A registrar is a company accredited to sell and manage domain registrations on behalf of the registries covered in the last lesson. Registering a domain in practice means picking a registrar, searching for a name, and paying for it — but a few details are worth understanding before doing that.
A registrar handles registering the name, renewing it, and giving you a control panel to manage where it points — the DNS settings covered in upcoming lessons. It does not host your website; that is a separate service, per the earlier lesson on the three separate pieces, even when the same company happens to also sell hosting.
Every registrar's site offers a search box: type a name, and it reports whether it is already registered. A taken name is not available at any price through normal registration — it would need to be bought from its current owner, if they are willing to sell at all, which is a different and much more expensive process than registering a fresh name.
Registration is priced per year, and cost varies significantly by TLD — a common gTLD is usually inexpensive, while some specialty and premium TLDs cost meaningfully more. Rather than quoting specific figures that will be wrong within a year, the pattern worth knowing is this: a first-year price is often discounted as an introductory offer, and the renewal price the following year is frequently higher than what you paid to register. Always check the renewal price before committing, not just the headline first-year price.
Check the renewal price, not just the first-year price
The classic first-time trap: registering at an attractive introductory price, forgetting to check what renewal actually costs, and being surprised a year later. Read the renewal price on the registrar's own pricing page before buying, not after the first invoice arrives.
Domain registration information — name, address, contact details — is recorded in a public-facing database called WHOIS. Historically this meant a registrant's personal details were publicly visible to anyone who looked up the domain. Most registrars now offer WHOIS privacy (sometimes called domain privacy), which substitutes the registrar's own contact details for yours in the public record — genuinely worth enabling, and often included at no extra cost.
A freshly registered domain does nothing on its own — it needs DNS records pointing it at hosting before a website appears, and at a mail service before email works. Both are covered in the lessons directly ahead.