Buy a domain without the renewal trap

Yes. The per-year price you see on this page applies to the first year and to every renewal after it, so a .com registered at 9.99 EUR a year still costs 9.99 EUR when it renews. We do not use first-year teaser pricing, where a domain is advertised cheaply and then becomes much more expensive at renewal. That matters because a domain is a long-term cost: you usually keep it as long as your project exists, and the renewal price is what you actually pay year after year. The only thing added at checkout is VAT where it applies, shown separately before you pay.

A .lv domain costs 19.90 EUR per year excluding 21% VAT, and the renewal is the same 19.90 EUR, so the yearly cost never changes. We are an accredited .lv registrar and register the name directly in the NIC.LV registry, without a reseller in between. The price already includes the services many registrars charge extra for: anycast DNS hosting for the zone, DNSSEC signing and email forwarding. There are no setup fees or hidden surcharges, VAT is simply added at checkout for customers who have to pay it. You can check whether your name is free using the search at the top of this page.

For a Latvian audience it usually is. .lv is the official country domain of Latvia, so a local visitor immediately reads it as a business that actually operates here, which helps with trust in ways a generic zone often cannot. It is also the ending Latvian customers tend to guess and type first. If most of your customers are abroad, a .com or .eu may serve you better, and many companies register both and point one at the other, which any domain here can do. The cost stays predictable at 19.90 EUR per year through the NIC.LV registry, with renewal at the same price, so trying it is a small commitment.

Among the popular zones on this page, .shop is the cheapest at 2.90 EUR per year, followed by .eu at 5.90 EUR and .com at 9.99 EUR, all excluding 21% VAT. Since every zone renews at its registration price, the cheap zones stay cheap: there is no jump in the second year. Two honest caveats apply. Some zones require a minimum registration of 2 years, which the checker shows before you order, and individual names flagged as premium by a registry carry their own price. If none of the listed zones fits, over 500 other TLDs are available at checkout, so it is worth comparing a few before deciding.

Yes. The usual flow is: unlock the domain at your current registrar, request the transfer authorization code there, then start the transfer with us and enter that code. For most gTLDs the transfer itself adds one year of registration to the term you already have, billed at the normal yearly price, so no paid time is lost. The website and email keep working throughout, because a transfer changes the registrar, not the nameservers, and you can leave DNS untouched until you decide otherwise. If anything goes wrong, for example the code is rejected or the domain turns out to be locked, write to support and we will walk it through with you for free.

Public WHOIS records are routinely harvested for spam and cold calls, which is why hiding them matters. For gTLDs such as .com we publish a proxy contact in the public database instead of your name, address and email, and this stays free for as long as you hold the domain. You remain the full legal owner: the proxy only changes what strangers see, not who controls the domain, and genuine legal or registry correspondence still reaches you. For .lv the mechanism is different, since the NIC.LV registry itself limits the personal data it publishes under GDPR, so a separate privacy service is not needed there. Nothing has to be enabled or paid for in either case.

No. Every domain comes with managed anycast DNS answered from 12 regions worldwide, which is convenient because the domain resolves quickly for visitors on any continent without any setup on your side. But it is a default, not a requirement: you can delegate the domain to any nameservers you prefer, for example those of your hosting provider or your own infrastructure, and change them again at any time from the panel. Switching nameservers does not affect ownership, the renewal price or the expiry date. One practical note: the included DNSSEC signing applies while the zone runs on our DNS, so if you move DNS elsewhere, signing becomes the job of that provider.

By default auto-renewal charges your saved payment method 30 days before the expiry date, so the safest habit is simply to keep that payment method and your billing email up to date. If auto-renewal is switched off and the date passes, the domain stops resolving, which means the website and any mail on it go down. Most zones then allow a grace period during which we can still restore the domain for you, but its length differs from zone to zone, and recovery generally gets harder and more expensive the longer you wait. After that the name is released and anyone can register it. If a domain of yours has expired, write to support straight away.