debate Is becoming a domain reseller a good business idea?

[katerleonid]

I have a friend who does hosting reselling and makes around €100,000 per year in revenue and about $40,000 in profit. He doesn’t do domain reselling.
So it made me wonder: is starting a domain-reselling business still a good idea in 2025?

Some companies claim to have 10,000+ resellers. If there are that many, some of them must be profitable, right?

How do you choose a domain reseller?
And why do most companies keep their reseller domain pricing private until you log in?

If you’re a reseller, which company do you use?
I’m doing research.

 

[Bravo Mod Team]

is starting a domain-reselling business still a good idea in 2025?

Maybe.

Hexonet was one of the largest resellers, and they closed down to merge with their sister brand:

• Hexonet is shutting down; customers migrating to other Team Internet platforms (CentralNic)

Domains are small margin. Even smaller as a reseller.

 

[katerleonid]

Interesting case, thanks for sharing.

Now, let me ask a better question - which business has a smaller margin: a reseller or a domain investor?

 

[biggie]

Interesting case, thanks for sharing.

Now, let me ask a better question - which business has a smaller margin: a reseller or a domain investor?

Hi

years ago, I had a reseller account at enom.com
I used the name dombuy.com as the retail site
com reg fee was $6.95, so I could charge retail price of $8.95 or higher
the best part was I could create sub accounts under mine and get commission of their purchases

resellers have lower margins because base price is fixed, only so much room to mark up prices

imo….

 

[katerleonid]

From what I see, Enom offers .com registrations at $11.50 through their reseller program for Enterprise accounts (which require $100,000 in annual spend).

 

[byte]

From what I see, Enom offers .com registrations at $11.50 through their reseller program for Enterprise accounts (which require $100,000 in annual spend).

Very interesting

 

[fka1080405]

Hosting is very high margin, hence most domain name registrars offering hosting services alongside domain name registration. Domain registration is, in most cases, a loss leader. The fixed costs of domain name registration and customer price sensitivity make domain registration a hard product to profit from directly. Domain registration is best thought of was a way to get customers in the door to be upsold to high margin products, like hosting, not as a profit generating product itself.

Your friend could, for example, offer a free .com domain name registration with any annual hosting plan purchase. I've not kept up with the shared hosting market for more than a decade now but historically it was very common to find free domain name promotions from hosting companies. The hosting company would be a domain name reseller but swallow the registration cost as a promotional expense.

OpenSRS is the biggest reseller, although their platform is pretty terrible. I'm intrigued by the newly launched OpusDNS but they're yet to make their mark. If your friend is using something like WHMCS, they'd likely want to pick a reseller that has an integration available (as both OpenSRS and OpusDNS do for WHMCS) but otherwise, they're mostly interchangeable, a few cents difference on the price here and there.

So to answer the question ("Is becoming a domain reseller a good business idea?"): no, it is a bad business idea to become a domain reseller for the sake of being a domain reseller. However, it can be a good idea to offer domain name registration if it feeds into some other part of the business.

 

[cooljub]

I asked at your firm, but you don't do .co.uk
I'm in the UK, that's the biggest extension here.

 

[Eric Lyon]

How do you choose a domain reseller?

In another thread you mentioned that OpenProvider had 1900 to 2000 TLDs they can provide to registrants. I then found that Regery offers 2,206 to 2.393 TLDs to registrants.

With that in mind, I would like to think that the price-point + white-label option + number of TLDs you could offer registrants could potentially widen the playing field a bit.

It just so happens that Regery appears to be developing a reseller program and already started accepting applicants: https://regery.com/en/partnership/resell-domains

Regardless, who the backer is, with a white-label, the registrant won't be seeing their brand initially anyways, so, it's not that big of a factor to choose a Registrar based on their brand power and reach, since it will be your brand on the white-label pitching and servicing registrants.

