Just wanted to jump in here, since this is something I know a bit about. There are a few moving parts: The REGISTRY. This is the database and, by extension, the company that owns the database, for a given top-level domain or country-code domain (e.g., .com, .org, .us, .co.uk, etc.). They can take issue with you and deny or revoke your domain name. Though generally they don't. The REGISTRAR. This is the company that's licensed by the REGISTRY owner to sell domain names in that top-level or country-code domain. In effect, they sell entries in a database table. These are the people you deal with when buying a domain, typically. They CAN be the same as the REGISTRY owner, but usually aren't. They can take issue with you and deny or revoke your domain name, and sometimes do. The AUTHORITATIVE DNS HOST. This is the company or individual that runs the nameservers that are listed as the authoritative nameservers when you buy a domain name. They can be literally anyone, including yourself. But REGISTRARS often sell DNS hosting services and try to package it with a domain name purchase. But you can also just stand up BIND 9 on a virtual private server (VPS) on somethine like Linode and do your own DNS hosting. Or use something like CloudFlare just for DNS (or also for DDoS protection) for free. DNS hosting providers rarely give a shit about the names they resolve. Though sometimes they do, as they're the hidden "off switch" of the internet: if you can't resolve a name, whatever that name points to is pretty much dead in the water, unless you can get people to memorize and type in your IP address all the time. The WEB HOST. This is the company or individual that runs the webserver that hosts the website and (usually) any backend services it needs. This is the entity that controls the computer at the IP for the A resource record in DNS that your website's fully-qualified domain name in DNS points to. This can also literally be anyone, but REGISTRARS also try to bundle this with your name purchase. They can and often do take issue with the websites they host, so choose carefully. As you can see, there are multiple bits involved here, and you can choose separate registrar, dns host, and web hosting providers. It's usually a good idea to do this for resiliency, and in the case of DNS, it's actually industry best practice to have multiple disparate DNS hosts, from different companies, on different Autonomous Systems (AS). But many people forget this, and it's why some big services go down intermittently, because they don't properly diversify their authoritative DNS.