ICANN

If you want to know who the ICANN-Accredited Registrars are—those with accreditation to work with some or all of the generic top-level domains (gTLDs)—visit ICANN.org. The ICANN list clarifies which gTLDs the registrar is able to handle, and clicking on the name of any of the ICANN-Accredited Registrars will take you to their website. Alternatively, clicking on the gTLD that interests you in the list at the top of the page, will send you to the main site for that domain and show you a list of all the registrars specifically available to register that gTLD.

IANA

If you want to know who the delegated registrars are for the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs)—those designated by each relevant country or dependent domain to represent their interests—you can gto to the Root Zone Database page of the IANA site and click the ccTLD button in the header of the chart. Choose the country or territory that interest you by clicking on its ccTLD, and at the bottom of the following page, you will find a listing called “URL for registration services” which will link to the registrar. It is likely that this link may supply you with criteria for registering a domain name with that TLD.

Other Kinds of Registrar Information

Comparative information about gTLD registrars can be found at:

http://www.webhosting.info/

where several different types of charts can help you understand a bit more about the world of domain registration, including the largest registrars, the fastest growing registrars, and the performance of each registrar over the past month.

For example, you can learn that:

• GoDaddy is the largest ICANN-Accredited domain name registrar with over 24% of the market and over 24,000,000 domains.
• The second place ICANN-Accredited domain name registrar has a bit over 8.5% of the market and a bit over 8,500,000 domains.
• Of the top 15 ICANN-Accredited domain name registrars, 8 are in the United States, 1 is in Canada, 2 in Australia, 2 in Germany, 1 in India, and 1 in China.
• Of the top 30 ICANN-Accredited domain name registrars, 15 are in the United States, and those 15 have about  55.5% of the market.
• One of the registrars with USA in its name—PSI-USA—is based in Germany.
• Of the 30 fastest growing  ICANN-Accredited domain name registrars, 17 are in the United States.
• Go Daddy is the fastest growing  ICANN-Accredited domain name registrar, with a net gain of nearly 424,000 domains during 3 weeks in May of 2008.
• The second fastest growing ICANN-Accredited domain name registrar, BasicFusion.com, had a net gain of a little over 108,300 domains in the same time period.

Information from all of these sources can help you judge the success of and trends of  ICANN-Accredited domain name registrars that you may be considering using or finding a reseller from for your domain name registration. WebHosting.Info also provides statistics about web hosting.