That's just my opinion anyways, I've never personally applied to be a white-label domain reseller, so I don't have hands on experience when comes to operating said platform and making sure all the nuts and bolts are tightly fastened for smooth operations.

 

[katerleonid]

I asked at your firm, but you don't do .co.uk
I'm in the UK, that's the biggest extension here.

Which firm? Thanks.

 

[katerleonid]

I checked OpenSRS, but their prices seem very high, at least for .com and .top.
A .top domain is $9, but it requires $100,000 in annual spend and 1,000 new registrations or transfers.
A .com domain is $11.50 with the same requirements.

 

[Future Sensors]

Which firm? Thanks.

NameSilo of course, because of your affiliation displayed next to each posting.

 

[katerleonid]

NameSilo of course, because of your affiliation displayed next to each posting.

NameSilo offers .co.uk domains for reselling.

 

[jmcc]

I have a friend who does hosting reselling and makes around €100,000 per year in revenue and about $40,000 in profit. He doesn’t do domain reselling.
So it made me wonder: is starting a domain-reselling business still a good idea in 2025?

Some companies claim to have 10,000+ resellers. If there are that many, some of them must be profitable, right?

How do you choose a domain reseller?
And why do most companies keep their reseller domain pricing private until you log in?

If you’re a reseller, which company do you use?
I’m doing research.

Reselling is a complicated business. Reselling domain names and resellng hosted are two linked but different businesses.

The domain name reselling business is quite concentrated at the higher end of the market. Of the gTLDs, approximately 95% of the gTLD market is hosted on 7,300 hosters (registrars and resellers). When it gets to the hosting market, 99.31% of the gTLD websites are hosted on 28,236 identified web hosting providers. The large players,Godaddy, Amazon, Google, Microsoft account for a lot of the gTLD web but there are tens of thousands of small web hosting provider operations.

With the gTLD registrars, domain names have become commoditised and are used as a way to upsell customers to products and services with a higher profit margin. Hosting is one of these. Most websites are on shared web hosting rather than dedicated servers. The web hosting provider has some strange quirks. Due to IPv4 addresses being in short supply, they have become traded and it is not unusual to see large numbers of these IP addresses being used by small web hosters. There are also large numbers (much more than people would expect) of gTLD websites hosted on ISP DSL, cable and wireless broadband connections. Some countries have no ICANN accredited registrars but over 400K gTLD registrarions on their hosters. Other countries with less developed Internet infrastructure host most of their domain names and web sites outside the country's IP addresses and infrastructure.

There are lots of companies who claim to have large number of resellers. If their market is in gTLDsm the simplest way to get an indication of whether they are being accurate is to check the monthly ICANN registry reports for registration volume and also check if they are an accredited ICANN registrar. Some large companies who are in the registrations as a service business do have large numbers of resellers. Then there is the less obvious reseller type that uses the reseller program offered by registrars or web hosting providers. They may not use their own dedicated nameservers and web hosting but use the seller's nameservers and web hosting. Godaddy alone has over 9,500 of these potential resellers using its main nameservers.

The ccTLD market can be even more competitive and complex with the top ten players accounting for about 85% of a country's domain name market. The reason it is more complex is because it is often cheaper for a large portfolio operator to purchase a large player in a country's market to buy market share rather than build it. While people may have heard of large players like Godaddy and Newfold Digital, they may not have heard of players like Team Blue which is a very significant operator in the European market.

In competitve markets such as domain name and web hosting reselling, pricing details are sensitive information. This is one potential reason why the sellers and registrars want to restrict the availability of the data to customers who are logged in to the website.

At the moment, I am working on mapping and identifying all of the web hosting providers in the gTLDs and about 35 million ccTLD domain names. As of this morning, I've got it down to 99.19% of the providers in the combined market identified. I have also been breaking down the providers by the country in which they are active. Many providers are active in more than one country.

