About the desk

Why the scope is this narrow

Website builders are reviewed to death. What nobody reviews is the paperwork underneath them — the registration record, the renewal term, the mailbox seat — even though that paperwork is what survives when the subscription does not.

DomainDesk covers that and nothing else. There are no template roundups here, no scores for page editors, no argument about which builder is best. If a question cannot be answered by reading a registration record, a policy document or a provider's billing terms, it belongs somewhere other than this desk.

Where the claims come from

Three kinds of statement appear on this site, and they are kept visibly apart.

Policy. Quoted from ICANN's published documents, chiefly the Transfer Policy and the Expired Registration Recovery Policy. These bind every registrar of a generic top-level domain. Where a policy sets a number — sixty days, five calendar days, thirty days — the number is quoted rather than paraphrased, because paraphrasing a deadline is how a deadline gets wrong.

Provider terms. Quoted from the company's own current help documentation, with the provider named in the sentence. When a provider's own wording is the whole point, it appears in quotation marks.

Our reading. Judgements, recommendations and the order in which to do things. These are written in a way that makes it obvious they are ours.

Every fragile claim carries an entry in the build's FACTS.md, naming the document it came from and the day it was read. Claims we failed to stand up at source are dropped from the card.

Prices

A registration fee is a number a company chooses and can change without telling anyone. So a price appears here only with the currency it was quoted in and the date it was read, and never as a bare figure in a comparison.

Where a provider does not publish a renewal price at all — which is the norm rather than the exception in this category — this site says that it does not publish one. That absence is itself the most useful fact on the page.

What this site will not publish

• Invented prices, invented renewal rates, or a transfer timeline stated more precisely than the policy allows.
• A claim about ICANN policy that is not a quotation from the policy text.
• Testimonials, user reviews or anecdotes. We have no way to verify any of them.
• Screenshots described as current. Panels are redesigned constantly; menu paths are named only where the provider documents them in writing.
• Legal advice. Registration records have legal consequences and this is not a law firm.

Corrections

Vendors move their help pages, rename their products and change their pricing pages without notice, and a card that was right in September may be wrong by March. If something here has drifted, the contact page explains what to send and what happens next. Corrections are made to the card itself, not appended as a note at the bottom.