There are so many resellers and resellers of resellers around nowadays. Many of them are 15 year olds working out of their bedrooms, who decide to just shut the site down when they go off to college, so you have to be careful where you buy from.
As far as I know, you can't buy directly from ICANN, the organization in charge of domain names.
I use Network Solutions (which is kinda pricy) but I would definitely absolutely recommend buying from GoDaddy. They're definitely stable, and at a cost of a dollar a month, it certainly isn't worth royally screwing yourself over just to save $2 ... especially if you plan on monetizing your site.
Unless there's something fishy going on, you can transfer domains to different registrants.
Dani
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Dani