Affiliate disclosure
What we earn from, where, and what we do about the conflict that creates.
The short version
Check a Domain earns a commission when a visitor registers, transfers, backorders or buys a service through a link on this site. That commission is paid by the registrar, not by you, and the price you pay is the same either way. Nothing you read here is written because it earns more.
Which links are affiliate links
Any link or button on this site that sends you to
Dynadot is an
affiliate link. That includes the Register a domain button in the
navigation, the Register and Backorder buttons in every search
result, and the panels offering a transfer, a backorder, closeout inventory,
email hosting or a site builder. Every one of them carries a note saying so at
the point of the click, and every one is marked in the page's own markup with
rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the correct declaration for a
paid link.
Links to registry operators, IANA, ICANN, Wikipedia and other reference sources are not affiliate links and earn us nothing. Links between pages on this site are not affiliate links either.
What the tools use, and why that is separate
Availability, pricing and suggestion results come from our accredited reseller partner's API rather than from an affiliate feed. That separation is deliberate: the number you see is the number the registry channel reports, not a number chosen to make a purchase look attractive. Registration and renewal prices are shown side by side for the same reason.
What we do about the conflict
A site that earns money on registrations has an obvious incentive to tell you to register things. We handle that in three ways, all of them structural rather than promised.
- The renewal price is always shown next to the first-year price. The renewal is the number you will pay for the rest of the name's life, and it is the number a discount-led registrar has an interest in keeping quiet.
- We document what we would advise against. Several pages on this site exist to tell a reader that an extension is a bad fit, that buying every variant of a name is usually wasted renewal budget, or that a bundled free domain is not free. Those pages cost us money and they stay.
- We do not rank registrars. We describe the criteria that separate them and leave the choice with you, because a ranking published by a site paid on referrals is not a ranking.
Other relationships
Check a Domain is published by Hartzer Consulting and DNAccess, which are the same people. Where a page mentions DNAccess, it is describing a related business and not an independent recommendation, and it says so on the page. We are not affiliated with ICANN, IANA, or any registry operator, and nothing on this site is endorsed by them.
Questions about any of this go to [email protected].