Buying a Domain: Where, How, How Much

Where do I buy a domain and how much does it cost?

A .com domain costs roughly 1,000 to 1,500 BDT a year. You can buy it from an international domain company, which needs a card that works abroad, or from a Bangladeshi reseller that takes bKash or a bank transfer. Turn auto-renew on the moment you buy, and keep the account in your own name and your own email. Hosting here is a one-time 6,999 BDT.

What a domain actually is

A domain is your own address on the internet, something like aiinbangla.com. Type that name into a browser and your site opens.

The three levels of hosting on your own domain

The name is not a website itself, and it is not the place a website is stored.
It is only a name, written against your own in a register year by year.
You decide which site it points at.

So the cost splits in two:

Cost of what	Who it goes to	How often
the rent on the name	a domain company	every year
a place to keep the site	hosting	here you pay once

Mixing those two up is the most common beginner mistake.

.com, .com.bd or .xyz

People read the ending of a name at a glance, and that glance forms their first idea of your business.

Kind	Who it suits	What to know
.com	shops, agencies, freelancers, almost everyone	৳1,000 to ৳1,500 a year. Easy to say on a phone, everyone knows it
.com.bd	schools, institutions, anyone whose Bangladeshi identity is the point	bought from the national registry, needs trade licence paperwork, takes patience
.xyz and the cheap endings	hobby projects, experiments, personal pages	looks cheap the first year, costs more at renewal. Less trusted by a buyer who does not know you

For a shop in Bangladesh the advice is simple: take the .com.

You will be reading the address down a phone line, and .com is the only ending people assume when you do not say it.
A .com.bd looks lovely and local, but it comes with paperwork and waiting, so keep it for an institution.
A .xyz will run a shop perfectly well, but a buyer who does not know you hesitates at the address, and that hesitation is your sale.
If the name you want is taken on .com, do not give up. Add your city, bd, or the thing you actually do.

Where to buy it

We do not sell domains, so we are not naming companies. But there are really only three kinds of place:

An international domain company. The clearest prices, the panel entirely in your own hands, and no permission needed from anyone to change DNS.
A Bangladeshi reseller or hosting company. They take bKash, Nagad or a bank transfer and they speak Bangla, so with no card this is the easy road.
The national registry, for .com.bd. These come from Bangladesh's own registry, and the application carries a trade licence or your institution's papers.

Keep these in mind while buying and while comparing prices:

The international companies have one condition: you need a card that works for international payments.
Buying from a reseller, make sure the account is opened in your own name and with your own email.
With the right documents a .com.bd goes through, it simply does not go through in an hour.
When you compare prices, look at the renewal price, not the first-year offer.
Around ৳1,000 to ৳1,500 a year is normal for a .com; an offer far below that usually means a large bill next year.

What makes a good name

You choose the name once and then say it a thousand times: on the phone, on a visiting card, on a delivery packet, in a Facebook post. So the real test is how easily it comes out of a mouth.

Keep it short. One word or two. Long names get mistyped, and a mistype is a lost customer.
Test it on the phone. Read the address down the line to someone you know. If they write it correctly first time the name is good; if you have to spell it out, drop it.
Avoid spellings that trick people. A word that sounds one way but can be spelled several ways in English will send half your visitors somewhere else.
No hyphens and no numbers. A hyphen is inaudible when you say the address out loud, and nobody can tell whether a number is meant as a digit or a word.
Match the signboard. When the shop's name and the address are the same, people remember; when they differ, people forget.
Never borrow someone else's name. A name close to a known brand can be taken away from you later, and the money does not come back with it.

What to do the moment you buy

Before you close that tab, do these. Put them off and the trouble comes back exactly a year later.

Write the login down. Which site, which email, which password, all three in one place.
Turn auto-renew on. A domain is renewed every year, and with auto-renew on you never have to remember a date.
Keep the email you bought it with. Renewal notices and transfer approvals all go to that address.
Put your own name and your own number on the account. Not the name of whoever is setting it up for you.
Check that the domain lock is on. While it is on nobody can quietly move the domain somewhere else.

Why those five:

A year on, the login details are precisely what nobody can find.
With auto-renew on, it takes the money from the card or the balance by itself.
Lose the email you bought it with and you have effectively lost the domain.
Your name on the account is the only document of ownership you get.
Most companies have the domain lock on already.

What you type in the app after buying, and the two records you get back

The two mistakes that lose people their domain

One, letting it expire. A domain is taken for a year.

Past the date the site goes dark, and email on that name stops arriving.
After a while anyone at all can buy the name, with no guarantee of getting it back.
An address your customers have known for years disappears exactly like this.
How to stop it: keep auto-renew on, and the day a card expires, put the new one in.

Two, leaving the domain in somebody else's name. If the person who built your site buys the domain inside their own account, with their own email, then on paper the name is theirs.

That you paid for it proves nothing.
The day contact stops, or the relationship sours, you are left holding nothing.
How to stop it: even if someone buys it for you, have the account opened in your name and your email.
Then log in once yourself and check that you really can get in.

Whoever's email is on the domain account owns the domain. Who paid for it is no proof at all here.

What comes next

Once the domain is bought, the hard part is over. The rest of the road is three steps.

Publish the site.

Type the address into the domain button in the builder.
Add two lines to DNS and press verify. Which box takes what is written out step by step in the next chapter.

Hosting on your own domain here is a one-time ৳6,999, for life.
No hosting renewals, no monthly bill, no price-rise letters. The domain's own yearly fee is separate and goes to your registrar.
Take Business or Commerce hosting and that same ৳6,999 sits inside the price, never charged on top.

The domain's yearly rent you keep paying to the domain company. No hosting company can waive that, and neither can we. We only made our own part a single payment.