Name.com

What Name.com actually is

Name.com is an ICANN-accredited domain registrar (IANA ID 625) founded in 2003 by Bill Mushkin and based in Denver, Colorado. It has been through several owners — Demand Media bought it in 2013, Rightside became the parent in 2014, Donuts took over Rightside in a $213 million deal in 2017, and Donuts rebranded to Identity Digital in June 2022. That last point matters more than most buyers realize: Name.com sits inside Identity Digital, a registry operator with an interest in how new TLDs are sold. It is not part of Newfold Digital, despite what some directory sites claim.

The product surface is a registrar with the usual accretion of add-ons. Domain search and registration across close to 600 TLDs, transfers, bulk portfolio tools, DNS management (A, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV records plus URL forwarding), an aftermarket for expiring and premium names, backorders for pending-delete domains, and a documented public REST API covering search, registration, renewal, transfers, DNS and DNSSEC records with pricing endpoints. Around the domains sit shared, cloud, and WordPress hosting, professional email, and SSL certificates. Scale is real: IANA records show about 3.1 million gTLD domains under management for registrar ID 625 as of October 2026.

Every eligible domain now includes Domain Safe at no charge — a bundle of WHOIS privacy, an SSL certificate, and security locks such as Domain Lock Plus. The paid Domain Safe Pro tier adds monitoring, Dynamic DNS, and HTTPS redirects. The free privacy is a recent and welcome change; older reviews that complain about paid WHOIS at Name.com are describing a product that no longer exists in that form.

Pricing: what you really pay

Name.com's own pricing table renders in JavaScript and is unfriendly to anyone comparison shopping, so we track current rates through price trackers and cross-check them. As of late October 2026, regular .com pricing is $13.19 to register, $20.19 to renew, and $18.19 to transfer in, with a $0.20 ICANN fee added on top and VAT excluded. New customers can register a .com for $11.24 with a promo code, and promo renewal and transfer codes exist — but budget on the regular rates, because the promos are one-shot.

The wider price list shows where the real margins hide. .net runs $16.69 to register and $24.19 to renew; .org is $10.19 and $20.19; .co is $29.99 and $44.99; .io is $53.99 and $79.99. Two entries deserve a warning label: .info renews at $40.19 after a $6.19 first year, and .xyz renews at $21.19 after a $2.19 first year. Those renewal multiples are the single biggest pricing risk at Name.com — the .com renewal is merely above average, but certain TLDs renew at several times the registration price. Always price the extension you actually want over three years, not year one.

For automation-heavy buyers there is a reseller program with published tiered wholesale pricing — the Bronze tier runs $12.40 to register and $15.10 to renew a .com — which is genuinely useful if you register domains on behalf of clients. The API itself is free to use and its pricing endpoints let you pull accurate rates programmatically, something several competitors still do not offer.

Compared with near-wholesale registrars, Name.com is mid-market. Trackers disagree slightly on exact .com figures — one September 2026 source reported $12.99 to register and $17.99 to renew — but all of them agree on the shape: competitive first-year pricing, renewals a few dollars above the cheapest options, and free privacy included. In our view that is a defensible position, provided the extension you want is not one of the renewal outliers.

Performance & infrastructure

For a registrar, "performance" means DNS behavior, control-plane reliability, and how the account surface behaves under pressure. Name.com's DNS management is competent and includes URL forwarding; the security baseline includes two-step verification, domain locking, and the free SSL that ships with Domain Safe. The REST API is the standout — it is documented, covers the full domain lifecycle including DNSSEC record operations, and exposes pricing, which makes Name.com one of the easier registrars to script against. If you are building a SaaS that registers domains on behalf of users, the API plus the reseller tiers are the reason to shortlist this registrar.

