Anonymous domain registrationMoving the server does not move the name.

A domain is a lease, not a possession

You do not own a domain. You hold a registration: a time-limited delegation recorded by a registry, sold to you by a registrar, under a chain of three contracts — registry to authority, registrar to registry, you to registrar. Every one of them has a termination clause, and you wrote none of them.

That is why the mental model matters more here than the shopping does. A machine is property: it sits in a rack, in a country, and if a supplier stops dealing with you it is still your data on your disk. A name is an entry in a zone file that somebody else publishes, and publishing it is a service.

Four parties can remove a name, and your host is not one of them

The cast is small and it is the same for every domain on earth. What is worth reading is not the first column but the last one, because it says how much has to be true before each of them acts.

Three of those four act without a judge. That is the whole difference between the naming layer and the hosting layer, and it is why a page about offshore hosting is not a page about this. A takedown notice sent to a host outside United States jurisdiction has no force to ignore; the same complaint sent to a registrar is a support ticket at a company with no stake in the argument and an easy way to end it.

The jurisdiction that decides is the registry’s

Everybody in this market asks where the server is. Almost nobody asks where the registry is, and the registry is the only party that can make a name stop existing rather than merely stop being served.

It is a lookup, not a judgement. IANA publishes the root zone database: one page per top-level domain, naming the organisation that operates it and the address it operates from. It takes ten seconds and it is the single most useful thing you can do before paying for a name.

What registration privacy actually covers

Public registration data is largely redacted now, and a privacy service will replace whatever is left with a forwarding address. Both are worth having and neither is what the marketing implies, because the public record was never the record.

• The registrar still holds it. Redaction is about what a lookup prints. The company you bought from keeps a name, an address and a means of payment, and produces them when its own regulator, registry or court asks.
• The past is not covered. Registration data has been archived commercially for two decades. A name that was public for a year and private ever since is a name whose registrant is on the record permanently; switching privacy on is a change to the present tense only.
• The payment is a second record, in a second company. A card, an invoice or an account at a registrar identifies the buyer as completely as any form would have, and it sits outside every privacy product being sold alongside it.
• The mail forwarder is a live channel. A privacy service that forwards messages to you is a service that can be compelled to stop forwarding and start recording, and that decision is taken where that company is.

None of that makes privacy pointless. It makes it a control against the casual look-up — which is the threat most sites actually meet — and not a control against an instrument. That distinction is the same one that runs through the nine things that identify a site, where the registration is link number two of nine.

The accuracy rule, which is the trap

A registrar operating under an ICANN agreement has to act on a report that a registration is inaccurate, and has to verify a contact address after a registration or a change to one. Fail to answer that verification inside the window and the name is suspended — with no complainant, no court and nobody to argue with.

So the failure people picture, an agency seizing a domain, is rare. The one that actually happens is an unanswered message sent to an address abandoned two years ago. Deliberately false details make it worse rather than safer: inaccuracy is a ground for suspension that acts on a complaint rather than on an order, which makes it the cheapest attack anybody can run against a name they dislike.

Trademark procedures move faster than courts, by design

Every generic top-level domain registration carries an arbitration clause. A complainant who says your name is confusingly similar to a mark files with a provider rather than a court, pays a fee, and a panel decides on documents in a matter of weeks whether the name is transferred to them or cancelled.

A faster variant exists for most of the names delegated since 2013 and for several older ones that adopted it when their contracts were renewed. It suspends rather than transfers, costs the complainant less, and turns the name off for the remainder of its term. The two largest generic names of all are not in that scheme, and a complaint against one of those runs the slower route.

Neither procedure asks whether your site is lawful, useful or true. They ask whether the string resembles a mark, whether you have a legitimate interest in it, and whether it was registered in bad faith. A perfectly legal site can lose a perfectly legal name, and the only appeal from either is a real court in a real jurisdiction, on your money and your calendar.

This is the point where an offshore posture buys nothing at all. It is not a law being applied to you from outside; it is a contract you accepted at the checkout, and it follows the name wherever you are.

