Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026
Register yourname.com if it’s free, and yourname.co.uk if it isn’t. Buy it at a registrar, not inside your website builder. Put the account in your own name, turn on auto-renew, and point it at whatever site you build later.
That is the whole decision, and for most authors it takes about fifteen minutes.
It’s worth those fifteen minutes because the domain is the one part of an author platform whose rules nobody else gets to change. You don’t own it outright. What you hold is a registration that lasts exactly as long as you keep paying for it. Amazon can rewrite its terms, a newsletter provider can reprice you, a social network can close your account without telling you why. The address survives all of that.
We build author websites (£199 to build, £15 a month to look after), so we have an interest in you having a website at all. We don’t sell domains, we aren’t a registrar, and we make nothing if you buy from anyone named here. Our preference is that you hold the domain yourself and give us access, so that if you ever sack us you keep the website. What a site costs is covered in our author website cost guide. This piece is only about the address.
What should an author use as a domain name?
Your own name, in full, with no hyphens and nothing clever. Readers who go looking for you type your name, booksellers and journalists link to it, and it survives every change of genre, series and publisher you’ll go through. Our author website essentials guide covers the naming basics; what follows is the order to work through when the obvious choice has gone.
Firstname plus lastname first. Then firstname plus middle initial plus lastname. Then firstname plus lastname plus “author” or “books”. Then the .co.uk or .uk of any of those. A middle initial reads as a name in its own right, and the name-plus-author construction is used by so many writers that nobody reads anything into it.
Say the address out loud before you buy it, because you’ll be reading it on podcasts and at events. That’s the real argument against hyphens: “hyphen” is a horrible word to have to say twice in a sentence.
One domain, not one per book. A single author site with a page per book means one thing to keep current, one address to print on a bookmark, and one renewal on the card statement. Buying both the .com and the .co.uk and pointing one at the other is reasonable when the second is cheap. Buying six variations because a registrar’s upsell screen suggested them is a standing charge every year, forever, to stop a squatter who was never coming.
Should an author use .com or .co.uk?
Most UK authors never get to make this choice. The .com of your name went years ago, to a dentist in Ohio or an investor in Shenzhen, and the .co.uk is sitting there for a tenner. Take it and get on with the book.
If both are available, the deciding factor is where your readers are. Google’s documentation on multi-regional sites says country-code domains are tied to a specific country and “provide a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country”. A .com carries no such signal, and Google’s advice for a generic domain aiming at one country is to set a country target explicitly. So if your books are about British subjects, sold mainly through Amazon.co.uk, and your events are in Britain, a .co.uk tells the truth about you. If you’re writing for a global market, or your ambitions are American, take the .com and don’t think about it again.
.co.uk is not a small or provincial namespace, incidentally. Nominet, the .uk registry, reports over 10 million domains under management, more than 120,000 new .UK registrations a month, and a network of over 2,000 registrars.
.uk against .co.uk. Both exist and both work, and at most registrars they cost the same: Porkbun listed both at $5.66 a year on 5 August 2026, and Krystal prices .co.uk, .uk, .org.uk and .me.uk identically. The short .uk looks tidier; .co.uk is more familiar to British readers of a certain age. Buy whichever you’d rather say out loud, and buy both if the name matters to you.
Moving registrar is easier on .uk. A .uk domain changes hands by a registrar change, with no year of renewal to buy. The losing registrar assigns the domain to the gaining registrar’s tag, which is the short code Nominet uses to identify each registrar. If they won’t or can’t, Nominet lets you do it yourself through its Online Services for a single transaction fee of £10 plus VAT, however many domains are in the batch. That is why Porkbun listed .co.uk and .uk transfers at $0.00 on 5 August 2026 while a .com transfer costs a full year at $11.08.
The 60-day transfer lock doesn’t apply. More on that below, and it’s the most underrated thing about a .co.uk.
What a domain should cost, and where to buy it
Two numbers matter and only one of them gets advertised. The first-year price is on the banner. The renewal is what you’ll pay for the next twenty years.
IONOS is more open than most, though you still have to read it properly. Checked on 11 August 2026, its domains page shows a .co.uk as “£10 £1/year for 1 year” and a .com as “£15 £1/year for 1 year” — the higher figure struck through, the £1 in bold. That struck-through number is the standard price you revert to, so with VAT you are looking at about £12 and £18 a year from year two. Note what is not on the page: the word renewal. Nothing states outright that £10 is what you will pay next year — you infer it from a crossed-out price, and the £1 is still the number you will remember.
