WHAT IS A DOMAIN NAME REGISTRAR?

If a person decides to register a domain name, he cannot do so by himself. He needs to take the help of a domain name registrar to do so.



A Domain Name Registrar is an organization that enables a person to register a domain name and acts on behalf of the consumer to help them acquire the domain name. The registrar is given the authority by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) or by a country’s national domain name authority to do so. This involves a lot of functions. The Domain Name Registrar needs to check if the domain name is available in the first place and is not registered to someone else. The Registrar should make sure that all the information of the registrant is collected and submitted to ICANN. It also allows the transfer of domain names between two registrants. A Domain Name Registrar also helps people to protect their domain contact details from spammers by either offering proxy or third party registration services.



All the people who register a domain name with a registrar make their contact details available on the Internet through the WHOIS database. A simple WHOIS search will give out these details unless some privacy settings have been put by the domain registrar. A domain name registrar will let you ‘lock’ your domain name. This does not allow any changes to be made to the registration information unless the domain is unlocked.



One needs to pay a domain name registrar for the domain name registration services as well as for ICANN. ICANN charges the domain name registrar an administration fee for every domain name that is registered. The domain name registration fee is calculated based on two aspects: The services of the registrar and the numbers of years for which the domain name is registered. The longest period for which a domain name can be registered is 10 years. However, the registrant can renew the registration after the span of 10 years. A lot of domain name registrars provide discounts if you buy domain names in bulk.



Till 1999, all the .com, .org and .net domain names were registered only by a company called Network Solutions because of an agreement they had with the US Dept of Commerce. Since then, there have been many domain name registrars that provide domain registration services.



One must be careful of domain name registrants who acquire domain names by wrong methods. Some of the tactics used are sending out notifications via email, fax or letters of domain names expiring if the recommended course of action is not taken. Hence, one must be careful and only contact or look for reliable domain registrars.