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<p>Engagement moves through links, and the resellers who offer clients a name worth clicking are the ones who win.</p>



<p>Last time, we covered<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/blog/why-link-premium-domains-are-worth-the-investment"> why .link premium domains are worth the investment</a>. This follow-up turns that case into a sales plan: How to sell .link domains to your customers, which clients to approach, when to offer a premium name, and what to say.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-link-premium-domains-for-resellers-at-a-glance">.link premium domains for resellers at a glance</h2>



<p>A premium .link domain is used as a primary brand domain, a campaign landing page, or a branded short link. Resellers sell premium .link domains to new businesses, marketing teams, and companies going through a rebrand. Premium .link names are short and memorable, so customers find them easy to read, say, and type.</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s what this guide covers:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Why premium .link names work as a standalone brand domain or alongside an existing one</li>



<li>Four client conversations lead naturally to a premium .link sale</li>



<li>Four trigger moments tell you when to offer a premium .link name</li>



<li>Ready-to-use pitch lines help you start today</li>



<li>How to register a .link premium domain</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-four-client-conversations-that-lead-to-a-premium-link-sale">Four client conversations that lead to a premium .link sale</h2>



<p>Premium .link domains suit any business that wants a short, memorable web address, so resellers can offer them across their whole client base. But for the fastest results, resellers should focus first on four types of clients: new businesses and startups, marketing teams and agencies, businesses using generic URL shorteners, and companies going through a rebrand.</p>



<p><strong>The new brand client: </strong>a founder naming a new business wants an address that is short, easy to say, and still available. Premium .link names offer exactly those qualities, so they can carry a brand from day one, from the website to business cards and app store listings.</p>



<p><strong>The campaign client: </strong>a client planning an event or ad campaign needs an address that works on a poster, in a video, and behind a QR code. A short premium .link name reads cleanly in all three, and it keeps the campaign separate from the client&#8217;s main site.</p>



<p><strong>The short link client: </strong>a<strong> </strong>client sharing links through a third-party shortener puts someone else&#8217;s branding on every click. A premium .link name gives them their own branded root for social posts, newsletters, and sales emails.</p>



<p><strong>The rebrand client: </strong>a business changing its name needs an address that carries the new identity. A premium .link name can become the new primary domain, or it can handle launch pages and redirects during the transition.</p>



<p>Each of these clients already has a reason to buy, and you can check available names for them on the<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/domains/tlds/link"> .link page</a>.&nbsp;</p>



<p>To turn that reason into a sale, raise a premium .link name when the client is already thinking about their domain or brand. These opportunities come up more often than most resellers expect, and the next section shows you where to find them.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-four-situations-when-clients-are-ready-to-say-yes-to-a-premium-link-name">Four situations when clients are ready to say yes to a premium .link name</h2>



<p>The best time to offer a client a premium domain is when they&#8217;re already making a domain or branding decision. The four trigger moments are the first domain registration, the renewal conversation, a campaign or product launch, and a rebrand. At each of these points, a premium domain fits into a decision the client is already making.</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s how to bring it up in each situation:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>At registration:</strong> present a premium .link name as the primary domain, or as a second name for campaigns.</li>



<li><strong>At renewal:</strong> ask what the year ahead holds for the client&#8217;s brand.</li>



<li><strong>At launch:</strong> offer a premium name before the marketing materials go live.</li>



<li><strong>At rebrand:</strong> recommend a premium .link name as the new brand domain.</li>
</ul>



<p>Timing opens the door, and how you package the name decides how easily the client walks through it.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-sell-premium-link-names-in-the-way-that-fits-each-client">Sell premium .link names in the way that fits each client</h2>



<p>Premium .link names are flexible enough to sell in whatever way suits the client, and two approaches work especially well. For a new business or a rebrand, the name becomes the main domain, with hosting, email, and DNS built around it. For an established business, the name sits alongside the existing domain as part of a campaign or branded link service.</p>



