Search for a domain

To check to see if your chosen domain is available, enter the domain in the search bar. It will let you know if it’s available of already registered.

While your second level domain is entirely up to you, we can help with top level domains (TLDs: the letters after the dot). You can use the ‘categories’ filter above the list to choose a category of TLD: perhaps one that suits the business category of the website?

As well as popular and geographic domains, we cover these categories: business, education, fashion, financial, food and drink, health, hobbies, interests, lifestyle, media, government, occupations, property, sport, technology and travel. You can also filter by price.

While this is optional, we’d recommend buying versions of your domain with different TLDs to help protect you from problems in the future. For example, if your website is a ‘yoursite.com’, you might want to make sure that no one can set up a site on the ‘yoursite.org’, ‘yoursite.net’, and so on.

If it’s just a small side hustle business and you don’t anticipate becoming the target of fraudsters then this might not be necessary. But we’d recommend it: it’s always better to be safe than sorry!

For .com, .net .org and .info domains, the maximum length is 67 characters (not including the top level domain). We don’t recommend using all those 63 characters: shorter is generally better: easier to type and remember. They must be at least 3 characters long.

They can’t contain symbols, except hyphens (and these can’t be at the beginning or end), so it’s just letters and numbers.

They aren’t case sensitive, but there’s nothing stopping you adding capitals to make it more readable in your marketing, e.g. MyReallyGoodWebsite.com.

You also need to be over 18 to register.

It used to be the case that anyone could do a ‘WHOIS’ search on your website and see your registration details held by the registrar. Now, due to privacy regulations this is less likely, but not impossible. You could get targeted by spammers if they got your contact details.

To ensure that this doesn’t happen to you, we’d recommend 20i Domain Privacy. This will mask your details with a generic company. It comes with free e-mail forwarding of the protected email address to an email of your choice, so you'll continue to receive any domain notifications. All the information you provide to us is kept secure, in line with our Privacy Policy.

If you're an individual with your own .uk or .co.uk domain name that isn’t for business use then you can hide your personal details for free. Just tick ‘opt out of WHOIS’ on ordering.

You’ll just need to give your current provider the 20i IPS tag, which is STACK.