Names & DNS · Tech Startups
Web hosting for software startups — Lock the name down before the announcement, not after
A startup name becomes public property the moment it is said out loud, and the gap between deciding on it and registering it is the most expensive few days in a company's life.
The short answer
Register the name the day it is chosen, before it appears in a deck, a job advert or a group chat with anybody outside the company. Take the plain global ending and whichever technical ending you intend to use, put the registration in the company's name rather than a founder's personal account, and only then start telling people.
Search covers 500+ endings here with registration and renewal figures on the same row, WHOIS privacy applies at no cost wherever a registry permits it, and the record table handles A, AAAA, CNAME, MX and TXT with edits live within minutes. Free SSL comes with every plan and reissues itself.
By the Hosting & Domains team · Reviewed 24 August 2026
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Early-stage companies get two things wrong about domains with striking regularity. They decide on a name and discuss it widely before registering it, and they register it in a personal account belonging to whoever happened to have a card handy.
The first costs money, occasionally a great deal of it. The second costs nothing at all until the cap table changes, a founder leaves, or a due-diligence questionnaire asks who owns the company's intellectual property and the honest answer is a former colleague's Gmail account.
Both are trivially avoidable, and the fix takes about twenty minutes. What follows is that twenty minutes, plus the DNS decisions that come immediately after it.
Register before you tell anybody
A name that has been discussed in a pitch, a job advert or an open channel is a name somebody else can register first. It is not always malice; sometimes a person simply likes it. Either way the recovery options are buying it back at whatever the holder now believes it is worth, or filing a dispute, which requires a trademark behind it to stand any chance at all.
So compress the gap to zero. Decide on the name, search it, and register it in the same sitting, along with the one or two obvious variants you would be annoyed to see in somebody else's hands. Put the company in the registrant field, use a role address the company controls as the contact, and note the renewal figure while you are there — several technical endings renew at a good deal more than they register for.
Which ending, and what it commits you to
The plain global ending is still the one people assume, and it renews at a steady figure. The developer-flavoured endings read well to a technical audience and carry a specific property worth knowing: .dev and .app are enforced HTTPS-only at the browser level through preloading, so a plain HTTP request to one never even leaves the browser. That is excellent discipline and a genuine surprise the first time a local dev environment refuses to load.
Whichever you pick, get the plain version too if it is available and affordable, because an ending choice made in month two is rarely the ending a company wants in year four. Check both columns on the row. A first-year figure tells you nothing about a cost you will carry for the life of the company.
The app and the marketing site are different records
Keep them apart at the DNS layer from the beginning. The marketing site sits at the apex and www, caches well and has to survive a launch-day crowd. The product sits on its own subdomain — app, or dashboard, or console — pointing wherever the product actually runs, which is usually somewhere else entirely.
The benefit is isolation. A spike on the front page cannot touch anybody using the product, a marketing deploy cannot affect an authenticated session, and you can move either one independently by editing a single record. It also gives you somewhere obvious to put staging, docs and status without cluttering the main name. Decide the naming convention now, while there are three records rather than thirty.
The sixty-day hold that catches a pre-launch rebrand
Registries hold a newly registered name against transferring to another registrar for sixty days. The same window usually applies after a transfer, and after a change of registrant details. It does not stop the name working, it does not stop you pointing it anywhere, and it does not stop you building on it — it only stops the name moving registrar.
Early-stage companies hit it constantly, because they register in haste, change their mind about the name or the arrangement a fortnight later, and want everything tidied into one account immediately. Plan around it: register in the account you intend to keep it in, with the registrant details you intend to keep, and you will never meet the rule at all.
Who on the team can edit the zone. DNS is a small surface with a very large blast radius. One wrong record takes the marketing site, the product and the company's mail off the internet simultaneously, and a compromised registrar account does the same thing on purpose.