<p>For example, an agency building a website for a startup can propose a premium .link name as the brand domain and quote it with hosting and email. The client launches with a memorable address, and the agency adds a premium sale and a new renewal to the portfolio.</p>



<p>Premium names carry a higher price than standard registrations, so each sale adds more revenue per client.</p>



<p>With your approach ready, the final step is putting the offer into words your client will respond to.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-pitch-lines-to-sell-link-premium-domains-today">Pitch lines to sell .link premium domains today</h2>



<p>Once you know who to approach and when, the right words make the conversation much easier to start.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The lines below give you a starting point for each of the four client types covered earlier. Adapt each one to the conversation you&#8217;re having, whether that&#8217;s an email, a proposal, or a call. Add the client&#8217;s name, their project, or the details they care about most, so the offer feels made for them.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-table"><table class="has-fixed-layout"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Client conversation</strong></td><td><strong>Pitch line</strong></td></tr><tr><td>New brand</td><td>&#8220;We found a short, memorable web address for your new business that customers will find easy to say and type.&#8221;</td></tr><tr><td>Campaign</td><td>&#8220;For this campaign, we can get you a short, memorable web address that works on posters and QR codes.&#8221;</td></tr><tr><td>Short links</td><td>&#8220;Your shared links could carry your own brand, with a short name your customers will recognize and trust.&#8221;</td></tr><tr><td>Rebrand</td><td>&#8220;For the rebrand, we can secure a short address that carries your new name and helps customers find you easily.&#8221;</td></tr></tbody></table></figure>



<p>Each line points toward the same outcome: a premium .link name registered and managed through your Openprovider account.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-sell-link-premium-domains-with-openprovider">Sell .link premium domains with Openprovider</h2>



<p>Premium .link names slot into the workflow you already use for every other TLD in your portfolio, with no new registry relationship to set up:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Registrations, renewals, transfers, and DNS for premium .link names run through the same domain API and Reseller Control Panel as the rest of your catalog</li>



<li>One dashboard and one support line cover .link alongside every other extension you sell</li>
</ul>



<p>Pricing for each premium name is listed on the<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/domains/tlds/link"> .link page</a>. If clients are asking for short, memorable names and your current setup can&#8217;t deliver them,<a href="https://cp.openprovider.eu/signup"> create a free Openprovider account</a> and start selling premium .link domains today.</p>


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<p>On 2 September 2026, zones on our Premium DNS product stopped resolving. We have published a full incident report covering the timeline, where our own response was not good enough, and the commitments we have made as a result, including replacing the provider.&nbsp;</p>



<p>This post is not that.&nbsp;</p>



<p>This post is about the mechanism, because the mechanism is genuinely interesting, and because most of the explanations circulating during the incident were wrong in the same instructive way.</p>



<p>Here’s the short version of the cause: the upstream provider migrated their own domain infrastructure and did not carry over the address records for their four nameserver hostnames. Not the zones. Not the servers. The address records for the names of the servers.</p>



<p>That distinction is the whole story. The DNS data for every affected domain was intact throughout. The machines serving it were up and answering. What disappeared was the ability of any resolver on the internet to work out where to send the question. It is a failure one level above the one everybody assumes when a nameserver stops working, and it behaves completely differently.</p>



<p>In this blog, we outline the resolution chain that broke, why four nameservers gave no protection, and the commands that would have told you the truth in under a minute.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-chain-that-has-to-hold">The chain that has to hold</h2>



<p>To answer a query for example.com, a resolver walks down a chain of referrals. The root tells it where .com is served. The .com nameservers tell it that example.com is delegated to a set of nameserver hostnames, in this case four names under a single provider domain. Then &#8211; and this is the step that matters &#8211; the resolver needs an IP address for at least one of those hostnames before it can ask anything.</p>



<p>There are two ways it can get one.</p>



<p>The first is glue. When the parent zone can supply address records for the nameservers alongside the referral, the resolver gets the names and the addresses in the same response and proceeds immediately. This is the common case and it is invisible.</p>



