Frequently Asked Questions

• Why did you create this site?
  
  Our reasons for developing RegistrarOwl.com are two-fold:

  1. Price Transparency
     We are firm believers in transparency, especially for customers selecting a company to give their business. Unfortunately, in far too many cases, we have found that many within the domain registrar industry use misleading tactics surrounding the actual price of domains and other services. We have done our best to break through this fog and to provide a true apples-to-apples comparison of prices for as many registrars as possible. You can read more concerning our methods for getting the prices that are displayed further down on this page.
  2. Registrar Size and Activity Data
     We could not find a single source for accurate and transparent statistics for vital information related to domain registrars such as the number of domains that each sponsor. We therefore set out to provide available information in an unbiased and accurate format to help customers better understand their registrar options.
• How is the pricing information derived?
  
  As detailed in the answer above, there are far too many examples of registrars hiding and misleading customers concerning their prices. This is the only industry we can think of that makes determining a final price so difficult.

  Throughout RegistrarOwl.com we have provided prices for .com registrations, transfers and renewals as well as the cost of WHOIS privacy. Gathering this data for over 1,000 accredited registrars was a monumental effort due to the fact that in nearly every case, registrars did not have a straightforward pricing page. Our researchers therefore had to comb through misleading advertisements, follow asterisks, call the companies, read fine print, get to the final step of ordering, and much more simply to find out how much a single .com domain would cost. Please keep the following things in mind when viewing the prices we list on our site:

  • Everywhere a price is listed you should also see a link to the registrar's web page where the price information was gathered. This was not possible in every case, but we do our best to be as transparent as possible.
  • The prices shown are for .com domains only.
  • The prices include fees we were able to ascertain such as ICANN fees, transaction fees, etc.
  • The prices shown attempt to bypass special offers and display the actual everyday price of the service.
  • Many registrars do not display prices in United States Dollars. We therefore used the exchange rate on the day of discovery to convert to USD.
  • If you see "Not Available" for a certain service, it just means that we could not determine the price with enough accuracy that we felt comfortable including it.
• What is "Price Index"?
  
  It is one of our goals to provide transparent and accurate comparisons of registrar pricing data. Our thought is that a good way to show a true total cost of ownership is to combine the cost of registration, transfer, renewal and WHOIS privacy together. The sum of each of these things is the "price index". Please remember that in order for a value to be displayed for a registrar's price index that we must have values for each of the components.
• Where do the statistics for domains originate from?
  
  All of the domain data currently available on the site comes directly from ICANN who in turn receives data from the applicable registries. Unfortunately, the data is a bit limiting in that it only represents the TLDs shown on the site, and that the data is always around 3 months old. If you are aware of other sources for additional or more up-to-date data please let us know.
• Why don't I see my registrar listed?
  
  We only show ICANN-accredited registrars. Many "registrars" on the Internet are resellers for an actual accredited registrar. Also, some registrars have their own accreditation, but do not use their own platform which explains why some popular registrars have very low domain counts.
• Am I free to use the charts and other data from RegistrarOwl on my site, blog, etc.?
  
  Yes, you are free to use the final data we make available so long as you include a reference and link back to our site.