How to buy Russian domains for $1.89 or less?

Sometimes for the needs of SEO or short-term advertising campaigns you need to buy a large number of domains. In case of .RU domains price in European registrars usually reaches $25. On GoDaddy at the moment, RU domain costs $14.99, but anyways. If you want to save money, you can buy domains “from the source”, i.e. directly in the Russian registrars.

I’ll show you an example how to do it using REG.com — one of the oldest and most trusted Russian registrar. All you need is your passport/ID and PayPal account.

Account registration

Go to website https://www.reg.com. If you have Russian interface, in the bottom right corner you can switch to English:

Click Create account and enter your email. The password will be sent to your email:

You will be immediately redirected to your personal panel, and system will offer you a few steps to protect your account. You may skip these steps by clicking “Remind me later” link:

If you want to make these steps right now, here is the description:

1. Enter a code word that only you know, and which you’ll be able to use to recover a forgotten password.
2. Confirm your mail by clicking the link in received email.
3. Attach your phone number. This option is currently available only for several countries besides CIS: Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, Latvia, Moldova, Montenegro, People’s Republic of China, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States.
4. Fill in basic information about the account owner: private person or organization. The form should be completed once. Then the main fields of the form become uneditable.

RU domain registration

OK, now let’s finally move on to domain registration. So, when you register Russian domain in Russia you buy it at least 5 times cheaper (if you count according to the Polish prices, where I live, it’s 7.5 times cheaper than in Poland). But that’s not all! You buy in bulk even cheaper. For the second domain that you register REG.ru offers a 5% discount, but  if you are interested in a package of more than 10 domains, they may cost even 1.89$ per domain! 

The more you buy, the less you pay. Detailed price can be found here: https://www.reg.com/domain/package/build

If the selected domains are available, you will be immediately prompted to register them. Click Register at the bottom of the page:

By default the auto-renew of the domain is enabled. You can turn it off by pressing OFF:

If you don’t need additional services, click Next at the bottom of the page.

If you haven’t filled out a basic questionnaire, you need to do it now. Choose who you are registering a domain for — a private person or a company. No matter what you choose prices do not change. All fields are accompanied by examples of how you should complete them, so pay attention. When you finish, click Next.

Now enter you DNS servers for the new domain. If you are planning to host a website on a hosting REG.RU you need to put following DNS: ns1.hosting.reg.ru and ns2.hosting.reg.ru:

Alright, now you just have to pay for your domain. I recommend to use PayPal because bank cards don’t work for all countries. After payment your domain will be activated within 15 minutes.

That’s it! If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.