Keeping the registrar away from everything else

The most valuable paragraph on this page costs nothing to act on. Your registrar must not also be your host, your DNS, your mailbox or your backups — not because any of them is bad at the job, but because a single complaint reaching a single company should not be able to end all five at once.

When they are one company, a suspension takes the site, the name, the mail, the backups and the address that the account-recovery message would have been sent to. There is a word for a recovery plan that lives inside the thing it recovers.

• The registrar is a different company from the host, and ideally answerable in a different country.
• Authoritative DNS is not at the registrar where that is practical, so a dispute over the account does not also cost you the zone.
• The registrar login is a mailbox hosted elsewhere, on a name you do not need to keep resolving in order to read it.
• The zone file is exported and kept — every record, not just the ones you remember — so it can be rebuilt at another provider in minutes rather than from memory over days.
• The recovery path has been walked once, in advance, while nothing was wrong.

The same reasoning, applied to a whole business rather than to one name, is set out in building so that one takedown cannot end you.

The controls that exist, in order of what they cost

1. Registry lock. Changes to the name require out-of-band human verification before they reach the registry. It is the only control on this list that survives a compromised registrar account, it is not free, and it is not offered everywhere. On a name that carries a business it is the one thing worth paying for.
2. Transfer lock, and treating the transfer code as a secret. Free, on by default at a competent registrar, and worth confirming rather than assuming. The code that authorises a transfer is a password with a different name.
3. A registration paid several years forward. This removes the commonest cause of losing a name, which is not an authority and not a lawyer but a card that expired before the domain did.
4. A second name, at a different registrar, under a different kind of registry. A rehearsed fallback rather than a spare: published somewhere, resolving to the same place, so that telling an audience where you went does not depend on the name that just stopped working.
5. DNSSEC, understood for what it is. It proves an answer really came from the zone. It does nothing whatever when the delegation to that zone is withdrawn, which is the event this page is about.
6. An onion address. The only name here with no registry, no registrar, no renewal and no fee: it is derived from a key you hold, so there is nobody to suspend it. What it costs is every reader who will not install a browser to reach you, which is why it belongs beside a normal name rather than instead of one.

What a host can do about any of this, and what it cannot

Being exact about scope is worth more than a reassurance, so here is the boundary drawn honestly from this side of it.

• No identity document is collected here at signup or afterwards, at any spend level, and settlement is on-chain only. That keeps one record thin. It does nothing about a card used at a registrar, which recreates the record the hosting account never held.
• What is held here is published as an inventory in the privacy and logging policy, and what arrives by way of legal process is counted in the transparency report. Neither document reaches your registrar, because your registrar is not us.
• We are not a registrar and do not sell names, which means we are structurally unable to be the single company whose bad day takes both your server and your address. That is worth more to you than a bundle discount.
• A name that has been suspended is not a hosting problem and we cannot fix it. What we can do is have the machine still running, the data still yours, and the replacement address pointing at it the same day.

And the sentence the whole page exists for: hosting decides who can read the disk, while registration decides who can switch off the address. They are different questions, answered by different companies in different countries, and buying carefully on one of them proves nothing at all about the other. Where the server sits is still worth choosing on the merits — that is a separate comparison — but it is not this decision.

A twenty-minute check, in the order to run it

Nothing below needs a tool you have to buy, and each step tells you something the step before it did not.

1. Look your top-level domain up in the IANA root database and read who operates it and from which country.
2. Read your registrar’s own terms for the clause that lets it suspend or cancel, and for the notice it says it owes you first.
3. Run a lookup on your own name and read the status codes it returns. A transfer prohibition is the state you want; a hold means the name is already switched off.
4. Send a message to the registration contact address and confirm that somebody would actually read it within a fortnight.
5. Confirm that address is not hosted on the name it is protecting.
6. Look the name up in a historical registration archive — and look up every other name registered with the same address, because that is how a set gets joined.
7. Export the zone file and store it somewhere that is not the DNS provider.
8. Check the expiry date and the payment method behind it. A card that expires first is a scheduled outage with a date on it.
9. Ask the registrar whether registry lock is available, what it costs, and how long a routine change will take once it is on.
10. Write down what a week of suspension would cost you, then decide once whether the second name is worth its annual fee.

Questions people actually ask

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