Buying a domain: registrars, WHOIS privacy, and the TLD decision

A registrar (Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar, GoDaddy, Google Domains' successor Squarespace Domains, and dozens of others) is an accredited reseller of domain registrations, itself ultimately accountable to the registry that manages a given TLD (.com's registry is Verisign; .dev's is Google, and so on). "Buying a domain" is really renting exclusive registration rights for a fixed term (usually 1 year, renewable) — nobody ever owns a domain name outright the way they own a physical object; letting the registration lapse returns it to the pool anyone can register.

Domain registration data (registrant name, address, email, phone) is, by ICANN policy, published in a publicly-queryable WHOIS database by default — genuinely findable by anyone who looks up the domain. Nearly every reputable registrar now offers WHOIS privacy (sometimes free, sometimes a small add-on) that substitutes the registrar's own proxy contact information in the public record instead of yours — worth enabling by default for any personal or small-business domain, since there's rarely a legitimate reason a stranger needs your home address just from looking up a domain name.

A TLD choice is a genuine trade-off between cost, brand signal, and — for some ccTLDs — actual legal registration requirements (some country-code TLDs require local presence or documentation to register at all). .com's familiarity is real leverage for a consumer-facing product; a developer tool or technical audience often reads .dev or .io as an intentional, credible signal rather than a downgrade, the same way this curriculum's own domain names reflect their actual audience.

A short, generic, or already-registered-but-expired domain can carry a genuinely inflated "premium" price at registration — sometimes legitimately reflecting real resale demand, sometimes a registrar's own markup. A domain you're specifically watching because its current registration is about to expire doesn't become registerable the instant it lapses — there's a real grace period (often 30-45 days) plus a redemption period after that, during which only the original registrant can renew it; a domain only becomes freely available to anyone else well after visible "expiration," a real, common source of confusion for anyone trying to grab a specific expiring domain the moment they think it's free.