Who are the world’s top 5 domain registrars – and how did they get there? - 2025 Domain Registrar Ranking

2025 global domain registrar market share comparison – by Famous Consultant Venkatesh Venkatasubramanian

As someone who spends most of his working hours helping companies become ICANN-accredited registrars, I get this question a lot. People see thousands of registrar names in ICANN’s lists, but in reality a small group controls a huge share of the world’s domains.

In this article, I’ll walk through:

How I define “top 5 domain registrar of 2025”
Who those five registrars are, based on domain volume
The strategic moves that got each of them to the top
What new or aspiring registrars can learn from them

I’ll keep the language simple, but I will be very strict about facts and sources.

How I’m defining “top 5 domain registrars” (and why it matters)

There are many ways to rank registrars:

By number of domains under management
By annual revenue
By new domain adds per month
By specific TLD (for example only .com, or only country codes)

For this blog, I am using total number of domains under management across all TLDs (gTLDs and ccTLDs), based on recent public data from:

ICANN/registry reports, as aggregated by Domain Name Stat
The October 2025 “Top 15 Largest Domain Registrars” analysis by HostingSeekers, which cites Domain Name Stat and the companies’ own disclosures
Official statements from each registrar (press releases, “About” pages, or product pages)

Globally, there are roughly 628.5 million registered domain names as of early 2025. A surprisingly large percentage of these are concentrated with just a handful of registrars.

Using that lens, the top 5 registrars by domain volume as of late 2025 are:

GoDaddy Inc. – >80 million domains under management
GMO Internet Group / Onamae.com – ~37 million domains
Namecheap, Inc. – 20+ million domains
IONOS SE – ~22 million domains
OpenSRS (Tucows wholesale platform) – ~18 million domains via 13,000+ resellers

Different datasets sometimes report slightly different numbers, but they all consistently place these five at or near the top when ranked by total domains under management.

There are also other very large players in the next tier (Squarespace Domains after the Google Domains acquisition, Newfold Digital brands, Alibaba Cloud, etc.), but they generally world's top domain registrar.

Rank #1

GoDaddy – from Super Bowl ads to 80+ million domains

Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona, USA

Domains under management: “Over 80 million” globally

Position: Largest domain registrar in the world by domain count and market share

How GoDaddy got there

Early entry and the .com boom GoDaddy was founded in 1997, right as the commercial internet and .com boom took off. Being early in the market allowed it to build a huge retail customer base before serious competition arrived.Aggressive, mainstream marketing For years, GoDaddy spent heavily on mainstream advertising – especially high-profile Super Bowl TV commercials and sports sponsorships. That meant that for many first-time website owners, “domain name” basically equaled “GoDaddy” in their mind. This mass-market brand awareness is still one of their strongest advantages. All-in-one SMB platform GoDaddy is not just a registrar. It also sells shared hosting, managed WordPress, website builders, email, SSL, security tools and now payments and marketing services. Over time, they have repositioned as a small business online presence platform, with domains as the entry product. Owning high-value registry assets GoDaddy is also on the registry side through Registry Services LLC (formerly Neustar’s registry business), running TLDs such as .biz, .club and many others. This gives them vertical integration: a presence at both registry and registrar layers.Continuous M&A Over the last decade GoDaddy has acquired multiple registrars and hosting companies (for example, Host Europe Group and Uniregistry) and several registry portfolios. Each acquisition quietly adds millions of domains under management, compounding their scale.

Key ingredients of GoDaddy’s success

Mass-market brand recognition
A very broad product portfolio beyond domains
Heavy investment in customer support and UX for non-technical users
Acquisitions that consolidate both the retail and infrastructure sides of the DNS value chain

For any new registrar, GoDaddy is the classic example of what happens when you mix early-mover advantage with serious marketing budgets and continuous expansion.

Rank #2

GMO Internet Group / Onamae.com – dominating Japan and Asia

Brand: Onamae.com by GMO Internet Group

Region: Primarily Japan and Asia

Domains under management: Over 37 million registered domains

Position: Largest registrar in Japan, one of the largest globally

How GMO got there

Strong domestic focus on .jp and local TLDs Onamae.com positions itself as the No. 1 domain registration service in Japan, offering ~630 types of domains (.com, .net, .jp, and many new gTLDs). By dominating the local ccTLD (.jp) and local business market, GMO built a very stable base. Multi-service internet infrastructure group GMO is not just a registrar. It operates across internet infrastructure (domains, hosting, cloud), online advertising, payments and crypto. Domains are one of many entry points into the GMO ecosystem. Reseller and wholesale channels Onamae.com grows through both direct sales and reseller channels for individuals and corporate customers. This quietly adds large volumes of domains via partners, not just retail customers.Price-competitive and localised offering GMO offers one of the lowest price structures in its region for many TLDs, combined with Japanese-language support and billing adapted to local norms. That combination makes it hard for global registrars to displace them in Japan.

Why GMO matters in the global picture

From an Indian or European perspective, Onamae.com is almost invisible. But by combining:

A strong domestic ccTLD position
Local language support and UX
Competitive pricing
And cross-selling of hosting, DNS and cloud

GMO shows how a regionally focused registrar can still be a global top-five player in terms of domain count.

