Alibaba Group

Alibaba Group runs a substantial domain registration business alongside its e-commerce platforms. It came out of a single acquisition and now sits inside the company's cloud computing operation.

The move into domains dates to 2009, when Alibaba acquired HiChina, at the time China's largest domain registration service and web hosting company. HiChina was folded into what would become Alibaba Cloud rather than run as a side business, turning a regional registrar into part of a global cloud infrastructure platform.

Registration at Alibaba is tied to the rest of the stack. It is built for businesses already operating inside the Alibaba ecosystem: sellers on Alibaba.com, developers on Alibaba Cloud services, and companies building a digital presence on the same technology stack.

The registrar of record is Alibaba Cloud Computing (Beijing) Co., Ltd., ICANN-accredited with IANA ID 420. It manages over 7.2 million domains according to the DNS Checker dataset, a 2.81% share of the global domain registration market. Brands include alibaba-cloud-dns and alibaba-cloud-hichina, carrying forward the name from the original HiChina acquisition.

Headquarters are in Hangzhou, China, and the company employs 126,661 people. Its stated mission is "to make it easy to do business anywhere," and the domain registration services support that by helping businesses establish an online presence as part of a complete digital commerce offering.