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What does a domain name cost and who should own it?

A web address costs a small yearly fee, paid to whichever company you register it with, and it should be in your business name and nobody else's. The price isn't the thing to worry about. Who the account belongs to is, because the address is the one part of your online presence that carries everything else with it.

What you're paying for

You're renting the name, a year at a time, from a registrar. As long as you keep paying, nobody else can have it. Stop paying and it goes back on the market, usually to somebody who resells it.

The yearly fee is small enough that it's never the interesting number in a website decision. What matters is that the renewal card doesn't expire and the reminder email goes somewhere you read.

Why the name on the account matters

Everything hangs off the address. Your email, your website, the link on your Google listing, the address on your truck and every business card you've handed out. Whoever controls the account controls all of it.

The story that goes wrong is always the same one. A web guy registered it for you years ago as a favor, and now he doesn't answer, or he answers with a number. You're not arguing about a website at that point. You're arguing about your phone number's online equivalent.

So register it yourself, in the business name, with your own card and your own email. It takes ten minutes and it never has to be dealt with again.

Picking one

Short, sayable over the phone, and your business name if it's available. A name a customer can hear once and type correctly beats a clever one every time.

Skip the address stuffed with a job and a town. It stopped being a shortcut with search engines a long time ago, and to a homeowner it reads as an ad rather than as a company. Your own name is the one that grows with you, and it's the one that still fits when you add a second trade or a second town five years from now.

Who does the work of pointing it

The address and the website are separate things. You own the address; somebody has to tell it which computer to send visitors to. That's a settings change, it takes minutes, and it doesn't mean handing anybody the account.

Ask for it that way: keep the account, share the access needed to point it, and take the access back when the work is done. Anyone who insists on owning the address to do the job is telling you something about how the relationship ends.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Log into your registrar today and check three things: that the account is in your business name, that the card on file hasn't expired, and that the contact email is one you read. If you can't log in at all, that's the finding, and it's worth sorting out before anything else.

Bindingstone helps you pick the name and points it at the site, and the address stays in your name the whole time, bought from your registrar, on your card, so it's yours if you ever leave.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.