OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
NameSilo, one of the fastest growing and most popular domain registrars in the world, jumped on to the Bitcoin bandwagon. It announced that it was offering Bitcoin as a new method of payment on its website. The move makes NameSilo the latest established business to accept payment via the digital currency, and one of the first major domain registrars to do so.
NameSilo (http://www.namesilo.com), which has seen its number of domains under management explode by over 110% in the last year, still offers more standard forms of payment including credit/debit cards, PayPal and wire transfers. However, accepting Bitcoin will open their doors to new customers who have already embraced the digital currency.
“It is important to us to respond to the requests of our customers,” said Michael Goldfarb, co-founder of NameSilo. “Our customers made it clear to us that they desired more flexibility concerning how they pay for their domain services, and Bitcoin was referenced in many of those requests.”
NameSilo is accredited by ICANN and currently has over 30,000 customers from 177 different countries making payment flexibility critically important. Bitcoin has no central authority and is available to anyone. Within minutes of offering Bitcoin, the first Bitcoin transaction occurred on NameSilo.
“Bitcoin’s track record for offering universally secure and flexible payments really got our attention,” said Michael McCallister, another one of NameSilo’s co-founders. “It is frustrating for us as a company to tell certain customers that we cannot offer services to them due to payment option limitations they may experience, due to where they reside or personal preference. Accepting Bitcoin will allow us to make domain registration available to many people who previously were unable to get a domain.”
NameSilo announced a few days earlier that it also began accepting Google Wallet payments. Google Wallet is currently available in 161 countries.
NameSilo has grown by offering a different type of experience from that typically associated with industry heavyweights including clear pricing touted as the lowest total cost of ownership available, no up-selling, easy ordering, completely free add-ons such as WHOIS privacy, excellent personal customer service and free security options such as Domain Defender and 2-factor authentication. Much of NameSilo’s growth has come at the expense of its competitors with customers transferring many more domains, by a factor of 8:1, to NameSilo than go the other direction (http://www.namesilo.com/transfer_compare.php).
Offering Bitcoin is another step toward NameSilo’s goal of offering the best in domain registration and management options to the greatest number of people.