<p>The second is a separate lookup. When glue is absent, expired from cache, or the nameserver names sit outside the zone being delegated, the resolver has to suspend the original query, go and resolve the nameserver hostname as a fresh question from the root down, then come back and resume. This is the out-of-bailiwick case, and it is entirely normal. A large share of the internet&#8217;s domains are delegated to nameservers under someone else&#8217;s domain, which is what happens the moment you use a <a href="https://www.openprovider.com/products/security/premium-dns">managed DNS provider</a>.</p>



<p>Both routes terminate at the same place: address records for those four hostnames. When those records were not carried over during the provider&#8217;s migration, both routes went dark simultaneously. Glue had nothing to supply, and the independent lookup had nothing to find. The resolver reached the point in the chain where it needed an address, found no way to obtain one, and gave up.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-four-nameservers-protected-nothing">Why four nameservers protected nothing</h2>



<p>Every managed DNS product advertises multiple nameservers, and resellers reasonably read that as redundancy. It is, against one specific failure: a server going down. A resolver that cannot reach ns1 will try ns2, and the outage is absorbed without anyone noticing. That mechanism works well and it’s why single-server DNS failures are rarely newsworthy.</p>



<p>Here, that mechanism provided no protection, because the four nameservers were four names sharing one dependency. They lived under the same provider domain, and their addresses came from the same set of records. When that set went missing, all four names became unresolvable at once. There was no healthy member of the set to fail over to, because the failure was not in any member. It was in the thing all four members were made of.</p>



<p>This is the part worth carrying away from the incident even if you never use this product. Nameserver count is not a measure of redundancy. What matters is whether the nameservers fail independently, and names under one parent domain, maintained as one set of records, by one operator, in one migration, do not fail independently. Four of them is one point of failure with four labels on it.</p>



<p>DNSSEC, for the same reason, would not have helped. Signing a zone protects you against a forged answer. It has nothing to say about the absence of any answer at all.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-servfail-was-actually-telling-you">What SERVFAIL was actually telling you</h2>



<p>Affected queries returned SERVFAIL, which is one of the least informative things DNS can tell you, and during the incident it sent a lot of people looking in the wrong place.</p>



<p>SERVFAIL does not mean the record is missing. That is NXDOMAIN. SERVFAIL means the resolver was unable to complete resolution and cannot say why in a way that fits in a response code. From the outside, that looked identical to a dozen unrelated problems. The domain was registered and fine. WHOIS was fine. The zone contents in the control panel were fine, and correct. Nothing a reseller could inspect on their own side was broken, which is exactly why several hours of collective debugging went into infrastructure that was never at fault.</p>



<p>Four commands separate this class of failure from the things it resembles. They are worth knowing before you need them.</p>



<p>Start with the trace, which shows you where the chain stops rather than just that it stopped:</p>



<p>dig +trace example.com</p>



<p>Check what the parent actually says about the delegation, so you know whether the NS set itself is intact:</p>



<p>dig NS example.com @a.gtld-servers.net</p>



<p>Then the diagnostic that would have identified this incident in about four seconds. Ask for the address of the nameserver hostname itself:</p>



<p>dig A ns1.your-dns-provider.example</p>



<p>If that fails while your own zone looks healthy, the problem is not your domain and not your records. It is the provider&#8217;s ability to be found. Every affected domain shared that one symptom, and no affected domain had anything else in common.</p>



<p>Finally, if you can get an address for the nameserver from any source, a cached value, documentation, a monitoring system, ask it directly and bypass the naming layer entirely:</p>



<p>dig SOA example.com @198.51.100.53</p>



<p>During this incident, that query answered correctly. The servers were serving the right data for the right zones the entire time. Confirming that is what tells you the outage is in discovery rather than in data, and it changes what you do next, because a data loss and a discovery failure call for opposite responses.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-blast-radius-ordered-by-how-long-it-hurts">The blast radius, ordered by how long it hurts</h2>



<p>DNS failures are usually described as though everything breaks and then everything recovers. In practice the damage is staggered, and the parts that recover slowest are the parts nobody watches during the incident.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-web-traffic-fails-first-and-recovers-first">Web traffic fails first and recovers first</h3>



