Soon you'll be able to get your own address online without learning what a registrar is or how DNS works. We're adding domain registration to the Magic Pages portal: search for a name, pay what it costs us plus €1 a year, and we do the rest.
If your domain is registered somewhere else, nothing changes. We'll keep connecting domains from any registrar, exactly as we do today.
Why we're building it
Today, putting your site on your own address starts with things nobody tells you. Addresses are rented, from a company called a registrar, and there are a lot of them. You pick one, buy the name there, then come back to us for your DNS records. Then you go back to the registrar, find its DNS settings, and copy the records in.
If you build websites for a living, that's ten minutes. If you write, run a newsletter or a small business and have never thought about how the web works, every word in it is new: registrar, DNS, CNAME, nameserver.
So we're turning it into one step. Owning your place online shouldn't need a dictionary.
What you'll be able to do
You'll find a name, see what it costs, and pay. We register it in your name, set it up and connect it to your site. There's nothing to copy anywhere.
If you already own a domain, you'll be able to move it to us instead. We bring its settings along, so your site and email keep working while it moves.
Email works the same way. Tell us you use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Fastmail or Proton, and we set the domain up for it.
At cost, plus €1
A domain will cost what the registry charges us, plus the payment processing fees, plus €1 a year for us. Every price shows that breakdown. Renewals follow the same formula, so there's no cheap first year followed by an expensive second one (unless that's what the registry sets – that's sometimes the case).
"But you told us not to buy the domain from our host"
We did. In A Press of Your Own, we wrote: "Buy it somewhere that isn't your host, so one bad week can't take both."
The worry behind that line is real. If one company holds both your site and your name, a billing dispute or a suspended account can take both at once, and the domain is the one thing you can't rebuild from a backup.
So we're building domain registrations to keep the domain out of that bad week. It's billed separately from your hosting, and if you cancel your hosting, you keep the domain. It's registered in your name, and you can take it to another registrar whenever you like, for free and without asking us, even while a payment is failing.
If you'd still rather keep the two at different companies, that's a perfectly good choice. Connecting a domain from anywhere stays exactly as it is.
What happens next
We're testing the whole thing end to end now: buying, moving, renewing and leaving again. The thing is, we need lots of domains to test with. While we have a portfolio of our own domains, we'd love to test things with fresh eyes as well.
If you're interested in transferring or registering a domain with Magic Pages, reach out via email at help@magicpages.co, and we'll give you access to this feature. It's already been tested and we'll promise that your site won't get stranded 😉