Rank #3

Namecheap – winning the “developer and value” crowd

Headquarters: US-based, with a large global footprint

Customers: Over 2 million

Domains under management: “Over 20 million” domains

Position: One of the largest independent retail registrars globally, and one of the best-known among developers and domain investors

How Namecheap got there

Clear value positioning from day one Namecheap has long marketed itself around affordable pricing + free WHOIS privacy for most domains. That combination made it especially attractive to developers, freelancers and early-stage startups who are price-sensitive but care about privacy.

Strong brand among technical users Over time, Namecheap earned a reputation as a “developer-friendly” registrar with a clean control panel, decent DNS, and transparent pricing. Independent rankings and industry commentary consistently list them among the biggest registrars by domain count and among the top choices for developers.

Large TLD portfolio and active promotions Namecheap offers hundreds of TLDs and runs aggressive promotions on new gTLDs and popular generics. That helped them capture a significant share of new registrations, not just transfers, across the 2010s and 2020s.

Ecosystem growth: hosting, email, VPN and more Like GoDaddy (but on a different scale), Namecheap expanded into shared hosting, premium DNS, business email and even VPN services. Domains remain the core, but the average revenue per user is pushed up with these add-ons.

Public positioning around user rights Historically, Namecheap has taken public positions on internet policy issues (for example, around SOPA or privacy), which has strengthened loyalty among technically aware customers.

Lessons from Namecheap’s rise

You can become a top-five registrar without Super Bowl ads, if you win trust among technically savvy users.
Free privacy, simple UX, and transparent pricing are powerful differentiators.
A focused “value and developer-friendly” positioning can coexist with high volume.

Rank #4

IONOS – Europe’s hosting giant with 22 million domains

Headquarters: Germany (1&1 / IONOS Group SE)

Domains under management: Around 22 million domains

Position: Largest hosting provider in Europe, with millions of domain names hosted for 6.2 million+ customers

How IONOS got there

Bundling domains with hosting and website packages IONOS built its business primarily as a hosting and website solutions provider. For many European SMBs, the first interaction was a hosting or website offer that included a “free” or low-cost domain for the first year. Over time, this bundling strategy created a huge base of domains under management.

Pan-European presence IONOS has data centres, localised websites and support across many European countries. That regional depth makes it a default choice for businesses that prefer a European provider (for language, GDPR, or data locality reasons).

Long history and brand continuity The company’s origins go back decades (1&1), and it has remained a familiar brand in Germany and beyond. This long-standing presence has translated into trust and renewals.

Focus on small and mid-sized businesses Like GoDaddy, IONOS positions itself as an end-to-end provider for SMEs – domains, hosting, website builders, email, cloud and security. The domain is rarely sold alone; it is usually part of a larger relationship with the customer.

What IONOS illustrates

IONOS is a good example of how a company can become a top-five registrar as a by-product of being a dominant hosting provider. For many of its customers, domain registration is just one checkbox in a broader hosting or website order flow, but in aggregate it adds up to tens of millions of domains.

Rank #5

OpenSRS (Tucows) – the quiet wholesale powerhouse

Brand: OpenSRS, part of TucowsBusiness model: Wholesale registrar platform for resellers

Domains under management: About 18 million domains via 13,000+

Resellers Position: Largest dedicated wholesale domain reseller platform

How OpenSRS got there

Wholesale-first model Unlike GoDaddy or Namecheap, OpenSRS is not primarily a retail brand. It is a white-label registrar platform that powers thousands of hosting companies, website builders, telcos and resellers. Those partners sell domains under their own brands, but the domains are technically managed by OpenSRS/Tucows.

APIs and automation for resellers OpenSRS invested heavily in APIs, automation and a robust back-office for high-volume partners. This makes it attractive for companies that want to offer domains but do not want to build and maintain their own EPP stack, ICANN relationship, and 24/7 registrar operations.

Scale via aggregationBy aggregating thousands of resellers, each with their own customer base, OpenSRS achieved domain volumes comparable to the largest retail registrars, without the same consumer-facing marketing costs.

Tucows’ broader registrar portfolioTucows also owns other registrar brands (such as Enom) that together manage tens of millions of domains. Some public analyses put Tucows’ combined domains around the high-teens to 20+ million mark, depending on the time period and data source.

Why OpenSRS is important

OpenSRS shows that you can be one of the biggest registrars in the world without being a consumer brand. If you own the infrastructure layer and let others do the retail work, you can still end up with tens of millions of domains under management.

Conclusion - World's Top Domain Registrar

What aspiring registrars can learn

Speaking now with my “consultant” hat on:

If you are thinking about becoming a registrar, you are not going to compete with GoDaddy on brand spend or with GMO on Japanese localisation. But you can learn from their playbooks:

Pick a clear focus: geography, niche vertical, or business model (retail vs. wholesale).
Treat domains as the start of a relationship, not the only product.
Invest early in automation, compliance and support processes so you can scale.
Be very honest about your distribution: how will customers actually find you?

The good news is that the market is still growing, and there is room for specialised, high-quality registrars that do one thing very well. The top five show what is possible when you get product, positioning, and execution aligned over many years.