Ever since DreamHost began in 1997, we’ve focused our services around helping people get online. As an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, helping connect users with the perfect domain name has always been a focus for us. We’ve registered nearly one million domain names on behalf of our customers, placing us among the top 50 largest domain registrars globally.
Strategic Partnerships and Customer Growth
In 2016, DreamHost’s Domains team began a years-long effort to form strategic partnerships with several domain registries, including Verisign, Radix, GoDaddy Registry, Identity Digital, .XYZ, and GMO Registry, among others. These partnerships have allowed us to offer discounted domain registrations and bundle free TLDs with annual hosting plans.
Approximately 85% of DreamHost customers own just one or two domains. To help our users “look beyond .COM”, we’ve partnered with registries to provide free domains to our users. Promotions like our “Extreme Website Makeover” giveaways have helped customers revamp their sites with state-of-the-art web tech, and the feedback we’ve gotten from our customers has been overwhelmingly positive.
The .COM Influence and Competitive Pricing
Like many registrars, our growth has also been fueled significantly by the registration and renewal of .COM domains. During the pandemic we saw a 40% surge in .COM registrations. Our competitive pricing for .COM registrations (at just $8.99!) and renewals has led to a very high renewal rate among our domain customers.
Innovative Tools and User Assistance
To further assist our users, we introduced various tools, including an improved suggestion engine for alternate domains and our AI-powered business name generator. We are also simplifying our proprietary account control panel so our customers can manage their domains or add website hosting services much more easily.
Looking Toward the Future
There is, unfortunately, a lot of fraud in the world of online transactions. We’ve been reluctant to offer premium domains in the past – in part – due to the high risk associated with them.
However, our heuristics for catching fraud have never been better, and our usage of AI-powered analytics and other tools will help us connect customers with the best domain names for their business. Our goal is to offer our customers truly tailored solutions.
We plan to offer tools to help our users strengthen their online presence and safeguard them against domainers and other cybersquatters.
As we move into 2024, DreamHost is geared towards integrating premium domains into our overall domain offering and modernizing our platforms, keeping an eye on the future, and continuously evolving to meet our customers’ diverse needs.