Domain vs hosting: what you need and where to buy it

Domain vs hosting in one minute

A domain is your address. Hosting is the building. You need both for a website, and they are usually separate bills, even when a builder hides one inside the other.

The domain, like yourbusiness.com, is a name you rent by the year. The hosting is a computer, always online, that stores your site’s files and sends them to visitors. The domain points at the hosting. If you move house, you keep the address and point it somewhere new.

That is the most useful thing to understand here: the domain is the part you should never lose. Your hosting can change. Your builder can change. Your domain is what customers, Google and your email depend on.

What a domain name is

A domain name is the human-friendly name for your site. Behind the scenes, computers find each other by number. The DNS system, the internet’s phone book, turns your name into the right server address.

You never buy a domain outright. You register it for one or more years through a domain registrar, and you renew it before it expires. If you let it lapse, someone else can register it.

Three groups get paid when you register a .com:

• The registry. Verisign runs .com and charges registrars a wholesale fee: $10.26 a year today.
• ICANN. The body that oversees domain names charges $0.20 per registration, renewal or transfer.
• The registrar. The company you buy from adds its own margin on top, or none at all.

The November 1, 2026 .com price increase

Verisign is raising the wholesale .com fee from $10.26 to $10.97 a year, effective November 1, 2026. That is about 7%, or $0.71 per domain per year. It applies to new registrations and renewals. The last increase was in September 2024.

Registrars usually pass this on. Cloudflare, which sells at cost, should go from $10.46 to about $11.17. Expect retail renewals elsewhere to rise by at least the same amount.

What a .com really costs at popular registrars

First-year prices are often a sale. The renewal is what you pay every year after. WHOIS privacy, which hides your name and address from public domain records, is now free at Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare and Squarespace Domains, so do not pay extra for it there.

The three-year totals use today’s prices. The Cloudflare figure is our estimate from an unofficial price tracker and Cloudflare’s at-cost policy. Porkbun and Namecheap renewals may also move after November 1.

A few takeaways:

• The cheapest first year is not the cheapest domain. GoDaddy’s one-cent year still costs $45.99 over three years because it locks you into two years at $22.99.
• At-cost and flat-price registrars win over time. Cloudflare and Porkbun keep renewal close to the wholesale cost.
• Builder “free domains” are first-year deals. See below.

How to pick a good domain name

Before you compare prices, settle on the name. A few plain rules help:

• Prefer .com for a US business. It is the extension people type by habit. Other endings work, but you will spend more time spelling them out.
• Keep it short and easy to say. If you have to spell it over the phone, it is too hard. Skip hyphens and numbers.
• Check that nobody else owns the name as a brand. Search the name and your state’s business records before you buy.
• Buy the obvious typo or plural only if it matters. Each extra domain is another yearly renewal.
• Register it in your own name and account. Not your web designer’s, not your nephew’s. The person listed as the owner controls it.

The “free domain” offers from builders

Many builders include a domain for the first year. Read the conditions:

• Squarespace: one year free on annual website plans only. If you transfer the domain away, the free offer does not carry over. Renewal price is not published.
• Wix: free for the first year with a yearly paid plan. Renewal price is not published.
• WordPress.com: free for one year on annual or longer plans. Monthly plans do not include it.
• Framer: free custom domain on Basic and Pro with yearly billing only.
• GoDaddy Airo: one free domain with a new annual plan, first year only, then “renews at current prices.”
• Hostinger: free domain for one year on its hosting plans.
• Webflow, Shopify, Lovable, Bolt and v0: no free domain confirmed. You connect one you own.

A free first year is nice, but it ties your domain to your builder account. We recommend registering the domain yourself at an independent registrar. Then your builder is just the hosting, and switching later means changing a few DNS records instead of moving a domain.

What web hosting is

Web hosting is the server space your site runs on. It stores your pages, images and database and answers every visitor request.

There are three main kinds you will run into:

1. Hosting bundled into a builder

Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Framer, Shopify, WordPress.com, GoDaddy Airo and Hostinger’s builder all include hosting in the plan. You never see a server. The trade-off is that the site must run there. Wix says plainly that “your site must run on Wix’s servers.” Framer says its sites rely on Framer-managed services such as pre-rendering and a global CDN.

