What an availability check actually tells you
When you type a name into the box above, the request goes to our server, which asks the registry that operates that extension whether the name exists in its database. The answer comes back in a fraction of a second, and it is authoritative: the registry is the only system of record for what is and is not registered.
What the answer does not tell you is whether the name is usable. A domain can be available and still be a bad idea — because it infringes a trademark, because it was previously used for spam and carries a poor reputation, or because its renewal price is several times its first-year price. Availability is the first question, not the only one.
Why two registrars sometimes disagree
You may occasionally see one site report a name as available and another report it as taken. There are three ordinary explanations, and none of them involve anyone lying.
- Caching. Availability results are frequently cached for seconds or minutes to reduce load on registry systems. A name registered thirty seconds ago may still show as free.
- Premium and reserved names. Some names are technically unregistered but held back by the registry as premium inventory, or reserved under registry policy. Front-ends report these differently — some as available at a high price, some as unavailable.
- Extension coverage. No registrar carries every one of the roughly 1,500 extensions in existence. A name may be genuinely available in an extension your registrar does not sell.
Read the renewal price, not the first-year price
This is the single most useful habit in domain buying. A large share of extensions are marketed on a heavily discounted first year, with a renewal price several times higher. The discount is real, but it applies once. If you intend to keep the name — and if you are building a business on it, you do — the renewal price is the number that describes your actual cost.
Our results show both figures together for exactly this reason. A name at a low introductory price with a high renewal is not necessarily a bad buy, but it should be a decision you make knowingly — and renewal pricing at most registrars is discretionary rather than fixed.
When the name you want is already taken
Most searches for a good short name come back taken. There are three realistic routes forward, and it is worth being honest that there is no fourth.
- Take the same name in a different extension. This keeps the name intact, which is the part your audience remembers. The cost is that you will say the extension out loud for the life of the brand, and some of your traffic and mail will go to whoever holds the other version.
- Modify the name. Add a real second word rather than a hyphen, a digit or a dropped vowel. A compound of two ordinary words survives being spoken; a creative respelling does not.
- Approach the current owner. A registration data lookup gives you the registrar and, for most generic extensions, an anonymised email or web form that reaches the registrant without disclosing who they are. Expect silence more often than a reply, and an aftermarket asking price if you do get one.
The route that almost never works is waiting for the name to expire: valuable expiring names are usually intercepted by the registrar's own expired-domain auction during the grace period, before the deletion command is ever sent. A backorder through a drop-catching service is the realistic mechanism, and it is a bid rather than a purchase.
Taken, but is anyone actually using it?
Taken covers several very different situations, and a registration data lookup plus a DNS lookup will tell them apart in about a minute.
- No nameservers at all. A record showing the status inactive means no delegation information has been associated with the domain. It is registered, but it is not in the DNS and resolves for nobody — usually a name someone bought and never used.
- Nameservers belonging to a parking or aftermarket service. The hostnames are visible in the lookup and generally identify the operator. A domain serving one page of advertising or a for-sale notice is being held rather than used.
- An address record but no MX records. A working business almost always has mail on its primary domain. An A record with no MX usually means a redirect, a placeholder, or a defensive registration — and a recent creation date alongside it suggests speculative inventory rather than an operating business.
None of this tells you whether the owner will sell. It does tell you whether you are approaching a working business, which will usually say no, or a holder, who is in the business of saying yes at a price.
Premium and registry-reserved names
Sometimes an available name comes back at a price far above the standard rate for its extension. That is usually a registry premium name: a label the registry has placed in a higher pricing tier because it is short, a dictionary word, or otherwise desirable. It is available, and the price is the registry's rather than a reseller's. Two things about premium pricing catch buyers out. The first is that it normally recurs — a premium name generally renews at the premium rate every year, so it is a permanent line item rather than a one-off acquisition cost. The second is that tiering is a registry decision and registries differ completely. Verisign operates no premium tier for .com at all, so a high price on a .com is a private seller's asking price rather than a registry rate. Other registries tier aggressively: short, dictionary and keyword names in extensions such as .io, .ai, .tv and .me are very often registry-priced.
Reserved names are a separate category. Every registry holds back some labels under its own policy — single characters, geographic and country names, and inventory held for later release. A reserved name is neither registered nor registrable, which is why one tool may show it as unavailable and another as available at a price.
Names with accents and non-Latin characters
An internationalised domain name contains characters outside the basic ASCII set — accented Latin letters, or scripts such as Cyrillic, Greek or Han. The DNS carries only a restricted ASCII character set, so these names are encoded into an ASCII-compatible form called Punycode, producing labels beginning with the prefix xn--. The pretty form is what the browser shows; the encoded form is what the network uses.
- Support is uneven. Not every extension permits internationalised names and not every registrar sells them, so a name registrable in principle may not be orderable where you buy.
- The permitted repertoire is set per registry — .fr adds thirty characters including the ligatures and the German eszett, and the .ch registry publishes an explicit caveat that it does not guarantee such names work with every program.
- The encoded form leaks into everything technical. Server logs, mail headers, certificates and analytics show the xn-- string, which is unreadable to non-specialists and easy to mistype.
- Some extensions exist as separate script variants entirely, delegated as distinct top-level domains — .eu has Cyrillic and Greek equivalents, run by the same registry.
The pattern that works for most businesses is to treat the ASCII spelling as canonical — on the business card, in email addresses, in the canonical URL — and to register the accented form defensively, redirecting it.
What happens after you find one
Registering a domain creates a record in the registry lasting for the term you choose, one to ten years for most extensions. You will supply registrant contact details, which some extensions verify and some do not; choose whether to enable WHOIS privacy, which most registries permit and a few prohibit; and point the domain at nameservers, which is what makes a website or email work.
None of that is complicated, but each step has a way of going wrong. The two that cost people most are the registrant email address, where every renewal notice and account recovery message goes, and auto-renew, which is the difference between owning the name in five years and reading about it on an auction site.