Registrars are companies accredited by ICANN to register domains. In other words, there’s a global registry (and a bunch of national registries) of domains, and registrars are the only companies permitted to sell domains and add them to the registry.

Once you have a domain in hand, you can add DNS records, which basically tell the internet how your domain behaves. They control the way your business email is routed, tell browsers how to find your website, safeguard your reputation, and much more. The tool used to edit DNS records is a nameserver.

Registrars typically also double as nameservers. If you buy a domain at just about any given registrar, you can also use them to edit your domain’s DNS records.

But we work a bit differently. Regardless of where the domains are purchased, we prefer to use nameservers that provide additional benefits that registrars can’t even hope to match. Our nameserver of choice for most websites is Cloudflare, which offers second-to-none security, domain management, and performance capabilities.