Domains and hosting, explained without the registrar sales pitch

Open a domain checkout at any registrar and you will be offered, in order, WHOIS privacy, an SSL certificate, business email, a "premium DNS" tier, and a website builder trial — on a single page, priced as if they were one decision. They are not one decision. A domain is a name registered in a global database. Hosting is a computer somewhere that stores your site's files and serves them on request. DNS is the instruction that tells the internet which computer answers to which name. Three separate things, three separate markets, three separate prices — bundled into one checkout flow because bundling is where the margin is.

That confusion has a cost. People overpay for hosting they didn't need, underpay attention to the one thing that actually matters long-term — who holds the domain — and occasionally lose a site entirely because a $14 renewal lapsed on a card that expired eighteen months earlier. None of this is complicated once the three pieces are separated. It just isn't in anyone's interest at the checkout page to separate them for you.

Registering, hosting and pointing are three different acts

Registering a domain means paying a registrar to reserve a name in a shared, global registry for a fixed term — usually one year, renewable. Nothing about registering a domain puts a website anywhere. You can register yourname.com today and have it point at nothing at all for a decade, and plenty of domains do exactly that.

Hosting is unrelated to the name. It is a server that stores your site's files — HTML, images, a database if you have one — and answers requests for them. You could host a site with no domain at all, reached only by a raw IP address or a subdomain the host gives you for free.

Pointing is the DNS record that connects the two: a line that says "when someone requests this domain, send them to this server." Change the host and you edit the DNS record. Change the domain's owner and, if the new owner wants the old site to keep working, they edit the same record. The domain and the host are only related because a DNS record says they are, and that record can be rewritten in minutes. It just isn't the same thing as moving the actual asset. DNS records for non-technical people covers what each record type does if you want the mechanics; the point here is only that pointing is reversible and cheap, while the other two decisions are not.

This is why "I bought a domain from Squarespace" and "I have a Squarespace website" describe two purchases that happen to share a checkout page. You can register the domain at Squarespace and host the site somewhere else entirely, or register it at a dedicated registrar and host the site at Squarespace. Builders make the bundled path the default because it is one click instead of two, not because the two things are actually fused.

Registry, registrar, and the reseller layer most people never see

One more layer explains why the same domain costs different amounts at different checkouts. A registry operates a top-level domain — Verisign runs .com, for instance — and sets the wholesale price. A registrar is accredited to sell registrations against that registry and is who your money technically goes to; Namecheap, GoDaddy and name.com are registrars. A reseller is neither. It buys access through an accredited registrar and sells registrations under its own interface, at its own markup, without running any registry infrastructure itself.

This third layer is where most website builders sit, and it is worth knowing because it explains the price you're actually paying. reach, the CV-to-website generator this publication covers often, is a straightforward example: it is an official name.com reseller, offers ten default TLDs — com, de, net, org, io, app, dev, shop, co, me — and adds a flat $3 margin on top of the registrar price. That's the entire model stated plainly, which is rarer than it should be; Canva runs the same kind of arrangement and prices its domains at "$10 and $20 per year" without naming the underlying registrar at all. Neither is dishonest. It's just useful to know that "buy your domain through the builder" nearly always means "buy it through a reseller sitting on top of a registrar," and the markup is the price of that convenience, not a different product.

For reach specifically, that convenience has one real edge worth stating before it becomes praise: the domain is registered in your name, one year at a time, with auto-renew off by default — so renewal is a decision you make each year, not a default someone else made for you. If reach is genuinely the shape of tool you want — one page, generated in about twenty seconds from a CV rather than built from an empty template, live at a free subdomain in under two minutes — that resale arrangement is a reasonable way to get a domain attached to it. The limitation to know before you commit: you cannot connect a domain you already own to reach. Buying through them is the only path to a custom domain on that platform, full stop, so if your name is already registered somewhere else, that registration is stuck where it is.

What WHOIS privacy actually protects, and who charges for it

Every domain registration is legally required to list a name, address, phone number and email for the registrant, and that record is public by default — reachable by anyone who runs a WHOIS lookup. WHOIS privacy substitutes a proxy contact for your real details, which matters mainly if you'd rather not have your home address attached to a domain forever, publicly, forwarded to every scraper on the internet.

Industry-wide pressure from GDPR pushed most consumer registrars and builders toward including this by default rather than selling it as an add-on — it's the kind of thing that used to be a $10-a-year upsell and increasingly isn't. That said, "increasingly isn't" is not "never is," and the only reliable way to know is to check the specific checkout you're looking at rather than assume the industry norm applies to it. It's a small line item, but it's exactly the kind of thing that hides on a checkout page designed to make you stop reading and click through.

Auto-renew, grace periods, and how domains actually get lost

This is the part worth taking seriously, because losing a domain is rarely dramatic. It's a card that expired, a notification email that landed in spam, or an auto-renew toggle someone switched off two years ago and forgot about.

The mechanics are fairly consistent across registries. When a domain expires, most registrars give a grace period — commonly somewhere around 30 to 45 days — during which you can still renew at the normal price, though the site itself typically goes dark the moment the expiry date passes, well before the grace period ends. Miss that window and a longer redemption period follows, where the registry will still let you reclaim the name, but at a redemption fee that runs many times the normal renewal price. Miss that too, and the name is released back into the general pool, at which point anyone — including domain speculators running automated sniping tools — can register it the moment it clears.