Flat pricing is the alternative. Krystal, a UK host, lists .co.uk and .uk at £7.99 a year and .com at £11.99, both excluding VAT, under the line “The price you see is the price you pay. We never add extra fees or costs.” With VAT that’s £9.59 and £14.39. Registrant details are hidden at no extra cost and there’s no charge to move a domain away, which is the clause worth checking wherever you buy.
The American cost-price registrars are cheaper again if you don’t mind a dollar charge on your card. Porkbun listed .com at $11.08 to register and $11.08 to renew on 5 August 2026, with .co.uk and .uk at $5.66 each. At the mid-market rate published that day, $1 to £0.7437, those come to roughly £8.24 and £4.21 as an indicative conversion, before whatever your bank adds for handling the currency.
Call it £10 to £15 a year including VAT to keep everything in sterling, or about half that in dollars. If you’re being asked for more than £25 a year for a plain .co.uk or .com, ask what the extra buys.
Price one more thing into a .com: it has an escalator attached. Porkbun tells customers its .com price rises to approximately $11.81 on 1 November 2026, and that Verisign’s agreement with ICANN allows increases of “about 7% every year from 2026 until 2030”. Domain Name Wire reported on 23 April 2026 that Verisign had announced a wholesale rise from $10.26 to $10.97, effective 1 November 2026. Your .com renewal will creep up, and your registrar isn’t the one doing it.
When your name is already taken
Look at what’s actually on the address before you do anything, because three quite different situations hide behind “taken”.
If it’s another real person with a real website, walk away and pick a different address. You will not win, and you shouldn’t.
If it’s a parking page with a “make an offer” form, you’re dealing with an investor. Decide your ceiling before you make contact, because the answer to “what’s your budget” is never a number you should say first.
If it’s dead, expired-looking or redirecting somewhere odd, put it on a backorder service, which queues an automatic registration attempt for the moment the name drops, and then forget about it. Domains fall out of registration constantly.
Only consider a dispute if you have rights worth asserting. Nominet runs a Dispute Resolution Service for .uk, administered by WIPO on Nominet’s behalf since 7 July 2026, with new complaints filed through WIPO’s site. Mediation is free and both parties are opted in automatically. Beyond that a summary decision costs £200 and a full expert decision £750, with no VAT on cases raised on or after 7 July 2026, and an appeal to a three-expert panel costs £3,000. Nominet says fully reasoned cases run approximately eight to 12 weeks. For a .com the equivalent is the UDRP, and WIPO’s published schedule for a single panelist covering one to five domain names is $1,500, of which $1,000 goes to the panelist and $500 to the WIPO Center.
Understand what has to be proved before anyone starts drafting: that you have Rights in a name or mark identical or similar to the domain, and that the domain in the other party’s hands is an Abusive Registration. Nominet puts it bluntly on its own page. “Simply showing you have rights to a domain name isn’t sufficient to win in a DRS complaint. The Complainant must also demonstrate that the registration or use of the domain name is abusive.” Having published a book under a name is not automatically a right, and someone registering their own name, which happens also to be your name, is not abusive.
Spending £750 to fight over an address you could have replaced with a middle initial is a poor trade for almost every author.
Domains and pen names
The pen name goes on the domain. Your real name goes on the registration. That distinction runs through everything else here.
ICANN’s registrar agreement requires the registered name holder to “provide to Registrar accurate and reliable contact details” and to correct them within seven days of any change. It makes willful inaccuracy, or a failure to answer accuracy queries for over fifteen days, a material breach that is “a basis for suspension and/or cancellation of the Registered Name registration”. The .uk side is checked too: every Nominet record we pulled on 5 August 2026 carried a data-validation line saying Nominet had matched the registrant’s name and address against a third-party data source. Fake details are how people lose domains, not how they protect them.
Buy the domain before you announce the pen name. The cover reveal and the Facebook post come afterwards. If your announcement travels at all, the gap between naming the pen name and someone else registering it is measured in hours.
Check the pen name isn’t already someone else’s name. Search it, and check the UK and international trade mark registers if it carries any commercial weight. A pen name that collides with a living author or a registered mark follows you into every retailer listing too. Our guide to choosing a pen name covers the rest of that decision.
If the point of the pen name is real separation, keep the separation in the plumbing: a different registrar account, a different email address, a different card where you can. It isn’t a lookup that exposes people. It’s a shared recovery address or a reused password.
Does a domain lookup show your home address?
