this
Bill Hartzer writes and reviews the pages on this site. He has worked with domain names, registrars and registries since 1996, serves as an expert witness in matters involving domain names, search and online advertising, and is the founder of both Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess.
That experience is the reason this site exists in the shape it does. Most of what is documented here came from watching it go wrong for somebody: a transfer that failed because nobody knew where the auth code lived, a renewal missed because the contact address on the registrant record belonged to an employee who left, an extension bought for a first-year price that renewed at eight times that. The extension pages spend as much time on eligibility rules, transfer mechanics and registry policy as they do on price because those are the things that actually cost people their names.
Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess
Check a Domain is published by Hartzer Consulting and its domain practice, DNAccess. The two do different work and the difference matters if you arrived here with a problem rather than a purchase.
Hartzer Consulting has advised organizations on technical SEO, website and domain migrations, search engine marketing, and internet investigations for more than twenty-five years, including expert witness engagements. Domain migrations are the overlap: moving a site to a new name is a search problem and a DNS problem at the same time, and the projects that go badly usually go badly at the seam between the two.
DNAccess works on the other side of the same subject: domain portfolio management, premium acquisition, domain recovery, stolen and hijacked domain investigations, registrar disputes, expired-domain recovery, and registry-level security including registry lock, DNSSEC and multi-factor policy across a portfolio. If a name has been taken, locked, improperly transferred or lost to an expiry nobody caught, that is the practice that handles it. Our guide to recovering a stolen or hijacked domain is the free version of the first conversation.
How these pages are made
Every extension page and every guide is written from sourced research, is attributed to a named author, and carries the date it was published and the date its content last changed. We describe that process in full on our editorial process page, and every content page on the site links to it from its byline.
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.