iwantmyname

What iwantmyname actually is

iwantmyname is a domain registrar built by people who were sick of domain registrars. It was created in 2008 in Wellington, New Zealand, by Lenz Gschwendtner, Timo Reitnauer, and Paul Spence — Gschwendtner had spent years inside a German registrar watching the industry's worst habits (front-running, parking, upsell mazes) pay well, and the founding pitch, in his own telling, was to build the registrar he actually wanted: no ads, no parking, no hosting bolted on, just buying and managing domains cleanly. That positioning has survived seventeen years and two ownership changes intact.

The ownership matters for due diligence. In August 2019, UK-listed CentralNic Group Plc acquired the operating company, ideegeo Group Ltd, for NZ$5.2 million. CentralNic has since become Team Internet Group PLC — one of the largest domain-industry groups — and iwantmyname operates as a brand within it, with its ICANN accreditation held via sister company Key-Systems GmbH. The team remains remote and New Zealand-anchored (an Auckland address at Quay Street appears in current company records), with roughly 80,000 customers and 180,000 domains under management at the time of the acquisition. In our view this is the ideal outcome for a boutique registrar: the interface and philosophy stay, while the back-end sits inside a group with real registry relationships.

What you get: registration, transfer, and renewal across 500+ domain extensions (namebeta counts 564 TLDs — far beyond the "90+" the brand once advertised), DNS hosting and management, subdomains, web and email forwarding, WHOIS privacy, 2FA, domain locking, and a well-documented API plus around a hundred one-click DNS integrations for services like Heroku, WordPress.com, and common email providers. It is a registrar and DNS platform. It does not pretend to be a host.

Pricing: what you really pay

iwantmyname has always said out loud that it does not compete on price, and the current rate card confirms it. A .com runs $19.99 to register and $23.49 to renew, with transfers at $22.49 — a three-year cost of about $66.97. For context, the price leaders in /benchmarks-adjacent registrar comparisons sell .com at roughly cost ($10–11 at Cloudflare, low teens at Porkbun and Namecheap). A .de is $13.90/$16.80; a .nz is about $24.90/yr; .org and .net sit near $17 per year; .app is $29/yr; .ai is $99/yr; and the long tail runs from cheap ccTLD promotions like .com.es at $3.99 (renewing at $4.15) up to premium renewals that can reach four figures a year on exotic extensions.

In other words: expect to pay a few dollars more per domain per year than at the discount registrars, and expect renewal prices to be the real prices — the deeper discounts some rivals advertise on first-year registrations are largely absent here, which is actually a small honesty signal. There are no membership tiers, no per-domain "protection" add-ons, no backorder gimmicks. WHOIS privacy is free and enabled by default at registration on every extension whose registry permits privacy masking, with no upsell — a feature some competitors charge $7.99–12/yr for.

Where the money adds up is portfolio size. For a handful of domains, the premium buys a cleaner workflow and is easy to justify. For hundreds of domains, the per-domain delta versus a price-focused registrar is real money, and the calculus flips. Our rule of thumb: iwantmyname is worth it for the domains that matter to you, and a discount registrar is fine for parking lots.

Performance & infrastructure

For a registrar, "performance" means DNS reliability, control-plane usability, and how quickly changes propagate — not CPU specs. On usability, iwantmyname is consistently the registrar designers and developers recommend: a clean dashboard, sensible bulk operations, and a help centre that goes deeper than usual on scam warnings, transfer safety, and avoiding downtime during moves. The DNS product is the other strength: hosted DNS with a full record set, subdomain creation, URL and email forwarding, and roughly 100 one-click integrations that prefill the right records for popular platforms — the single biggest time-saver for anyone pointing a domain at external services.

On security hygiene, accounts support app-based two-factor authentication and standard domain locking, and DNSSEC availability is the one notable gap in the technical feature set — third-party assessments flag that DNSSEC is not available through iwantmyname's DNS setup, which matters if you want cryptographic signing of your zones. You can work around it by pointing nameservers at a DNSSEC-capable provider (Cloudflare, for instance), but it is a genuine limitation of the bundled DNS.