We ran three .uk lookups on 5 August 2026 to check, querying Nominet’s public WHOIS directly. Our own domain, publishing.co.uk, came back with the registrar, the registration and expiry dates, the registration status and the name servers, and no registrant name or address at all. lovereading.co.uk returned the same shape of record. The third, nominet.uk, is registered to a UK limited company and returned a full name and postal address. Nominet’s stated position is that registrant details are not published unless the registrant has consented, and that is what it looks like in practice. Run the same lookup on your own domain and you’ll see exactly what a stranger sees.
The lookup itself is being retired. Every response we received carried a banner reading “WHOIS service for .UK will cease on 9th of February 2027”, pointing at RDAP, the modern replacement lookup protocol. Nominet’s registry page, under a heading about .UK standardisation, says the same thing from the other end: “Changes to our systems and .UK policies will come into effect on 9th February 2027.” Any older article telling you to file a WHOIS opt-out form with Nominet is out of date.
For .com and other generic extensions the mechanics differ. Registrars redact personal data in the published record, and some include that for free, Cloudflare and Krystal among them, so check what you already have before paying for it as a bolt-on. Cloudflare’s documentation is a good model of what redaction covers: free, removes the registrant name, email address and postal address, and shows “Data Redacted” in those fields.
One detail matters if the pen name exists for your safety. Cloudflare notes that registrant state or province and registrant country are still published under ICANN policy even with redaction switched on, so a .com lookup won’t name you but can narrow down where you live. That’s one more reason a .uk suits an author writing under cover. Either way, keep a home address off the record in the first place, because a PO box, an accountant’s address or a virtual office costs less than most people expect.
Why buying the domain inside your website builder makes leaving harder
We build author websites for £199, which puts us in direct competition with Squarespace and Wix, so read this section knowing that. Everything in it comes from their own help pages.
Buy the domain during signup and the builder becomes your registrar of record. Everything you would otherwise do at a registrar you now do through their interface, alongside your site subscription.
The free year belongs to the plan, and year two is theirs to price. Squarespace’s domains FAQ states that sites within the first year of an annual billing cycle include one free custom domain. After one year of service it renews at $20, and common extensions like .com and .org are $20 a year. Porkbun sells the same .com at $11.08. That’s about 80% more, every year, for as long as you keep the name.
Getting out is a request, not a button, and it’s two jobs. Squarespace’s own instructions for leaving are to switch the domain lock off, click “Request transfer code”, reauthenticate, wait up to 24 hours for the code to arrive by email, then hand it to your new provider. Nothing there is unfair, but it’s a sequence that depends on their systems at the point where you’ve already decided you don’t want to be their customer. The same page adds that transferring the domain “doesn’t move your site hosting to your new provider or cancel your current Squarespace site”, and that if you’re leaving entirely you should cancel the website subscription after transferring the domain. Do those two in the wrong order and you’re negotiating with a company you’ve already left.
The 60-day locks come from ICANN, and they bite hardest here. Under its transfer policy a domain can’t move to another registrar within 60 days of being registered, within 60 days of a previous transfer, or within 60 days of a change to the registrant’s contact information. Wix says so plainly: the limitation “applies to both incoming (to Wix) and outgoing (away from Wix) transfers and cannot be changed by Wix”. Squarespace’s domain-locks page describes that third trigger like this: “You can enable a 60-day contact update lock when you change the domain registrant’s contact information. The lock can’t be disabled.” Correcting a typo in your surname or updating the email on the account can therefore start a two-month clock during which you cannot leave, and authors find this out in the week they’ve decided to move. What makes it sharper at a builder is that the domain and the website share an account you’re trying to get away from.
Here’s the bright spot, and it’s a British one. Squarespace’s page lists .co.uk, .org.uk and .uk among the country-code extensions with no 60-day lock: “you can transfer it at any time.” A .co.uk bought through a builder is meaningfully easier to walk away with than a .com bought the same way.
None of this makes builders villains, and their domain products work perfectly well. It’s that the domain outlives the website, and the two shouldn’t share a cancel button.
How authors lose their domains
Price is rarely what kills a domain. Admin is.
Auto-renew switched off, or a card that expired. Check both today, on every domain you own, and put a card on file that isn’t about to be reissued.
Assuming the expiry date is the deadline. For some extensions it isn’t. Namecheap recommends setting .ch, .es, .fr, .li, .pe, .sg and the Australian extensions to auto-renew a minimum of 12 days before expiry, “due to the renewal peculiarities of these TLDs”. .com and .co.uk are more forgiving than that, but the habit costs nothing.
