The best place to register a domain:
learn the wholesale price and judge for yourself.

Why does the first-year price mean nothing?

Because a registrar can sell you year one at a loss and recover it on renewals. You are not buying a year; you are entering an annual commitment that lasts as long as the site does. The price that matters is the renewal price, and the right way to measure it is not against another registrar — it is against the wholesale figure.

To make it concrete: if you see a .com renewing at $20 a year, you are paying roughly double the registry price. That is not a scam — registrars have costs, support and services — but it is a number you should know, and you should know that others sell it for less than half of that.

What does the November 2026 increase mean for you?

One practical thing: registering or renewing for several years before 1 November 2026 holds the current rate for those years, because the registry fee is charged on the years you pay for up front.

For a single domain the difference is small — about $0.71 a year — and we will not oversell it. But it is worth a minute if you were going to renew soon anyway, and it becomes real money across a portfolio. What matters more is the direction: the .com contract permits increases of up to 7% in each of the last four years of every cycle, so this is a repeating rise, not a one-off.

Which is a further reason for what we said in the registration guide: register for several years on a project you know you are continuing.

The four questions that judge any registrar

Use these on any company, including ones this page never names:

1. What is the renewal price? Not the first year. Divide it by the wholesale figure to see the margin you are paying.
2. Is WHOIS privacy free? At some registrars it is always free; at others it is a paid annual line item. The difference compounds.
3. What is the transfer policy? Is leaving free and clear, or are there fees and friction? Your ability to leave is what protects your price.
4. Does it force you onto its own DNS? Some registrars — Cloudflare among them — require their own nameservers. Not necessarily a flaw, but you want to know before, not after.

Add a fifth question specific to our region: does it support the extensions you need? Not every registrar sells .sa or Arabic-script domains.

Why don't we give you a price table?

Because it would be wrong — not in future, but now. Registrar prices vary by your country and currency, each runs different promotions every month, and some quote you a different figure than they quote us. A table published today becomes misleading within weeks, and we do not publish numbers we cannot stand behind.

What we did instead is more useful to you in practice: we gave you the wholesale figure — published, fixed, and identical regardless of your country — and the four questions. Together they let you judge any offer yourself, and they stay true long after every price on this page has changed.

GoDaddy and Namecheap: what you need to know

These are the two best-known names in the market, and the most searched in Arabic of any registrar — under several transliterations. Both are large accredited registrars, and there is no technical problem with using either.

The one point we insist on: apply questions one and two. Fame is not a price, and an introductory promotion is not a cost. Read the published renewal price, check whether WHOIS privacy is included or a yearly extra, then measure both against the wholesale figure above. If the answer is acceptable to you, go ahead — we are not asking you to switch registrar, we are asking you to know what you are paying.

Cloudflare: at-cost registration, and its two conditions

The Cloudflare Registrar page states that it does not mark up domain prices at all, and that customers pay only what the registries and ICANN charge — on registration and renewal. So there is no introductory rate and no renewal cliff. That model is rare and deserves credit.

But its documentation states two conditions, and both matter:

• Its nameservers are mandatory — every domain registered there uses Cloudflare's nameservers automatically, and the documentation states you will not be able to change to another DNS provider's nameservers while using Cloudflare Registrar.
• No internationalized domain names — no Arabic-script domains, and only ASCII characters are accepted in contact data.

That second condition is specific to our market and goes unmentioned in English comparisons: if an Arabic-script domain is in your plans, Cloudflare is simply not your option. But if your domain is a Latin-character .com and you do not mind its DNS, it is the cheapest renewal you will find.

Hostinger: when is it the right call?

When you need hosting too — which describes most people looking for a domain in the first place, since a domain alone serves no site.

Hostinger Premium includes a free domain for the first year. Since you need the hosting regardless, the domain's marginal cost in year one is zero — and an at-cost model cannot beat zero. Add a practical benefit people underrate: domain, hosting and email in one dashboard, with no manual step to connect two companies together, which is exactly where beginners get stuck.

And to be straight with you in return: Hostinger's listed .com registration price is $19.99 a year (with a first-year offer that can be far lower when bought alongside a plan). That is above an at-cost model, and we will say so plainly. So if all you want is a bare domain to renew for ten years, Cloudflare is cheaper. If you are building a site, the full arithmetic — domain and hosting together over four years — is in our hosting comparison.

Hostinger's listed .com price is taken from the domain pricing page on its own site, reviewed 12 August 2026. Promotional prices change and vary by country and term — check before you pay.

The whole thing in two lines

• Need hosting? Take the domain with the hosting. Marginal cost is zero in year one and you manage everything in one place.
• Want the domain alone for years? At-cost is cheaper — if your domain is Latin-character and you accept mandatory DNS.

Whichever you choose: register before 1 November 2026 if you were registering anyway, turn on auto-renew, and confirm the verification email. Full steps in our domain registration guide.