Do you know what Registrar, Registry, and Registrant are?
Today, I want to talk about the differences between Registry, Registrar, and Registrant.
A domain consists of several parts, and the part we are dealing with today is the extension or TLD (Top Level Domain) of the domain.
TLDs are divided into two groups
gTLD (generic TLD)
These are extensions with three or more characters, such as com, net, org, asia, rocks, etc.
ccTLD (country code TLD)
These are country-specific extensions, such as ca, tr, ir, etc.
There are organizations or companies that handle domain registration for you. Currently, for each TLD (domain extension), there is only one main organization referred to as the Registry, and there are other companies that obtain licenses from the main organization to register domains for that specific extension. These secondary companies are called Registrars.
Registrant refers to an individual or entity applying for domain registration and is considered the owner of the domain.
In general, there are three ways to register a domain
- Directly go to the Registry’s website and register the domain.
- Choose a Registrar and register the domain through them. The Registrar then registers your information with the Registry for that specific domain extension.
- Go to the website of a company that is neither a Registry nor a Registrar and register the domain.
You can find a list of all available extensions along with the main registering organization here. For example, the top-level domain com is registered by the company VeriSign, and for ir, it is registered by the company Nic.ir. In this list, you can also find the second-level companies or Registrars.
Note that there is only one Registry for each domain extension.
To view the details of a domain, you need to use Whois, a text-based protocol on port 43 that provides registration information for a specific domain.
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Here is a list of common extensions along with their Whois servers