Where Should You Store Your Domains?

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Why You Need to Keep the Numbers Down

As a domain investor, you’re going to end up having a lot of accounts in a lot of places. When you’re investing in high quality domains, you’re going to be driven towards a wide variety of registrars. There are so many options out there, so people literally around the world will have their names are registered all over the place.

It’s essential that you minimise the number of registrars that you have your domains stored at, as it makes your portfolio management significantly easier. In an ideal world, you might want to consolidate the majority of your domains into just one place – particularly the ones that you want to hold onto for the long term.

These are the key considerations that you have to think about with your investment domains:

Registration fee; over $10 is just wrong in this day and age
TLD range; essential if you’re investing in non-legacy domains or newer gTLDs
Renewal cost; often renewal costs are higher than initial registration, so make sure you know before (and keep it under $10/year)
Fast transfer (Afternic offers fast transfers with a number of registrars)
Push option (free internal registrar transfers, rather than full transfers from one registrar to another)
Privacy (if this is important to you, look for ones that offer this as standard, without you having to pay extra)
Ease of transfer (the processes differ at many registrars, but those with free pushes and fast transfers tend to be the easiest)
Industry familiarity (people are a lot more likely to agree to a push or transfer if they know the registrar)

What are the Options?

I would say that the majority of domain investors tend to have their names registered in the following places:

GoDaddy
NameCheap
NameSilo
NameBright
DynaDot
Domain.com
Uniregistry
Donuts

You really have to do your own research on each to see which is best for your needs. I’ll tell you where I’ve got mine below, but it’s worth going through these and considering the key considerations before you decide where you think it’s best to have yours held.

Where I Have Most of My Domains Registered

I’ll start by saying that the vast majority of my investing domain portfolio is split between .com and .co.uk. It means that pretty much all of the registrations can be managed at mainstream registrars which should only ever charge $8 to $10 for renewals each year. I don’t need to worry about the expensive newer gTLDs and country code ones, which may come with higher price tags.

I personally stick to a very small number of registrars at the moment. It means that whenever I need to make a sale, I know exactly what needs to be done and there are never any delays from my side.

It also means that whenever acquire a new domain, I can usually change the nameservers on autopilot, and get them listed on all the marketplaces without really thinking about it. This kind of streamlining just makes things so much easier in the day-to-day management of my portfolio.

My domains are held between GoDaddy, DynaDot and NameBright. I’ve experimented with a few others, but I’ve decided that I’m in a solid position with these. Most transactions tend to take place through via Afternic pushes, so that’s essential to have in the stash. DynaDot is cheap for handregistration, offer privacy and all of that good stuff. NameBright is where all DropCatch auction wins and backorders head to, so a fair quantity of my names end up there, and stay there because their renewals are cheap.