Buying a domain
Domain purchasing is in a limited beta. The search works for anyone; checkout, DNS editing and transfers are not open to every workspace yet. If the purchase panel is hidden in your dashboard, that is why.
Why buy it here rather than elsewhere
Buying the domain somewhere else leaves you with a zone file to fill in: an ownership TXT record, a routing record, three DKIM records, a bounce-domain MX and TXT, a DMARC record. That is an afternoon, and it ends in a support ticket when one value has a trailing dot in it.
When the domain is registered through BusinessDash, the platform is the registrar of record, so the email records are written into the zone directly and the domain is recorded as yours without any verification dance. Ownership is not a claim we check — it is a fact we created.
Searching
Search accepts a bare name or a full domain. acme and acme.com both
produce the same list: the exact name first when you typed a supported
extension, then the siblings across the extensions BusinessDash sells.
| Extension | |
|---|---|
.com .net .org | The general ones |
.co .io | Shorter alternatives |
.us | United States |
The list is deliberately short. Each extension is its own pricing row, its own registry policy and its own support topic, so one gets added when it can be supported rather than because it exists.
What "available" means, and what the price means
The public search on the marketing page runs without any account. It answers from the registry itself — RDAP, the standard replacement for WHOIS — and falls back to a nameserver lookup when RDAP refuses or times out.
Two consequences worth knowing:
- Unknown reads as unavailable. If neither source gives a straight answer, the name is shown as not purchasable. Telling you a name is free when we cannot confirm it would send you to a checkout that fails.
- Those sources carry no prices. The price beside a name on the public search comes from BusinessDash's published price table, not from the registry. When you are signed in, search quotes the live registrar instead, and a name the registrar declines to price shows no price at all rather than a guess.
Checkout always re-prices server-side before any money moves. The number on screen is a published price; the number you are charged is quoted fresh at the moment you buy. If they ever disagree, the checkout price is the real one.
Renewal costs the same as year one
The renewal price is quoted at the same retail as the first year. The first-year-cheap, renewal-expensive pattern common at registrars is not used here, and the pricing is built so the two cannot drift apart.
Premium names are not sold
Registries price some names as premium — sometimes thousands of dollars. Those are shown as not purchasable rather than put behind a normal-looking button.
Checking out
Registration is a legal act, so a purchase collects the registrant details ICANN requires: name, email, phone and a postal address. These are yours, not the platform's — you are the registrant, and the details are snapshotted onto the purchase record as they were at the time.
| Term | One year at a time |
| WHOIS privacy | On, always |
| Autorenew | On by default, switchable afterwards |
| Payment | Card, through the normal checkout |
Your card is saved at the first payment. That is what makes the renewal charge possible a year later without asking you to come back and re-enter it.
Registration never runs before payment is confirmed, and fulfilment is idempotent end to end — a payment notification that arrives twice cannot register the domain twice or charge you twice.
Purchase states
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
pending_payment | Checkout started, not paid |
paid | Payment cleared, registration in progress |
registered | The domain exists and is yours |
registration_failed | Payment cleared and no domain exists |
cancelled | The purchase was abandoned |
transferred_out | It left for another registrar |
expired | The registration lapsed |
registration_failed is the one state that is treated as an incident: your
admins are notified, it is logged on the platform side, and the retry button
is safe to press because fulfilment is idempotent. It is never silently
retried into oblivion and never quietly written off.
DNS editing is only offered once a purchase reaches registered. Before that
there is no zone to edit, and showing an editor for one would be a lie.
What arrives configured
As soon as the domain is registered, BusinessDash writes the email setup into the zone for you:
| Written | Why |
|---|---|
Three DKIM CNAME records | So your mail is signed and receivers can verify it |
A bounce-domain MX and SPF TXT on send.yourdomain | So the envelope carries your own domain and SPF aligns |
A DMARC TXT at _dmarc, starting at p=none | So receivers know the domain authenticates its mail |
It also records the domain as verified for your organization and sets it as your organization's primary domain if you did not have one. See Sending from your own domain for what each of those records does.
The website routing record is not written for you. Pointing the domain at your published site is still a step you take — see Connecting a domain you own. The difference is that you can add that record from your own dashboard instead of logging in somewhere else.
Editing your DNS
A registered domain's zone is editable from the dashboard. You can add and
delete A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, SRV and NS records, with a TTL
between 60 seconds and one day.
The records BusinessDash wrote are labelled as platform-managed, and the distinction is enforced rather than cosmetic:
- Your records are invisible to the platform. Automatic configuration only ever touches records it wrote itself, by id. It cannot modify or remove anything you added, even by accident.
- You can delete a platform record anyway. It is your domain. Deleting one removes it from the platform's ledger too, so the system stops claiming a record it no longer owns and can honestly re-create it if you ask it to.
Zone export gives you the whole zone as a standard zone file. Full portability is the point: it is the proof that the domain is yours and not hostage to the platform.
Renewals
A domain expiring takes your website and your email down together, so the renewal path is deliberately noisy:
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| 60, 30 and 7 days before expiry | Your admins are notified |
| Inside the last 30 days | Autorenew charges your saved card and renews at the registrar |
| A failed charge | Keeps retrying through the remaining window, so one declined card is not fatal |
Autorenew can be switched off per domain. If it is off, the notices still arrive — a domain nobody meant to drop should not go quietly.
Transferring in
An existing domain registered elsewhere can be moved in. Eligibility is checked before any money moves, because a registry will refuse a transfer for reasons that have nothing to do with you — a recent registration, a recent transfer, a lock at the current registrar.
You supply the auth code (sometimes called the EPP code) from your current registrar. Real transfers take days and complete at the registry, so "pending" is the normal answer; the lifecycle sweep polls until it finishes.
Transferring out
Leaving is a button. It unlocks the domain and gives you the auth code to hand to your new registrar; transfers usually complete in five to seven days.
Easy departure is not a concession. It is what makes buying here safe in the first place — a domain you cannot take with you is not really yours.