When I first built this personal website, I wanted to buy a domain, but I did not know much about domain providers at the time.
At that point, I had not yet learned about a workflow such as “GPT searches for the best practices in an industry, then chooses one to put into practice.”
So I explored the internet freely, read various blog posts, and even visited abc.xyz, the website purchased by Google co-founder Larry Page.
(My first impression of the .xyz domain was that it felt very unreliable, with an intuition that it might belong to some questionable industry. Later, after discussing it with Gemini, I learned that .xyz was also one of the early internet domain extensions. Larry Page buying this website also had the bold feeling of a wealthy person buying a license plate number like 8888.)
Returning to the main topic, the more established domain-purchase websites I identified were
Cloudflare https://www.cloudflare.com/domains/search
Spaceship https://www.spaceship.com/zh/
For people who are unfamiliar with this knowledge, a .com domain is generally the most reliable choice. Since caoyueyang.com had already been registered in 2016, I chose the .org extension instead (at least it would not be mistaken for a strange website).
The price of a domain includes:
- Registry cost: the fee charged by the operator of the domain extension; this is the underlying cost.
- Registrar markup: Cloudflare, Namecheap, GoDaddy, Porkbun, and similar companies add some profit to the cost.
- ICANN fee: some generic domains have a small ICANN fee, usually around $0.18/year.
- Taxes: depending on your billing address, this may include VAT, GST, or Sales Tax.
- Payment and exchange-rate costs: if you pay in U.S. dollars with a credit card denominated in RMB, HKD, or JPY, your bank may charge a foreign-exchange fee.
- WHOIS Privacy: many registrars provide it for free, while some may still charge for it.
- First-year promotion versus renewal price: this is the easiest trap. The first year might cost
$0.99, while the second year could become$20+.
Therefore, most domains can be found in the price range of 5–20 U.S. dollars, and domain prices are also affected by supply and demand.
For example, the .ai extension was originally a country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) representing Anguilla, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean. Due to the popularity of artificial intelligence, prices have risen considerably, as the images show. Domain choices should therefore follow the actual situation and budget.
Tips
A domain can be purchased for up to 10 years at a time. If it expires without renewal, someone else may register it, so remember to renew it on time.