<p>A, AAAA and CNAME lookups fail, browsers show a resolution error, and the moment resolution returns, so does the site. Recovery is not perfectly simultaneous, because resolvers cache failures as well as successes, and implementations differ in how long they hold a failed lookup. Some clients came back minutes after others.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-mail-mostly-defers-rather-than-dies">Mail mostly defers rather than dies</h3>



<p>a sending server that cannot resolve MX gets a temporary failure and queues the message, then retries, typically over a period measured in days rather than minutes, though every sender has its own policy and a minority give up early. So the visible mail loss from an outage like this is small, and the invisible consequence is a backlog that lands later, along with whatever your customers concluded when their mail went quiet for an evening.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-email-authentication-fails-in-a-way-that-outlives-the-outage">Email authentication fails in a way that outlives the outage</h3>



<p>SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS lookups performed by the receiving side, not by you. A receiver holding your MX in cache but unable to resolve your TXT records will process mail it cannot authenticate. Handling varies: some receivers defer, some treat it as unauthenticated and apply policy accordingly. Either way, the record of it sits in receiver reputation systems after your DNS is healthy again, which is the sort of damage you find out about a week later from a deliverability report.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-certificate-issuance-stops-and-that-one-waits-to-bite">Certificate issuance stops, and that one waits to bite</h3>



<p>A CA has to check CAA immediately before issuing, and a CAA lookup that cannot be resolved is not treated as permission. Any issuance or renewal attempted inside the window failed. ACME clients retry, so for most domains this resolves itself invisibly. For a certificate that happened to be close to expiry, it does not, and that failure surfaces days later as an expired certificate with no obvious connection to a DNS incident anyone still remembers.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-why-the-per-domain-workaround-did-not-scale-in-ttl-terms">Why the per-domain workaround did not scale, in TTL terms</h2>



<p>The workaround available during the incident was to recreate a zone on our own nameservers and repoint the domain&#8217;s delegation. It works. Our incident report is straightforward about the fact that we had no way to do it in bulk, and that this was our gap rather than the provider&#8217;s.</p>



<p>What is worth adding here is that the manual labour was not the expensive part. The delegation change was.</p>



<p>Rebuilding a zone by hand is tedious and error-prone, and for a portfolio of a few hundred domains it is a serious amount of work. But once you have done it, you change the NS records at the registry, and then you wait, because resolvers that already hold the old NS set keep using it until it expires. Delegation NS records carry long TTLs by design, commonly 48 hours in .com, and varying by TLD. So the domain you fixed at 18:00 is not reliably fixed at 18:05. It is fixed for resolvers with cold caches, and gradually fixed for everyone else.</p>



<p>In this case the provider&#8217;s fix landed at around 02:21. A delegation change made during the evening would in many cases still have been propagating when the underlying problem was already resolved, and then you pay the same propagation cost again to move the zones back. That is the real reason emergency re-delegation is a poor tool for a short vendor outage, and the real reason bulk tooling has to exist before you need it rather than being assembled while the incident is live. It is also why we are building the scripted path now, when the clock is not running.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-we-take-from-this-structurally">What we take from this structurally</h2>



<p>The provider replacement is covered in the incident report and it is the headline change. The engineering lesson underneath it is the one we would rather other people take away too.</p>



<p>A DNS dependency chain is part of your product&#8217;s failure surface, not the vendor&#8217;s private business. We knew the product depended on four nameservers. What we had not treated as our problem was that those four names depended on one domain, maintained by one operator, whose own infrastructure migration was not something we would ever see coming or be told about in advance. The dependency was documented. Its correlation was not examined.</p>



<p>So the questions we now ask of an infrastructure vendor are different. Not how many nameservers, but whether the nameserver names resolve through independent paths. Not whether they have redundancy, but what single change on their side can take all of it out at once. Not whether they have an incident process, but whether we can operate around them without one.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-checking-your-own-exposure">Checking your own exposure</h2>



