Affiliate disclosure

The arrangement

A handful of the links here are commercial. Register a domain or start a subscription after following one and the company may pay us a commission, at a price identical to the one you would have been quoted anyway.

That is how the site is funded. There is no advertising, no sponsored card, no paid placement in any table, and no arrangement under which a company can buy a better position or a softer sentence.

Where partner links are allowed to appear

This is a rule rather than a preference, and it is checkable.

Partner links appear in ordinary prose, at the point where a company is being named as somewhere you could go. They never appear inside a numbered step, inside a policy quotation, or inside a sentence describing a limitation or a risk. A procedure you are following is not a place to sell you something.

Every partner link on this site points at our own /go/ path, which is disallowed to search engines in robots.txt and rendered with rel="sponsored nofollow" on every page. If you want to audit that, the outbound links are visible in the page source of any card.

Which links pay us

Four registrars, and nothing else: Namecheap, Dynadot, IONOS and GoDaddy. These are the companies a reader ends up at if they take the recommendation this site keeps making — that the registration belongs somewhere other than the builder.

There are exactly ten such links across nearly twenty thousand words, on three pages. You can count them in the page source.

Every other company named here — Wix, Squarespace, Hostinger, Google, Microsoft, Tucows, ICANN and the registries — is named because the facts require it, and earns us nothing at all.

What the commission does not buy

The ordering on the free domain website builder register is by the terms of each offer, not by what any of them pays. The offer most tightly bound to its first purchase term, and least specific about what happens after it, is ranked last regardless of the commercial relationship, and the reasoning for the order is printed on the page so you can disagree with it.

Likewise, the recommendation that recurs throughout this site — keep the registration away from the builder, buy the mailbox from the company that operates it — costs us commission rather than earning it. We publish it because it is the right answer for most people.

No website builder is linked here

Wix, Squarespace, Hostinger and GoDaddy's builder are discussed on nearly every page of this site, and not one of them carries a partner link to its website plans. The GoDaddy link that does exist points at the registrar, which is a different purchase.

The reason is coherence rather than squeamishness. This site's standing advice is that your domain registration should not live with the company that sells you your website. Taking a commission for sending you into a builder's free-domain offer, on the same page that spends two thousand words qualifying that offer, would make the advice unreadable — you would have no way of telling which sentences were for your benefit.

The companies we will not link

We also do not and will not carry partner links for domain parking services, expired-domain auction houses, domain brokers or "domain recovery" outfits.

The reason is specific to this lane. People arrive at pages about expiry, redemption and transfer at the worst moment of their year, and that is the exact audience those businesses are built to charge. A site that explains the redemption window should not be paid to route panicking readers into a marketplace. The card on the redemption window says the same thing on the page itself, which means adding those links later would make a published card false.

Your part

Nothing here asks you to use a partner link. Typing a company's name into your browser works identically and costs you nothing extra either way. If you would rather the site earned nothing from your visit, that is a completely reasonable choice and the information on the cards is the same.

Questions about any of this go to [email protected].