Data story, quarterly
Registrar consolidation: who owns whom
18 owners stand behind the 23 registrars this site tracks: 9 groups own 11 of them under 25 retail brands, and 9 are operated by the company whose name they carry. At the registry layer, Binky Moon, LLC is IANA's recorded operator for 148 of the 287 extensions tracked here (52%), and the three largest operators run 66% between them. Shared ownership does not mean a shared price: Namecheap and Spaceship have the same owner (CVC Capital Partners) and renew a .com $8.30 apart.
Computed from the ownership map (updated 2026-08-24), the verified price rows (checked 2026-09-29) and IANA's root database. Machine-readable: registrar-ownership.json, tld-registry-facts.json, pricing.csv.
1. The owners behind the comparison page
A shortlist of two registrars can be a shortlist of one company. The groups below own more than one tracked registrar or trade under more brands than the one on this site; the share of verified price rows shows how much of the price comparison each owner speaks for.
| Owner | Type | Tracked registrars | Verified rows | Share of rows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVC Capital Partners | Private-equity owned | Namecheap, Spaceship | 295 | 12% |
| Top Level Design | Privately held | Porkbun | 278 | 11% |
| Total Webhosting Solutions / Your.Online | Privately held | Gandi | 276 | 11% |
| Identity Digital (Ethos Capital) | Private-equity owned | Name.com | 272 | 11% |
| NameSilo Technologies Corp. | Publicly listed | NameSilo | 263 | 11% |
| United Internet | Publicly listed | IONOS | 261 | 11% |
| Tucows | Publicly listed | Hover | 15 | 1% |
| Newfold Digital | Privately held | Network Solutions, Domain.com | 0 | 0% |
| Squarespace | Privately held | Squarespace Domains | 0 | 0% |
| Independent (9) | Brand and owner are the same entity | GoDaddy, Cloudflare Registrar, Dynadot, Hostinger, OVHcloud, AWS Route 53, Wix Domains, Shopify Domains, WordPress.com | 788 | 32% |
CVC Capital Partners speaks for 12% of the verified price rows on this site through Namecheap and Spaceship. A price comparison that showed both as independent choices would be counting one owner twice.
2. Same owner, different price
Where an owner runs two tracked registrars, the verified .com renewal at each. Shared ownership has not meant shared pricing.
| Owner | Registrar | .com renewal | Sibling | .com renewal | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVC Capital Partners | Namecheap | $18.48 (2026-08-19) | Spaceship | $10.18 (2026-09-02) | $8.30 |
| Newfold Digital | Network Solutions | not verified | Domain.com | not verified | n/a |
3. The registry layer is more concentrated than the shelf
Extension choice looks like a wide market. Grouping every tracked extension by the exact TLD Manager string in IANA's root database, 69 operators run 287 extensions; 59 of them run exactly one, and the largest three run 188 (66%). Country-code extensions sit with 248 national operators, one per country, which is the opposite structure.
| Registry operator (IANA TLD Manager) | Tracked extensions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Binky Moon, LLC | 148 | 52% |
| Dog Beach, LLC | 21 | 7% |
| Registry Services, LLC | 19 | 7% |
| Identity Digital Limited | 13 | 5% |
| XYZ.COM LLC | 11 | 4% |
The largest portfolio, Binky Moon, LLC, has a verified price on 148 of its 148 tracked extensions; the median cheapest verified renewal across them is $33.32. Every operator has its own page under registry operators.
Why it matters
Ownership is the variable behind price rises, forced migrations and support changes that a comparison page never shows. A buyer choosing between two brands with one owner has not diversified; a buyer choosing between two extensions with one registry operator faces the same wholesale policy on both. Neither fact appears on the registrars' own sites.
Cite this
"18 owners stand behind the 23 registrars we track, and one registry operator runs 52% of the 287 extensions." (Best Domain Registrars, ownership map updated 2026-08-24, prices checked 2026-09-29, https://www.best-domain-registrars.com/stories/registrar-consolidation/)
Figures recompute on every build from the datasets linked above. The ownership map records its sources per group on who owns your registrar; a group with no sourced parent is recorded as independent rather than guessed. Free to quote with attribution under the data terms.