<p>None of this is specific to one provider, and the check takes a minute.&nbsp;</p>



<p>To see what your domains are actually delegated to, across whatever portfolio you manage:</p>



<p>while read d; do</p>



<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;printf &#8216;%s &#8216; &#8220;$d&#8221;</p>



<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;dig +short NS &#8220;$d&#8221; | sort | tr &#8216;\n&#8217; &#8216; &#8216;</p>



<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;echo</p>



<p>done &lt; domains.txt</p>



<p>Then look at the output with two questions in mind. Do all the nameservers for a given domain sit under one parent domain, and is that acceptable for what the domain does? And can you resolve each of those nameserver hostnames independently right now?</p>



<p>dig +short A ns1.your-dns-provider.example</p>



<p>For domains where the answer to the first question matters, the fix is nameservers whose names do not share a fate. That means more than one provider, with names under more than one parent domain, which is more work to run and is the honest price of the guarantee.</p>



<p>Domains on Openprovider&#8217;s own nameservers were unaffected throughout this incident, and if you want to move zones there, support can help. That is not the point of this post, and it would be a poor lesson to draw from it.&nbsp;</p>



<p>The point is that the four names on your delegation are a dependency worth understanding before somebody else&#8217;s migration teaches it to you.</p>



<p>The full incident report, with the timeline and what we are changing, is <a href="https://lp.openprovider.com/hubfs/Premium%20DNS%20outage.pdf">here</a>.</p>


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<p>Every agency and hosting provider gets asked the same question sooner or later: where should the client&#8217;s blog live?&nbsp;</p>



<p>The usual answer stops at SEO, comparing a subdirectory against a subdomain and calling it done. But that only covers half the decision. The other half is what each option actually costs to run: the DNS records, the certificate, the mail setup, the renewal exposure three years from now.&nbsp;</p>



<p>This article walks through both sides, plus a migration path for when a client outgrows their first choice.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-key-takeaways">Key takeaways</h2>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>A subdirectory inherits the main domain&#8217;s authority. A subdomain usually counts as part of the same site, but consolidation is less consistent. A separate domain starts from zero and has to earn its own authority.</li>



<li>Each option has a different operational cost: DNS zones, certificate scope, mail authentication, and provisioning steps all change depending on where the blog sits.</li>



<li>Short, brandable .blog names are often premium-tier, which means a higher renewal price every year, not just at signup.</li>



<li>Moving a client between options is a manageable migration with a redirect map and a Search Console change of address, not a reason to avoid the right long-term choice.</li>
</ul>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-subdirectory-subdomain-or-blog-what-you-re-actually-choosing-between">Subdirectory, subdomain, or .blog: what you&#8217;re actually choosing between</h2>



<p>Each of the three options puts the blog in a different place technically, and that difference is what drives everything else in this article.</p>



<p><strong>A subdirectory</strong> puts the blog at a path under the main domain, like yoursite.com/blog. It lives on the same server or the same hosting account as the rest of the site, under the same certificate and DNS zone.</p>



<p><strong>A subdomain</strong> puts the blog at blog.yoursite.com. It&#8217;s a separate hostname under the same root domain, which can point to different hosting, a different platform, or a different team, while still carrying the yoursite.com name.</p>



<p><strong>A separate domain</strong>, such as client.blog, is its own registration entirely. It needs its own DNS zone, its own certificate, and its own mail setup if the client sends anything from it.</p>



<p>Is .blog better than .com for a company blog? Neither extension is inherently better. What matters is what the client needs the hub to do, covered in the decision framework below.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-each-option-does-to-your-client-s-search-rankings">What each option does to your client&#8217;s search rankings</h2>



<p>When a client asks where their blog should live, SEO is usually the first thing on the table.</p>



