Domain Name Wire published its full-year 2025 .com registrar data in April 2026, covering every major registrar’s domain count trajectory across the year. The headline is not who has the most domains. It is who is gaining and who is losing. GoDaddy registered approximately 7.9 million new .com domains in 2025 and still finished the year with roughly 1 million fewer domains under management than it started with, because expirations and outbound transfers exceeded new registrations. Namecheap added approximately 1.9 million .com domains, the largest gain of any registrar. Cloudflare, operating an at-cost registrar with no upsell model, was the third-fastest-growing registrar by net domain count, adding 870,000. Newfold Digital, parent of Bluehost and HostGator, lost 379,000 .com domains through net transfers, the steepest transfer loss of any major registrar in 2025.
The direction of these flows matters more than the absolute counts. A registrar losing domains on a net basis while still registering millions of new ones is a registrar with a churn problem, not a new customer problem. A registrar gaining domains entirely at-cost with no complementary products is signaling something about what a segment of domain buyers actually wants. The 2025 data draws a clear line between the registrars that are structurally winning and those that are managing a slow decline.
The Winners: Namecheap, Cloudflare, Hostinger, Squarespace
Namecheap’s approximately 2 million net .com additions in 2025 make it the largest gainer by volume among established registrars. Namecheap operates at significantly lower price points than GoDaddy or Newfold brands, and its Spaceship sub-brand is specifically targeting technically sophisticated users. Some portion of the Namecheap gain is direct absorption of customers who left GoDaddy or Newfold brands on renewal, and some portion is Google Domains refugees who opted against Squarespace’s higher pricing when the 12-month grace period expired in September 2024. As of December 2025, Namecheap sits at approximately 12.6 million .com domains, second globally behind GoDaddy’s approximately 52.4 million.
Cloudflare Registrar is the structurally unusual case. Cloudflare sells domain registrations at ICANN wholesale cost with no markup, no upsell, and no promotional pricing that resets to a higher renewal rate after year one. It exists to reduce friction for developers and technically aware operators who want to consolidate DNS and security services on Cloudflare’s platform. In absolute size, Cloudflare sits at approximately 2.4 million .com domains and ranks fourteenth globally. That is not a top-ten position. What is notable is the growth rate: Cloudflare added 870,000 .com domains in 2025, the third-largest gain of any registrar, without offering a single promotional price or complementary product to drive it. The customers choosing Cloudflare Registrar are making an explicit decision that at-cost pricing with no renewal shock is preferable to any first-year discount offered by volume registrars. A registrar that does not advertise, does not run affiliate programs, and does not discount is still the third-fastest-growing major registrar. That signal matters for what the technically aware segment actually values.
Hostinger’s registrar growth tracks its hosting subscriber growth, which has been the fastest among major providers through 2025. Hostinger’s model is low headline prices with aggressive upsell to hosting packages, and its registrar volume reflects customer acquisition in the SMB and first-website segment it is targeting. The combination of Namecheap, Cloudflare, and Hostinger as the three consistent growth stories in the registrar market covers three different buyer profiles: price-sensitive technical users, cost-certainty-seeking developers, and SMB first-time website owners.
Squarespace added approximately 732,000 .com domains in 2025, ranking fifth among annual gainers. This is steady growth but notably slower than Namecheap’s gain of approximately 1.9 million, more than 2.5 times that volume. Squarespace entered 2025 as the fifth-largest .com registrar globally with approximately 8.14 million domains and ended with approximately 8.87 million. The Google Domains acquisition that made Squarespace the fifth-largest registrar overnight in September 2023 still represents the foundation of that position. Whether Squarespace can grow organically as a registrar rather than through acquisition is the open question.
The Losers: GoDaddy and Newfold
GoDaddy’s net loss of approximately 1 million .com domains across 2025 is the most significant structural signal in the data. GoDaddy registered approximately 7.9 million new .com domains in 2025, which means its gross new registration volume is substantial. The net loss is driven by renewal and transfer economics. GoDaddy has historically used low first-year pricing to acquire customers, with renewal prices substantially higher. As that pricing model has become more widely understood and comparison has become easier, renewal-to-transfer rates at GoDaddy have increased. Customers who registered at a promotional price and renew at the standard rate have more alternatives and lower switching costs than they did five years ago.
GoDaddy’s Q4 2025 earnings, reported February 24, 2026, reflected the same dynamic in its core business metrics. Airo, its AI product suite intended to convert domain registrations into website builder subscriptions, is showing slower adoption than forecast. The registrar data and the earnings data tell the same story: GoDaddy’s historical distribution advantage, built on search advertising and affiliate channels, is producing diminishing marginal returns against a competitive environment where every major registrar and website builder has comparable tooling.
Newfold’s 379,000 domain transfer outflow in 2025 is more acute because Newfold is operating under financial stress that limits its ability to respond. With $3.3 billion in debt rated Caa3 by Moody’s, Newfold cannot match the pricing of at-cost competitors or invest at the rate needed to arrest retention losses. The registrar transfer data is one component of a subscriber loss that reached approximately 1 million customers, or 17 percent of the base, between 2023 and early 2026. The customers moving domains out of Newfold brands are the leading indicator of the broader customer churn across Bluehost, HostGator, and Network Solutions.
What the Distribution Shift Means
The registrar market is more concentrated at the top by total count than the growth data suggests. GoDaddy at approximately 52.4 million .com domains is roughly four times larger than the second-largest registrar. That gap does not close in a year or even a decade of the current trajectory. But market share in the registrar business translates directly into new customer acquisition pipelines for hosting, website builders, email, and related products. The customers switching to Namecheap or Cloudflare are choosing providers that either have a lower-cost hosting offer (Namecheap) or have an explicit strategy to be the infrastructure layer for technically capable operators (Cloudflare). Neither of those providers is currently a major threat to GoDaddy’s position among SMB first-time website owners. The threat is in the technically aware segment, and that segment’s domain concentration is increasing at Cloudflare and Namecheap while decreasing at GoDaddy.
The April 30, 2026 Q1 earnings report from GoDaddy will be the first data point on whether the trend continued into 2026. If the net domain loss accelerated, the market will need to reconsider whether the Q4 2025 miss was a temporary adoption timing issue or the beginning of a structural repricing of GoDaddy’s competitive position.
For the broader hosting industry, the registrar data is a leading indicator because domain registration precedes everything else in the web presence funnel. Where new domain registrations go is where new website, hosting, and email customers go next. The 2025 data shows that the flow is moving toward providers with more transparent pricing structures and away from those with promotional-to-renewal rate gaps. That signal is not about registrar market share in isolation. It is about where the next cohort of hosting customers is starting their relationship with the industry.
Łukasz Nowak
Nearly two decades in IT. A decade in web hosting - and still in the trenches. Writing about the infrastructure that runs the internet from the inside.