The honest gap is DNSSEC. Name.com's own FAQ states that its nameservers do not support DNSSEC — you can add DS records at the registry level if DNS is hosted elsewhere, for example with a managed DNS provider that signs zones for you, but you cannot run DNSSEC end-to-end on Name.com's own DNS. For anyone with a hard DNSSEC requirement, that is a functional disqualifier rather than a nitpick, and we would move DNS to a provider that signs zones and keep Name.com as the registrar of record.

Uptime and support: there is no published uptime SLA for registrar or DNS services, which is normal in this category — ICANN contracts cover registration obligations, not DNS availability. Support is 24/7 live chat plus ticketing and a knowledge base, and the account area does the standard things: bulk operations, transfer locks, auto-renew controls. Domain volume (roughly 3.1 million gTLDs under management) and two decades of continuous operation suggest an operational track record we consider acceptable for a registrar of this size, though we have no independent measurements of DNS query latency to report and will not invent any.

Transfers follow the ICANN rulebook: standard inter-registrar transfers with confirmation via the registrant email, transfer locks you control in the account panel, and a modest transfer-in price ($18.19 for a .com at regular rates) that adds a year to the registration term. The account surface supports two-step verification, and the free Domain Safe SSL plus security locks cover the basics of domain hijack prevention. None of this is unusual, but all of it is in place and works without a sales conversation, which we count as a positive.

Where it falls short

Pricing surprises first. The .com renewal at around $20.19 is several dollars above near-wholesale registrars, and the .info and .xyz renewal rates are the kind of numbers that generate support tickets and angry forum posts. If you hold a large portfolio at Name.com, those renewal rates compound quietly, and moving domains out later costs transfer fees and attention.

Second, the no-DNSSEC-on-own-nameservers limitation is unusual in 2026 and hard to justify for a registrar owned by a registry operator. It pushes security-conscious buyers to split registrar and DNS across two providers — workable, but an extra account and an extra failure domain.

Third, the ownership history is a legitimate consideration. Name.com has passed through three corporate parents in a decade, and its current parent is a registry business with its own TLD portfolio. We have seen no evidence of registry-registrar conflicts bleeding into customer experience, but the incentive structure is worth knowing when you decide where your domains of record should live.

Fourth, the product bundle is broad rather than deep. The hosting and email offerings are standard reseller-grade services; we would not choose Name.com as a hosting provider on the strength of this review — see our shared hosting category for that decision. Buy the domains and the API here, and pick infrastructure elsewhere.

Who should pick this

Our pick for developers and small platforms that register domains on behalf of users or clients: the REST API with pricing endpoints, published reseller tiers, and free WHOIS privacy with an SSL certificate make it a practical registrar of record for scripted, portfolio-style work. It is also a reasonable home for buyers who value a US-based registrar with a long operating history and want privacy bundled rather than sold back to them.

We would look elsewhere if you need DNSSEC on the registrar's own nameservers, if you are purely renewal-price sensitive (near-wholesale registrars beat Name.com's .com renewal by several dollars), or if the specific TLD you want sits in one of the renewal outlier brackets. Check the three-year cost of your exact extension before you transfer anything.

Key takeaways

• ICANN-accredited registrar (IANA 625) since 2003, Denver-based, owned by Identity Digital (formerly Donuts) — not Newfold Digital.
• Domain Safe is now free on eligible domains: WHOIS privacy, an SSL certificate, and security locks; a paid Pro tier adds monitoring and Dynamic DNS.
• .com pricing in late 2026: $13.19 to register, $20.19 to renew, $18.19 to transfer, plus a $0.20 ICANN fee — mid-market, above near-wholesale registrars.
• Renewal outliers exist: .info renews at $40.19 and .xyz at $21.19 after cheap first years. Price your extension over three years.
• Strong developer story: documented REST API with pricing endpoints and published reseller tiers ($12.40/$15.10 Bronze .com).
• Name.com's own nameservers do not support DNSSEC — a real limitation if zone signing matters to you.

Sources

• https://tldes.com/registrars/name
• https://whichdevtool.com/tools/name-com/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name.com
• https://tldmath.com/tld/com