The turnover on domain name resellers at the low end of the market is high. Most of them never gain critical mass and can last for a year or two. They are competing with large registrars and operators who may be able to offer gTLD domain names at a better price. If they are not upselling with value added services llike web design, management, content etc, then there it is difficult to compete with existing players.

There is an opportunity though. The costs and requirements of becoming an ICANN accredited registrar (gTLDs) are too high for smalll businesses. If these small businesses are operating in a country with a strong ccTLD, then becoming a ccTLD registrar in the local ccTLD may be a better option. In countries where there is a strong ccTLD, the new registration volume for the ccTLD is often two or three times that of the gTLDs each month.

Just on the numbers, the US market has 128,775,147 gTLD websites and 2.194 identified providers at 99.73% of web hosting providers identified.

Regards...jmcc

 

[katerleonid]

Really good article - thanks for sharing. From what I see, some resellers start in countries outside the US, some focus on Chinese markets (for example, with .top domains), while others focus on ccTLD extensions.

For example, in Romania many people use local web-hosting companies, which also act as domain resellers, so they buy their domains directly through them. People don’t usually go to big international registrars - either they don’t know them, or they prefer having someone handle both hosting and domain registration for them.

It seems like a blind spot, but it’s extremely competitive in smaller countries as well.

 

[jmcc]

Really good article - thanks for sharing. From what I see, some resellers start in countries outside the US, some focus on Chinese markets (for example, with .top domains), while others focus on ccTLD extensions.

For example, in Romania many people use local web-hosting companies, which also act as domain resellers, so they buy their domains directly through them. People don’t usually go to big international registrars - either they don’t know them, or they prefer having someone handle both hosting and domain registration for them.

It seems like a blind spot, but it’s extremely competitive in smaller countries as well.

I calculate the market shares by gTLD/registrars/resellers and country each month for reports. I'm working on the website provider report (spreadsheet) at the moment. The Chinese market is a curious one. I don't track the .CN ccTLD. In terms of gTLD websites, Hong Kong has more gTLD websites than the rest of China
(6,991,795 to 2,966,355). These are based on the country of the IP address. The hoster/nameservers are also correlated using a different set database tables. They produce the potential resellers by hoster data.

There are also Chinese Cloud operators operating out of Singapore. The .TOP is a high non-renewal gTLD (also track the renewal rates for a different monthly report). The business model is based on offering a low first year regfee with a high second year regfee. It is quite common with new gTLDs.

The Romanian market has a strong ccTLD. On the gTLDs, it has 69.137 gTLD websites with 84 identified web hosting providers (85.1% pf the providers identified). Outside the main legacy gTLDs, some of the popular new TLDs by country market can be strange. The .EU and .CAM are strong in Romania.The Turkish market is even stranger with .XYZ being very popular there. The new gTLDs have their own geography. I think that Team Blue is active in Romania but would have to check. Bulgaria is also quite a competitive market for its size. I had been planning to do a breakdown webpage for each country by its most popular gTLDs but haven't had the time yet. In terms of websites, the five most popular TLDs in the Romanian local market are .COM, .CAM, .EU, .NET and .ORG. The .COM leads the market by multiples of the others.

Where there is a strong ccTLD in a country, the market will be dominated by the ccTLD. That has a knock-on effect with most people identifying with their local ccTLD as being "their" ccTLd and that makes it harder to sell gTLDs into such a market. The biggest problem for a lot of new resellers is, from what I can see with the gTLD popularity spreadsheets is in trying to sell gTLDs for which there is no real demand. The country level markets are also not at the same stage of development so many countries will be hosting both domain names and web hosting outside the country's IP address space.

Regards...jmcc

 

[katerleonid]

Very interesting info - thanks again for sharing.

I’m curious: which countries (outside the USA) have a strong presence in .xyz, .top, or other similar/affordable new gTLDs, besides their own country ccTLD?
Is there any country where a new gTLD actually has more registrations than the local ccTLD?

I’d also love to see your document once it’s ready.
Of course - paid - since it looks like a lot of work.