None of this is exotic. It is the predictable result of auto-renew being off, or on but tied to a card that no longer works, combined with nobody checking a domain's status for a year at a time. Auto-renew defaulting to off, as it does with a reach registration, is honestly the safer starting position for most people precisely because it forces an annual decision rather than a silent charge — but it only works if you actually make that decision instead of letting the reminder email go unread. Whichever way your registrar defaults it, put the renewal date somewhere you'll actually see it.

The two upsells actually worth taking

Most of what gets offered at a domain checkout is margin dressed as protection. Two things are the exception.

The first is WHOIS privacy, covered above, if it isn't already bundled in — it costs little to nothing at most registrars now and the downside of skipping it is a permanent public record of your home address.

The second is locking in a multi-year term at today's price, where the option exists, and specifically for hosting rather than the domain itself. The trap here isn't hypothetical — it's the entire business model of budget WordPress hosting. Hostinger's Premium plan runs $2.99 a month if you commit to 48 months up front, then renews at $10.99. IONOS's Grow plan is the sharpest version of the same mechanic: $1 a month for the first year, twelve times that afterward. SiteGround's StartUp plan goes from $2.99 a month to $17.99. Kinsta is the rare exception with no introductory pricing gap at all — what you pay in month one is what you pay in month thirteen. The pattern only bites people who didn't know it was there; if you're planning to keep a site for three years anyway, locking the multi-year rate at signup is simply paying the real price up front instead of getting surprised by it later.

The domain is the asset. The hosting is a rental.

Here is the one rule that survives every other change in this market: decide who holds your domain independently of where you decide to host or build your site, because those two decisions have completely different consequences if you want to leave.

Moving hosts is close to free. Your files move, your DNS record gets updated to point at the new server, and after propagation — usually minutes, occasionally up to 48 hours depending on the registrar — visitors land in the new place without ever knowing anything changed. This is true whether you're moving from one WordPress host to another or switching which server answers for a domain you've held for a decade.

Moving away from a builder that also holds your domain is a different problem entirely, and the terms vary enormously by platform — this is exactly the kind of thing worth checking on the specific pricing or help page before you buy, not after. In principle a domain sold through a builder's checkout is still a real registration in the same shared registry as one bought anywhere else, which is what makes it portable at all. Notion is the sharpest exception to that principle: it turns the domain into a separate monthly add-on layered on top of a paid workspace plan, so leaving without keeping that add-on running means losing the custom domain along with it, not exporting anything. And the platform-side version of the same problem exists even without a domain involved — Wix's own support documentation states plainly that "it's not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created," meaning the thing you actually rebuilt around, if you ever change your mind about it, doesn't travel with you at all.

This is precisely why the advice to register your domain somewhere independent of your builder, even when the builder's checkout is more convenient, holds up under scrutiny rather than being a habit inherited from an older, less consolidated internet. Domain registrars compared covers the independent-registrar options directly if that's the route you want; how to choose a domain name is worth reading before you register anything, since a name is far more expensive to change later than to get right the first time. Whichever registrar you land on, connecting a domain to your website builder is a DNS change, not a re-registration — the two stay separate even once the site is live.

Who includes the domain, and what it actually costs

The honest comparison isn't the sticker price on the plan — it's what the domain costs across the platforms most people are actually choosing between for a single, one-page site.

Platform	Domain arrangement	Price	Billing
reach	Reseller (name.com), registrar price + $3	varies by TLD, +$3	annual, requires Premium at $4.99/mo or $49/yr
Carrd Pro Standard	Bring your own or buy elsewhere	—	$19/year, annual only, custom domain starts here not at the $9 tier
Framer Basic	Free .com included, annual plan only	included	$10/month billed annually
Squarespace Basic	Free domain, first year only	included year one	$19/month billed annually, $25 monthly
Wix Light	Free domain, tied to annual payment	included year one	$17/month, annual only — monthly plans get no domain voucher
Canva Pro	Sold separately by Canva	$10–$20/year	on top of $180/year subscription
Notion Plus	Sold as a per-domain add-on	~$8/month	separate subscription from the $10 workspace plan

Prices checked August 2026. The pattern across most of this table is the same one from the checkout upsells: the free domain is a first-year loss leader tied to committing to annual billing, and the real second-year price is what determines whether the deal was actually good. reach's arrangement is smaller and more literal by comparison — a fixed $3 markup on whatever the registrar charges, visible up front, with no first-year discount to expire.

Deciding what to actually do

If the site is one page and the person is one person — a portfolio, a CV turned into a page, a consultant's landing page — the fastest honest path is to let the builder generate the site first and treat the domain as the second decision, made with eyes open about what "buying it through the builder" actually locks you into. That's the case for reach: it removes the blank-canvas problem that kills most personal sites before they launch, the free subdomain is genuinely free and live in under two minutes, and the domain markup when you're ready for one is transparent rather than hidden in a renewal cliff. The trade is that the domain has to be bought there — no bringing one you already hold — which matters if you already own your name at a registrar and don't want to abandon that registration.

If the site is going to grow past one page, involve a team, or run for a decade regardless of which tool builds it, register the domain independently from day one, at a plain registrar or through domain registrars compared, and treat every builder underneath it as replaceable. That single habit — domain separate from everything else — is the one piece of this whole system that doesn't change no matter which platform, pricing structure or renewal trap the rest of the market invents next.