When you are thinking about your website, one of the crucial decisions is choosing a domain name.
A domain name is like phonebook for the Internet - it is human-readable name that allows web browsers to "find" your website, email servers to send emails to you and other services on the Internet to work. An example of a domain name is AuthorLandingPages.com or FormattingExperts.com.
When you own a domain, you can create multiple subdomains, like blog.example.com and www.example.com at no cost, the latter of which is the most commonly seen subdomain on the Internet. Subdomains allow you to, for example, host your WordPress blog on hosting provided by NameCheap and a completely independent high-performance book landing page created by us on our distributed hosting.
First, let's get some domain registration terms out of the way:
Technically speaking, you don't "own" your registered domain name. Instead, you pay for the exclusive right to use it for a year (or several years, if you paid for longer registration in advance). After you register a domain with a specific registrar, you can transfer it to another one, so you are not tied to the company with which you registered a domain initially.
The price of a domain consists of a wholesale registry price and registrar markup. Virtually any company offering web-related services acts as a domain registrar, allowing you to pay them to have a domain name registered. A common practice among domain registrars is to offer first-year domain registration at a loss (often $0.99) to draw customers in and then they make up for it when charging you for subsequent renewals at a much higher price and selling add-on services.
There are lots of registrars that charge you twice as much (or more) as the price charged by registry. Most notorious offenders for inflated pricing are companies behind website builders which may offer "free" domain bundled with their other services and make it challenging to see what the renewal price will be when registering the domain.
In our opinion, for non-technical folks, NameCheap provides the best value when it comes to domain registration. They charge around $10 per year for .com domains and provide good, honest support which directly addresses your questions (which is not a given among the domain and hosting companies). For that price, you get domain name and a complete set of essential features, including easy DNS management, WHOIS database privacy protection and incoming email forwarding. Their only downside are frequent marketing emails and cross-sellling.
When you order a landing page from us, we will send you step-by-step tutorial on registering and setting up the domain with Namecheap.
CloudFlare is probably the only domain registrar which offers no-markup pricing for domain name registration. In other words, you pay what they pay to a domain registry and they don't make any profit on this service. They offer other web services, mainly aimed at large companies, and do not need to make a profit on domain name registration, especially considering that (in their own words): "from a technical perspective, the effort involved (in registering a domain) is minimal".
Just as NameCheap, they offer, at no extra cost those essential features: easy DNS management, domain owner information protection, email forwarding. They are the most reliable and affordable choice long-term. They also offer advanced features (which other registrar do not offer or charge for additionally) like DNSSEC and CNAME flattening for free.
CloudFlare is great and we use them ourselves for Author Landing Pages domain registration. However, their customer base is mainly technical people and enterprises and so their support for services offered at no profit to non-technical users might be limited. This is why if you are not "computer person" and feel like you might need a lot of support related to your domain, NameCheap is a better choice.
With that said, if you use CloudFlare to register your domain which you will want to use with a landing page designed and hosted by us, we will provide easy-to-follow step-by-step tutorials on buying and using your domain, so you won't need to ever contact their support.
If you are in Europe and need a local invoice for tax purposes, a good option is a French company OVH. Their pricing and included services are very similar to what NameCheap and CloudFlare offer. Unfortunately, their domain management interface is not so beginner friendly and can be frustrating and confusing even to advanced users.