NameSilo is the budget registrar that's been quietly running near-cost domain pricing for over a decade. The UI looks like 2012; the prices look like cost-plus-a-dollar; the API works. For a portfolio of personal domains, it's the cheapest sane option after Cloudflare.
The registrar industry has two natural pricing equilibria. One is "we make money on upsells, so the domain is a loss leader" — that's GoDaddy and most consumer-facing registrars. The other is "we make money by being efficient on the domain itself, so the price is low and we charge for nothing else" — Cloudflare, Porkbun, and NameSilo all live there. The difference between the three on price is small in absolute terms; the difference in UI polish is enormous.
NameSilo has the worst UI of the three. It looks like a registrar from 2010, because that's roughly when it was built and they have not aggressively redesigned. What they have is functional: every record type, free WHOIS privacy, free email forwarding, a usable API, decent uptime, sane support. The UI charm is missing; the underlying registrar is fine.
For developers who don't care about how the dashboard looks and who manage domains rarely (point DNS once, leave alone for a year), NameSilo is reasonable. For developers who care about a clean interface or who'll spend time in the registrar UI, Porkbun is better for ~$1/year more.
Search at namesilo.com. The price shown is what you pay every year — no first-year discount tricks. .com sits around $9.50, which is genuinely close to wholesale.
Bulk discounts kick in at portfolio sizes: hold 50+ domains at NameSilo and renewal prices drop a few cents per domain. Not life-changing, but real if you're managing a large portfolio (an investor, a brand-protection use case, etc.).
Add to cart. The cart page is dense — every option visible at once rather than progressively disclosed. WHOIS privacy is pre-selected (free); email forwarding is pre-selected (free); auto-renew is on by default. The optional add-ons exist (premium DNS, certain TLD-specific things) but aren't aggressive about themselves.
Pay, confirm. The domain is registered immediately. There's no animated success page; there's a text confirmation and a list of your domains.
Click into the domain, then DNS management. The form is utilitarian: type, hostname, value, TTL. Add a record by filling in the fields and clicking submit. Edit by clicking the record, modifying, submitting.
It does everything you need (A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV, CAA). It's not enjoyable to use compared to Cloudflare or Porkbun, but for occasional changes it's fine.
NameSilo's API is older than Porkbun's or Cloudflare's — XML-based, GET-parameter-heavy, documentation that feels generated. But it works. Endpoints exist for: listing domains, registering, renewing, managing DNS records, managing nameservers, managing privacy.
Terraform providers exist (community-maintained). For automation use cases, the API is functional but not the most pleasant. If API ergonomics matter, look at Porkbun, Cloudflare, or Gandi — they all have JSON-based modern APIs.
Transferring into NameSilo: unlock the domain at your current registrar, get an auth code, start the transfer at NameSilo. The transfer year is at NameSilo's flat price — usually saves $5–10 per domain coming from GoDaddy or Namecheap.
Transferring out: same flow in reverse. NameSilo doesn't make this hard, which (sadly) is worth calling out — some registrars do.