Treat it like production, because it is. Put the registrar account on a role address rather than a founder's personal inbox, turn on two-factor authentication, leave the transfer lock engaged between deliberate changes, and keep a written copy of the zone somewhere the whole team can reach. If a name you are taking on already has DNSSEC enabled, do not change its nameservers without dealing with the registry signature first — a signed name pointed at unsigned nameservers goes dark for everybody, and it fails in a way that is very hard to diagnose from inside.
What early teams use the panel for
Registering fast, keeping the registration in the company's name, and editing A, AAAA, CNAME, MX and TXT in one table where a change is live within minutes rather than after a ticket.
Registration and renewal figures are quoted together, WHOIS privacy applies wherever a registry allows it, and the transfer lock, contacts and auto-renew all sit on the same screen as the hosting.
- Registration in the company's name, from the first day
- App, docs and staging as separate records you control
- Both figures on the row before you order
- Locks, contacts and auto-renew on one screen
Why Hosting & Domains
Standard on every plan
Register in one sitting
Search across 500+ endings, see both figures on the row, and have the name in the company's account before it is spoken outside the building.
Subdomains without an invoice
App, docs, status and staging are records you add yourself, so the naming convention is a decision rather than a purchase.
Records live in minutes
Save a change and it takes effect shortly afterwards, which is what makes a vendor verification a same-afternoon job.
The lock in your hands
Keep transfers blocked between deliberate moves and lift the lock yourself when it is time, rather than asking somebody to do it for you.
Certificates that never need chasing
Free SSL on every plan, issued as soon as a name points here and reissued before the old one lapses, across the main name and every subdomain.
Growth as a setting
From a first marketing site to a private server, plan changes apply in place from the client area with no migration and no downtime.
Quick Start
Order placed to site online
- 1
Register the moment the name is chosen
Company in the registrant field, a role address as the contact, both figures checked, and the obvious variants taken at the same time. Privacy engages as the registration completes.
- 2
Lay out the records before you need them
Apex and www for the marketing site, a subdomain for the product, another for docs and one for staging. One-click WordPress puts the marketing site up in minutes.
- 3
Lock it down and write it down
Engage the transfer lock, turn on two-factor, switch auto-renew on, and keep a plain copy of the zone somewhere the team can find it.
Built In
Fitted to every plan
- 500+ endings to choose from, .com through .dev and .store
- Registration and renewal figures shown on the same row
- Subdomains and parked names added without a further invoice
- A, AAAA, CNAME, MX and TXT records edited from one dashboard
- An edited record live within minutes of you saving it
- The transfer lock in your hands, not ours
- Contact details and locks changed in the panel beside the hosting
- Free SSL on every plan, reissued before the old one lapses
- SSH, Git and Composer on the developer plans
- People on the support desk every hour of every day
Frequently Asked
Questions we field again and again
How early should we register the name?
Before it leaves the room. A name discussed in a deck, a job advert or an open channel is one somebody else can take, and the recovery routes are buying it back at the new holder's price or filing a dispute that needs a trademark behind it. Decide, search, register, then announce — the whole sequence fits in one sitting.
Why does a .dev domain refuse to load over plain HTTP?
Because .dev and .app are enforced HTTPS-only at the browser level through preloading, so a plain HTTP request to one is upgraded or refused before it ever reaches the network. It is a deliberate property of those endings rather than a misconfiguration. It catches people first on a local development environment; the answer is to serve those hostnames over HTTPS from the start.
Should the product sit on a subdomain or its own domain?
A subdomain, in almost every early-stage case. It keeps the brand together, it is one record to point wherever the product actually runs, and it isolates the marketing site from the application so a launch-day crowd on the front page cannot reach anybody using the product. A separate domain becomes worth it only when the product genuinely needs its own identity.
We renamed two weeks after registering. Can we move the name yet?
Not to another registrar. Registries hold a newly registered name against transfer for sixty days, and a change of registrant details usually starts the same clock. The name works perfectly throughout and you can point it wherever you like; only the registrar move waits. Register in the account you intend to keep it in and the rule never comes up.
Keep reading
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Register it, then say it out loud.
500+ endings with both figures on the row, the company in the registrant field, and the lock in your own hands.
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