Preview data. Pricing is verified from the registrar's own source for 6 of 20 registrars (fetched live where the registrar publishes one); the remaining registrars' prices, plus all scoring and country recommendations, are illustrative placeholders pending verified testing. See data sources for a row-by-row breakdown, the methodology, or fetch /data/verification-status.json for a machine-readable view.
The retail domain market looks like dozens of independent companies. It is mostly a handful of groups — and two brands on your shortlist may share an owner, a support desk and a pricing policy.
Of the 20 registrars we track, 11 belong to a parent group and 9 are run by the company whose name they carry. The largest consolidation is CVC Capital Partners, whose brands include Namecheap, Spaceship — names that appear on comparison tables as if they were rivals. Namecheap and Spaceship are one company too, and Namecheap has been majority-owned by private equity since September 2025.
This is not an argument against big groups. It is an argument against mistaking sibling brands for a choice: shortlisting two of them is not diversification, and moving a domain between them is not really switching registrar.
Namecheap was founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall and independent for its whole history until September 2025, when private equity firm CVC Capital Partners agreed to take majority control in a deal valuing it at $1.5 billion including debt; the founder retained a large stake. Namecheap also operates Spaceship, marketed as a separate registrar aimed at domain investors — so two brands that appear side by side on comparison sites belong to one company.
Formed in 2021 by combining Endurance Web Presence and Web.com Group. It is the largest consolidation in the retail domain and hosting market, and most of its brands still trade under their original names. In June 2025 it reorganised into two divisions: a Network Solutions Group covering Network Solutions, Register.com, Domain.com, MarkMonitor and Crazy Domains, and a Bluehost Group covering hosting. Web.com now redirects into Network Solutions.
Other brands in the group: Register.com, Web.com, Bluehost, HostGator, Crazy Domains, MarkMonitor.
Runs both sides of the market: it operates one of the largest portfolios of top-level domains AND owns the retail registrar Name.com, acquired with Rightside in 2017. Ethos Capital took majority control in March 2021, and Donuts and Afilias were rebranded into Identity Digital in 2022. When a registry group also sells retail, the wholesale price and the retail price are set under one roof.
Other brands in the group: Identity Digital registry portfolio.
NameSilo LLC is majority-owned by NameSilo Technologies Corp., listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange. The holding company was formerly Brisio Innovations, which acquired NameSilo in 2018 and renamed itself after it.
Not historically a registrar. It acquired Google's domain business in 2023 — around ten million domains and the ICANN accreditations — and migrated those customers through 2024, which is why a great many people hold domains at a registrar they never chose.
Other brands in the group: formerly Google Domains.
Porkbun is a Top Level Design company, based in Portland, Oregon. The group also operates registry business, though at a very different scale from Identity Digital.
A pan-European hosting group that acquired the French registrar Gandi in February 2023, folding it into the Your.Online brand family. Gandi's post-acquisition price increases became one of the more visible registrar-exodus stories in Europe.
Other brands in the group: Yourhosting, Versio.
The second-largest domain registrar group in the world, built by acquisition. It runs a retail brand (Hover), a reseller platform (OpenSRS), a wholesale registrar (Enom, bought from Rightside in 2017 for $83.5m) and a European wholesaler (Ascio, 2019). A great many small registrars are OpenSRS or Enom resellers without saying so.
Other brands in the group: Enom, OpenSRS, Ascio.
The German internet group behind IONOS, which listed separately on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in February 2023. United Internet remains by far the largest shareholder.
Other brands in the group: 1&1.
These registrars are operated by the company whose name they carry — the brand and the owner are the same entity, whether privately held or publicly listed. Listed here so the map is complete rather than selectively alarming: consolidation is real, but it is not universal.
Each group below is sourced to reporting or primary corporate material, linked per group. Registrars we could not source a parent for are recorded as independent rather than guessed. Corporate ownership changes without announcement to customers, so treat the date above as the point this was last checked rather than a permanent fact. The underlying data is published as JSON under CC BY 4.0 — if you find an error, our corrections policy explains how to report it.
Related: all registrars · head-to-head comparisons · Google Domains shut down · transfer guides
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