 

[jmcc]

Very interesting info - thanks again for sharing.

I’m curious: which countries (outside the USA) have a strong presence in .xyz, .top, or other similar/affordable new gTLDs, besides their own country ccTLD?
Is there any country where a new gTLD actually has more registrations than the local ccTLD?

I’d also love to see your document once it’s ready.
Of course - paid - since it looks like a lot of work.

I'd have to run a query on the database for the full set of new gTLDs but this is the breakdown for .XYZ on websites. The US IP space is also used by a lot of resellers and some large Chinese Cloud operations have a of of US IP space. the right column is the percentage of the gTLD's websites. The Hold/Expired category is for websites on known expired hosting and also on private or non-routed IP addresses (127.0.0.1 etc).

| United States | xyz | New gTLD | 70.9252 |
| Japan | xyz | New gTLD | 13.8295 |
| Germany | xyz | New gTLD | 5.5694 |
| Hong Kong | xyz | New gTLD | 2.1606 |
| Turkey | xyz | New gTLD | 2.0810 |
| China | xyz | New gTLD | 1.0119 |
| Australia | xyz | New gTLD | 0.6914 |
| Singapore | xyz | New gTLD | 0.6836 |
| Hold/Expired | xyz | New gTLD | 0.6106 |
| Canada | xyz | New gTLD | 0.4976 |

The .TOP is somewhat different in that it is concentrated on the Chinese market.

| United States | top | New gTLD | 41.4128 |
| Hong Kong | top | New gTLD | 40.6668 |
| China | top | New gTLD | 7.0666 |
| Singapore | top | New gTLD | 5.1112 |
| Germany | top | New gTLD | 4.2210 |
| Netherlands | top | New gTLD | 1.3897 |
| Canada | top | New gTLD | 0.8361 |
| Japan | top | New gTLD | 0.8195 |
| Hold/Expired | top | New gTLD | 0.8027 |
| France | top | New gTLD | 0.6714 |

This is what the Turkish local gTLD website market for November 2025 looks like:
| Turkey | com | Legacy gTLD | 0.6230 |
| Turkey | xyz | New gTLD | 2.0810 |
| Turkey | online | New gTLD | 3.2932 |
| Turkey | net | Legacy gTLD | 0.7651 |
| Turkey | org | Legacy gTLD | 0.3316 |
| Turkey | info | Legacy gTLD | 0.2025 |
| Turkey | site | New gTLD | 0.4040 |
| Turkey | cyou | New gTLD | 2.5683 |
| Turkey | cloud | New gTLD | 0.9932 |
| Turkey | click | New gTLD | 0.5884 |

Some countries with well developed infrastructure become regional hosting players. Turkey is one of these and South Africa is also a major player in the African market. Germany, France, Netherlands and the UK also have strong European hosting operations used by hosters outside those markets.

PM me so that I won't forget about the reports.

There is an effect with some of the discounted gTLDs becoming popular in developing markets but some of these markets are still in their outgoing phase (when many businesses are trying to sell outside the country and will use .COM or a gTLD). Once a market develops in a country, the pattern reverses and more businesses use the local ccTLD to sell inside the country. I don't think that there is any country with a developed market that has a stronger new gTLD than the local ccTLD.

There is also the Adjacent Market effect for some countries where instead of a gTLD, the third largest TLD (other than the ccTLD and .COM) will be the ccTLD of an adjacent country. For the Irish market, the .UK is the largest TLD after .IE (320K) and .COM (109K on Irish hosters). The same kind of overlap happens with Belgium, Netherlands and France, and also with Germany and Austria. Some of this is based on history and language as well as economics.

Regards...jmcc

 

[katerleonid]

Thanks a lot for sharing. Very good data.

 

[nicenic]

Hi, katerleonid

Margin now comes from automation and value-add, not just buying low and selling TLDs, so the reseller choice hinges on API depth, support speed, and consistent wholesale tiers.