<p>A subdirectory carries a real advantage here: because it lives under the same domain, search engines treat it as part of the same site from day one, inheriting the domain&#8217;s existing authority and crawl budget (the number of pages a search engine is willing to crawl, in order to index them on a given site in a given window). A subdomain gets treated as part of the same site too, most of the time, but the signals don&#8217;t consolidate as cleanly. Google can, in some contexts, read a subdomain as a separate entity, and that inconsistency is exactly why agencies hesitate before recommending one.</p>



<p>A separate domain is a different proposition entirely. It won&#8217;t drag down the main site&#8217;s rankings, but it also inherits nothing. Every ranking signal has to be built from zero, on its own timeline.</p>



<p>What doesn&#8217;t factor into any of this is the TLD itself. A .blog domain ranks no better and no worse than a .com purely because of the extension &#8211; the part after the dot doesn&#8217;t affect ranking. Treating it like it does is a common mistake. We&#8217;ve made that case in full in<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/blog/why-resellers-should-revisit-blog-2026"> why resellers should revisit .blog in 2026</a>, so it&#8217;s worth a read if you want the deeper argument.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-each-option-actually-costs-to-run">What each option actually costs to run</h2>



<p>In reality, cost is where the three options diverge, and it&#8217;s the part most SEO comparisons skip.</p>



<p>Here&#8217;s what each one actually costs, starting with the cheapest to run:</p>



<p><strong>Subdirectory: </strong>no new DNS zone, since it sits inside the existing one. The main site&#8217;s SSL certificate already covers it, no separate issuance needed. Mail authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) stays exactly as it is, since there&#8217;s no new sending domain. Provisioning is whatever the client&#8217;s existing hosting plan already does. No separate billing line, no separate renewal date to track.</p>



<p><strong>Subdomain:</strong> it needs one new DNS record inside the existing zone, usually a CNAME or A record pointing to wherever it&#8217;s hosted, plus an MX record if it sends its own mail. Zone management stays light. The certificate is the one thing to watch: a standard single-domain certificate won&#8217;t cover it, so it needs either a new certificate or a SAN (Subject Alternative Name) added to the existing one. If the client sends a newsletter from the subdomain, that hostname needs its own SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records &#8211; the authentication that proves mail from it is legitimate. Provisioning in WHMCS or HostBill is usually a quick manual addition rather than a full new product.</p>



<p><strong>Separate domain:</strong> this is the full setup &#8211; its own registration, its own DNS zone, its own certificate, and its own SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records if it sends mail. Yes, it can send email exactly like any other TLD, as long as those records are configured. Most registrar modules let you provision it as a standalone product tied to the client&#8217;s existing account, so it lands on their usual invoice rather than as a new customer record. That&#8217;s also where the ongoing cost sits: a second domain means a second renewal date and a second line item on the bill, for as long as it stays active. Beyond the registration fee, budget for one certificate, a handful of DNS records, and the time to set it up properly the first time. After that, it runs itself.</p>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-premium-renewal-trap-that-erodes-your-margin"><strong>The premium renewal trap that erodes your margin</strong></h4>



<p>Many of the best short, brandable .blog names sit in the registry&#8217;s premium tier, which means they renew at a premium price every single year, not just at first purchase. A reseller who prices year one off a promotional rate and lets the domain auto-renew at list price can get squeezed hard on renewal, especially if the client only budgeted for the promo price. Before quoting a .blog name to a client, check its tier in the registry&#8217;s premium list so the renewal cost is part of the conversation from day one, not a surprise twelve months later.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-registry-rules-that-protect-you-before-you-commit-a-client">Registry rules that protect you before you commit a client</h2>



<p>With Openprovider, .blog domains carry a six-day transfer window rather than the more typical 5, so factor that into any migration timeline. If a domain lapses, it moves through a series of stages: a free-restore soft quarantine, then a paid-restore quarantine, and finally a five-day PendingDelete period where restoring it is no longer possible. After that, the domain becomes available for anyone to register. For the full technical detail on transfer windows and lifecycle stages, see our <a href="https://support.openprovider.eu/hc/en-us/articles/360000736267--blog">.blog registry knowledge base article</a>.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-five-questions-that-decide-the-right-option-for-your-client">The five questions that decide the right option for your client</h2>