Registrar warnings going to an address on the domain itself. If your registrar account uses hello@yourname.co.uk and the domain lapses, the mail stops working, so the warnings about the lapse bounce and you hear about it from a reader instead. Use an address on a different domain, and fix this today if it applies to you.
Redemption fees. Once a domain falls past its grace period, getting it back means paying a restore fee on top of the renewal, and by then somebody else may have it.
The domain sitting in someone else’s account. A designer, a nephew, a publisher, a former assistant. If your name is on the book, your name should be on the registration, so ask while the relationship is still a good one.
Leaving the registrar lock off. Most registrars turn a transfer lock on by default. Leave it on, and switch it off only for the fortnight you’re moving.
The order I’d do it in
- Check yourname.com, yourname.co.uk and yourname.uk together, in one sitting.
- Compare the renewal price at two registrars, and screenshot both.
- Register in your own account, with your own card, using an email address that isn’t on the domain you’re registering.
- Turn on auto-renew and two-factor authentication, and leave the transfer lock on.
- Take the free privacy if it’s offered, and check you aren’t already paying for it as an add-on.
- Point it at whatever you’re building. That part is reversible in a way the name isn’t.
The whole thing costs less than a decent hardback, and it’s the piece of your platform that will still be working in ten years, which is more than you can say for any social network you’re currently worrying about.
Once the address is yours, the next jobs are making it findable (author website SEO and AI discovery), pointing your retailer profiles at it (Amazon Author Central UK), and deciding whether to sell direct from it. If the manuscript is what’s actually holding you up, our free KDP readiness audit is the more useful next click, and our formatting service is where most authors start.
Related guides
- What an author website costs in the UK
- Author website essentials: Carrd vs WordPress vs Shopify
- Author website SEO and AI discovery
- Selling books direct from your website
- Pen name strategy for authors
- Amazon Author Central UK
External references
- Nominet: The UK Registry
- Nominet: domain disputes
- The UK Domain: can I switch registrar?
- ICANN 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement
- WIPO: schedule of fees for UDRP cases
- Google Search Central: managing multi-regional sites
- Cloudflare: WHOIS redaction
- Wix: ICANN’s 60-day lock policy
- Squarespace: domain locks
- Squarespace: transferring a domain away
- Squarespace: domains FAQ
- Porkbun: domain pricing
- Porkbun: why did .com prices go up
- Krystal: domain names
- IONOS UK: domain names
- Namecheap: renewing .CH / .ES / .FR / .LI / .PE / .SG / .AU domains
Frequently asked questions
Where’s the best place to buy a domain name in the UK?
Anywhere that publishes its renewal price, lets the account sit in your own name, and includes privacy in what you pay. In sterling, Krystal listed .co.uk and .uk at £7.99 a year excluding VAT on 5 August 2026, so £9.59 with VAT, and .com at £11.99, so £14.39. In dollars, Porkbun listed .com at $11.08 and .co.uk at $5.66. Treat any £1 or £3.99 headline as a first-year price until you’ve found the renewal figure underneath it.
How much should I pay for a domain someone else owns?
Almost always nothing. Hardly anybody arrives by typing an author’s name into a browser bar; they arrive from a retailer listing, a recommendation or a search result. £2,500 spent on a cover, an editor and a year of advertising will sell more books than £2,500 spent on an address. Add a middle initial or the word “author” and move on. Pay only if that exact string already carries commercial value for you, and negotiate through an escrow service if you do.
My web designer registered my domain. Is that a problem?
It’s a problem waiting for a bad month. Ask for the registration to be moved into an account in your name now, and if they resist, that tells you something useful. Changing the registrant details triggers a 60-day transfer lock on .com and most generic extensions, though not on .co.uk, so start the conversation before you need the domain moved in a hurry.
How do I move my domain to a different registrar?
For a .com you unlock the domain at your current registrar, request the authorisation code, and give it to the new one. That normally costs a year’s renewal, and it can’t happen within 60 days of registration, a previous transfer or a registrant-contact change. For a .uk it’s a registrar change instead: your current registrar assigns the domain to the new registrar’s tag, the short code Nominet uses to identify each one, or you do it yourself through Nominet’s Online Services for £10 plus VAT per transaction.
Can I point the domain at my Amazon page instead of building a website?
You can, and a redirect beats nothing while you’re writing the next book. What you give up is everything a page of your own does: an email sign-up you keep, somewhere to send a journalist, and a page whose rules Amazon doesn’t set. If that trade sounds fine for now, buy the domain anyway and redirect it. The name is the part that’s hard to get back later.