There is no published uptime SLA for the DNS service, and the group does not disclose the anycast footprint behind it. Uptime record in the wild is generally good — the platform has been running continuously since 2008 under the same product philosophy — but we have not measured it ourselves and we will not invent numbers. For domains where an outage costs real money, our standard advice applies regardless of registrar: run DNS where you can measure it, or at minimum know how fast you can repoint nameservers.

Transfers deserve one practical note, because the help centre handles this better than most: iwantmyname documents the auth-code and lock-period dance clearly, warns about the scam emails that arrive during transfer windows, and makes the EPP steps legible for people who move domains rarely. The same care shows up in the one-click integrations — pick a target service and the correct CNAME, A, and TXT records are pre-filled, including the awkward verification records for email providers that trip most people up. For anyone who has debugged a mis-set TXT record at midnight, that small piece of product design is worth a couple of dollars a year on its own.

Where it falls short

Price, plainly. At $19.99 registration and $23.49 renewal for .com, iwantmyname is among the more expensive mainstream registrars, and the gap compounds across a portfolio. Second, support is email and ticket based — no live chat, no phone — which is fine for routine questions and uncomfortable during a hijack or a botched transfer at 2 a.m. Third, the technical gaps: no DNSSEC in the native DNS product, no DNS analytics to speak of, and no marketplace for premium or aftermarket domains (a deliberate omission, but a limitation if you hunt for drop-catches).

Fourth, the Team Internet ownership is a double-edged fact. It provides stability and registry reach, but iwantmyname now sits inside the same kind of roll-up structure that has degraded other hosting and registrar brands over time; the brand's independence is cultural, not structural. Fifth, the product surface is deliberately thin — no hosting, no email inboxes, no website builder — which is a strength if you want a registrar and a gap if you wanted one vendor for everything. Finally, some country-code registries forbid privacy masking entirely, so those domains publish your contact details no matter which registrar you use — a registry rule, not an iwantmyname failure, but worth knowing before you register a ccTLD for a personal project.

Who should pick this

Our pick for developers, designers, and small businesses who treat their primary domains as assets rather than commodities: people who want a clean control plane, free WHOIS privacy without thinking about it, fast DNS changes, and a registrar that does not email them "domain services" scams every week. If you own a handful of domains and value your time more than a few dollars per year, this is one of the most pleasant registrars to operate, and the one-click DNS integrations genuinely remove setup friction.

We would not pick it for large portfolios where per-domain price dominates, for buyers who need DNSSEC in the bundled DNS today, for drop-catching or aftermarket buying, or for anyone who wants phone support and contractual SLAs. Those buyers are better served by price-focused registrars or enterprise DNS platforms — compare options in /category/domain-registrars before moving a portfolio.

Key takeaways

• Founded 2008 in New Zealand (ideegeo Group Ltd); acquired by CentralNic for NZ$5.2M in 2019, now part of Team Internet Group PLC.
• 500+ domain extensions (564 counted by third parties), with a clean, ad-free dashboard and no upsell culture.
• Pricing is premium: .com at $19.99 registration / $23.49 renewal versus ~$10–13 at price-focused rivals — cheap ccTLD promos exist (.com.es $3.99).
• Free WHOIS privacy enabled by default wherever the registry allows it; 2FA and domain locking standard.
• Strong hosted DNS with ~100 one-click integrations and a documented API — but no DNSSEC and no published DNS uptime SLA.
• Email/ticket support only; best for people who value workflow over the last few dollars per domain.

Sources

• https://iwantmyname.com/en/about
• https://tldbee.com/registrars/iwantmyname
• https://namebeta.com/registrars/iwantmyname.com
• https://tlds.host/en/registrar/iwantmyname
• https://whtop.com/review/iwantmyname.com
• https://scoop.co.nz/stories/BU201908/S00227.htm
• https://bloggingvision.com/iwantmyname-review
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2448387