<p>When deciding whether a separate domain is worth it for a blog, run through these five questions with the client before recommending an option:</p>



<ol class="wp-block-list">
<li>Does the hub need its own brand, separate from the main site?</li>



<li>Does it need its own analytics baseline, tracked independently?</li>



<li>Will it send its own newsletter, with its own sending reputation?</li>



<li>Does it need its own team or workflow, separate from whoever runs the main site?</li>



<li>Will the client still be running this hub in three years, or is this a shorter-term push?</li>
</ol>



<p>If you answer yes to most of these, a separate domain is usually the right call. A no across the board usually means a subdirectory is the simpler, cheaper option. A subdomain sits in between: useful when the client wants some separation without the full cost of a second domain.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-to-migrate-a-client-without-losing-their-traffic-or-their-trust">How to migrate a client without losing their traffic or their trust</h2>



<p>Clients often change their minds, and moving from a subdirectory to a separate domain, or the other way round, is a manageable project rather than a reason to avoid the right long-term choice. The key is doing it properly: start with a full redirect map, giving every existing URL a 301 redirect to its new equivalent rather than a blanket redirect to the homepage. Set canonical tags on the new domain so they point to themselves, update internal links across the main site to the new location, and file a change of address in Google Search Console once the redirects are live.</p>



<p>Done this way, most migrations see rankings and traffic largely recover within a few weeks to a couple of months. It&#8217;s worth setting that expectation with the client up front rather than promising an instant transition.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-openprovider-keeps-all-three-options-cheap-to-run">How Openprovider keeps all three options cheap to run</h2>



<p>Whichever option a client lands on, the operational side runs through one platform. Openprovider handles the domain,<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/products/security/premium-dns"> Premium DNS</a>,<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/products/security/ssl-certificates"> SSL certificates</a>, business email, and DMARC setup from a single account, so provisioning a subdomain or a separate domain doesn&#8217;t mean juggling four different vendors.</p>



<p>For resellers managing this across a client portfolio, bulk actions, the<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/resellers/plugins"> WHMCS module</a>, and the API handle provisioning at scale, and<a href="https://www.openprovider.com/membership-plans"> a Membership subscription</a> offers Openprovider-accredited TLDs at cost price.&nbsp;</p>



<p><a href="https://cp.openprovider.eu/signup">Create your free Openprovider account</a> to start registering .blog domains today.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-faq">FAQ</h2>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-do-blog-domains-renew-at-the-same-price-every-year">Do .blog domains renew at the same price every year?</h3>



<p>Not always. Standard .blog names renew at the standard rate, but premium-tier names renew at a premium price every year, not just at initial registration.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-is-a-premium-blog-domain">What is a premium .blog domain?</h3>



<p>A premium .blog domain is a name the registry has priced above the standard rate, usually because it&#8217;s short or highly brandable. The premium applies to every renewal, not just the first purchase.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-long-does-a-blog-transfer-take">How long does a .blog transfer take?</h3>



<p>A .blog transfer runs through a 6-day transfer window before completing, slightly longer than the more common 5-day window on many other TLDs.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-happens-if-a-blog-domain-expires">What happens if a .blog domain expires?</h3>



<p>An expired .blog domain moves through a free-restore soft quarantine, then a paid-restore quarantine, before entering a five-day PendingDelete period. After PendingDelete, it becomes available for anyone to register.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-who-runs-the-blog-registry">Who runs the .blog registry?</h3>



<p><a href="https://www.openprovider.com/domains/tlds/blog">.blog</a> is operated by Knock Knock WHOIS There, LLC &#8211; a subsidiary of Automattic, the company behind<a href="http://wordpress.com/"> WordPress.com</a>.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-how-long-does-traffic-take-to-recover-after-a-blog-migration">How long does traffic take to recover after a blog migration?</h3>



<p>Most migrations done with proper 301 redirects and a Search Console change of address see traffic largely recover within a few weeks to a couple of months.</p>



<p></p>


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