Your business starts with the right domain.

A domain name is the address people type to reach you, like yourbusiness.com. It is not the website itself and not your email: it is the name that points at both. You register it for a fixed term, renew it to keep it, and can move it between providers without changing the name.

You hold the exclusive right to use it for as long as you keep it registered, and you are recorded as its registrant. Domains are not sold outright by any registrar; they are registered for a term and renewed. As the registrant you can transfer it away, change its DNS, or let it lapse.

Registration is immediate. Making it resolve worldwide takes a little longer, because DNS is cached at every step between a visitor and us, and typically completes within 15 to 30 minutes.

Yes, on every domain where the registry permits it, at no extra charge. A small number of registries publish registrant details and provide no means to hide them, so privacy cannot be applied to those extensions by anyone. Where it applies, your personal contact details are replaced in the public WHOIS record.

Yes. You will need the domain unlocked at your current registrar and its authorization code. The transfer fee for the extension adds a year to your registration rather than replacing the time you have already paid for, and the domain keeps working throughout.

A domain does not disappear the moment it expires. It moves through a grace period, then a redemption period where recovery is possible but a registry fee applies, before it is finally released. Auto-renew avoids the whole sequence, and it is on by default.

A .com is still the default assumption for a business, and worth taking if the name is free. Beyond that, pick an extension that says something true about you: a country code where your customers are, or a descriptive extension that matches what you do. What matters more than the extension is that the name is short, spellable aloud, and yours.