In Monday's article -- Questions to Ask Before You Pick Your Domain Name Registrar -- Elliot covered a lot of ground in his list of things you should know about when picking a domain name registrar. In this series of articles, I'll expand on what he wrote and explain some of the finer points of domain names that you might not be aware of.

Registrants, Registries, Registrars and Resellers

The last question in Elliot's list was Are you a registrar or a reseller? If these terms, along with registry and registrant are unfamiliar to you, read on -- I'm going to explain what each one means.

Let me begin with the diagram below. It provides a brief description of each of these terms...

• Registrant
• Registry
• Registrar
• Reseller

...and also illustrates the relationships among them. I'll explain each of these terms in greater detail after the diagram:

Registrant

The registrant is the easiest one to explain. The registrant for a domain name is the person or organization who registered and owns the domain name. If you've ever registered a domain name, you're its registrant.

Registry

Before I can talk about registries, I need to talk about top-level domains first. A top-level domain -- often shortened to TLD -- is the last part of any domain name. You're probably familiar with the generic TLDs .com, .org and .net and country code TLDs such as .ca, .de, .eu and .jp.

Each top-level domain is managed by an organization called a registry, which is responsible for:

• Managing the domain names within its assigned top-level domain.
• Maintaining the WHOIS database for that domain, which stores information on each domain name in the top-level domain, such as the domain's registrant, registrar and expiry date.
• Maintaining the root servers for that top-level domain, which act as an "address book" for all nameservers responsible for the top-level domain. I'll cover root servers and other parts of the domain name system in a later article.

Registrar

In order to keep the domain name system working and stable, only organizations accredited by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, one of whose jobs is to manage the assignment of domain names and IP addresses) can register domain names. If you're curious about what sort of process an organization has to go through to become an accredited registrar, ICANN has a page that describes it in detail.

There are a few hundred ICANN-accredited registrars worldwide; Tucows is just of them. One way for you to register a domain name is to select one of these registrars, who will electronically make the appropriate arrangements with the registry and activate your domain name.

There's another way for you to register a domain name: through a reseller.

Reseller

In the previous section, I mentioned that Tucows is a registrar. However, we're a little unusual. We don't directly register domain names on behalf of registrants. Instead, we sell our capability to register domain names to other companies, who then resell this capability to registrants. Hence the name reseller.

You're probably wondering why you'd want to go through a reseller rather than a registrar. Two very important reasons are:

1. Most of the time, you don't buy just a domain name by itself. You also buy services that the domain name points to, such as a website, a blog, email mailboxes and so on. A good reseller will often offer package deals or bundles comprising what they feel are the best services, just as a good retail store will carry a selection of what they feel are the best brands.
2. Customer service. By reselling our domain name registration service, a reseller can spend less time worrying about the technical and regulatory issues that registrars face and spend more time on what's really important: their customers.

One thing to keep in mind when registering domain names through a reseller: they're bound by the policies of the registrar whose services they resell. Make sure you know which registrar your reseller uses and what their domain name policies are.