2. Shared hosting

You rent space on a server shared with other sites and install software like WordPress. It is cheap to start but renews much higher:

3. Managed WordPress hosting

The host handles server tuning and much of the upkeep. Kinsta Single 35k is $30 a month billed yearly ($35 billed monthly) for one site and 35,000 visits a month. It costs more but has no intro-then-renewal jump on its pricing page.

We build on WordPress every week. For a business site we care about, we pick hosting on the renewal price and the support, not the first-year deal.

Hosting also covers your SSL certificate

An SSL certificate is what puts the padlock in the browser and the “s” in https. Since Chrome 68 in July 2018, Chrome marks every plain-HTTP site as “Not secure.”

Certificates are getting shorter-lived. Industry rules cut the maximum lifetime to 200 days from March 15, 2026, 100 days from March 15, 2027, and 47 days from March 15, 2029. Let’s Encrypt, the free certificate authority, issues 90-day certificates by default today.

The practical result: renewal has to be automatic. Hosted builders handle this for you. On self-hosted WordPress, make sure your host renews certificates automatically.

Where to buy each piece

How to connect a domain to a website builder

The steps are similar on every platform. The builder tells you exactly which records to add.

1. Buy the domain at your registrar and turn on auto-renew.
2. Open your builder’s domain settings and choose the option to connect a domain you already own. Do not buy a new one there.
3. Copy the DNS records the builder shows you. These are usually an A record for the root domain and a CNAME record for “www.”
4. Add them in your registrar’s DNS panel. Leave your email (MX) records alone unless you are setting up email.
5. Wait for DNS to update. Changes can take from minutes to a couple of days to reach everyone.
6. Check the padlock. Once the domain points at the builder, it issues the SSL certificate. Visit both yourbusiness.com and www.yourbusiness.com.

Some builders offer to manage your whole DNS instead of single records. That is fine, but if you later leave, you will need to recreate every record, including email, at the new DNS provider.

Moving a domain away from a builder

If your domain is registered through a builder, you can usually transfer it out. Squarespace’s help center describes the process:

1. Turn off the transfer lock in the domains dashboard.
2. Get the authorization code by email and give it to the new registrar.
3. Wait. Transfers can take up to 15 days.

Newly registered or recently transferred domains have a 60-day lock. If Google Workspace is attached, you must update the MX records at the new provider. See the Squarespace transfer article for details.

For other builders, transfer-out terms were not confirmed in our research. Keeping the domain at an outside registrar avoids the question entirely.

Common domain and hosting mistakes

• Letting a domain expire. An expired card on file is the usual cause. Turn on auto-renew and keep the billing email current.
• Paying for privacy you already get. WHOIS privacy is free at Namecheap, Porkbun, Cloudflare and Squarespace Domains.
• Budgeting on the intro price. Hosting that starts at $2.99 a month can renew at $17.99.
• Deleting email records during a move. When you point your domain at a new builder, change only the website records. Your MX records control email.
• Letting a freelancer hold the account. If someone else set up your domain or hosting, ask them to move it into your account now, while you are on good terms.

Email at your own domain

Email is a third service. Your domain’s MX records tell the world which company receives your mail. Most builders do not include it, or include it only for year one.

Google’s annual plan lets you add users but only remove them at renewal, and canceling early means paying the rest of the contract. The flexible plan costs more but you can cancel any time.

Bundled email offers:

• Squarespace Core, Plus and Advanced include one Google Workspace account free for the first year. Basic does not.
• Hostinger Premium includes 2 mailboxes per website for one year; Unlimited includes unlimited mailboxes for one year.

Keep email separate from your website platform where you can. If you change builders, your inbox should not have to move with it. More in our email hosting entry.

What to do next

• See how domains, hosting and the rest stack up in how a website works.
• Add the domain, hosting and email numbers to your budget in our website cost guide.
• Planning a switch? Read leaving your website builder first.