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Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

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Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#121

Post by commoner »

nceqs3 wrote: post #57
ted0 wrote: post #38

Only upvoting this for visibility. This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets. For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in de…

Ted, I've used namecheap for years and I love it. One thing though, when I visit namecheap while using a VPN it makes me fill out a cloudflare captcha. Any way to stop that? Considering I have already paid you money, you have my address, name, phone number, etc. it seems a bit ridiculous to ask for a captcha when visiting using a VPN.

Surprisingly, Cloudflare doesn't force me to complete a CAPTCHA while logging in to manage my domains with them with a third-party VPN enabled. On the other hand, Namecheap doesn't even allow me to log in using that VPN.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#122

Post by Spivak »

ketzu wrote: post #18

So... What would be the fair price? Was $7.85 already outrageous? Should DNS be organized completely differently? Would such a reorganization actually make things cheaper or improve in any other way?

I think people want to see open bids where any company that wants to run a .tld can agree to do it for a given price until (ideally) the $/domain is bid down to near cost.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#123

Post by Spivak »

jaywalk wrote: post #29
res0nat0r wrote: post #5

That's cheap. And I thought Route53 for $12.99 was cheap already.

$12.99 for a .com registration is a hilariously overpriced ripoff.

And yet people pay it routinely every day which is probably why Big V’s probably not afraid of upping the wholesale rate secure that the Amazon and the like are the one’s most likely to eat their own margins to not lose customers due to a consumer facing price hike.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#126

Post by gumby »

trafalgarcircle wrote: post #119
theandrewbailey wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit is reward for taking a risk. Don't like that a .com costs more? Use another TLD.

Verisign did not take a risk by developing the dns system - network solutions did that. Verisign maintains a perfect monopoly over the addition of records to a central database, with minimal operational costs. Their business is almost pure profit by operating a mandatory service with highly inflexible demand. If they were forced to compete on providing access to a core internet infrastructure (e.g. allow competitors…

Network solutions did not develop the DNS either.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#127

Post by commoner »

commoner wrote: post #117
ted0 wrote: post #38

Only upvoting this for visibility. This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets. For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in de…

I migrated all of my domains away from Namecheap after their support told me that my (non-Namecheap) VPN needed to be disabled before I could log in. Namecheap now sells their own VPN service, so there is some conflict of interest in the VPN restriction. Cloudflare does not require me to turn off my third-party VPN before logging in, and sells domains at cost (at lower rates than Namecheap). For example, Cloudflare c…

Correction: Namecheap also adds the $0.18 ICANN fee to the domains, so their .com rates are $9.06 for the first year and $13.16 every year after.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#128

Post by commoner »

ted0 wrote: post #72
qeternity wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loss leader. The markup from legacy registrars is probably excessive, but with Google, Cloudflare, etc getting into the game, they can likely offer wholesale pricing to support the rest of their (very) profitable product lines.

Exactly. Depends how you define legacy registrars but I can agree with you to an extent. Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means — domains on their own are essentially commoditized — it all depends how much you value service and trust. Try calling Google if your domain is hijacked, your account is locked, or you have any number of other issues with a high value domain.

> Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means

$12.98 for a .com domain renewal is a 65% upcharge over the $7.85 wholesale rate. That is considerably more expensive than many of Namecheap's competitors.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#129

Post by utucuro »

zinekeller wrote: post #107
entropyie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, as a general aside to web devs, if we need captchas, can we at least use something less obnoxious and more privacy friendly, like: https://friendlycaptcha.com/ I put this on my signup form and have had zero spam since, and it has very little impact on user experience. The fact that it doesn't feed the google surveillance machine is a bonus.

Cloudflare no longer uses Google's ReCaptcha, it's now using HCaptcha ( https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptch... )

HCaptcha is not without problems, it is monetized by selling ML model training to 3rd parties, where the images and the labelling requests come from. Personally, I do not wish to be employed to train ML models of 3rd parties unknown to me. I have no idea about what model I'm helping train and what it is going to be used for. Transparency in this regard would go a long way towards making HCaptcha friendlier (I'm not going to talk about the ethics of free labor this time, though those too ought to be discussed.)

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#130

Post by qeternity »

ted0 wrote: post #72
qeternity wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loss leader. The markup from legacy registrars is probably excessive, but with Google, Cloudflare, etc getting into the game, they can likely offer wholesale pricing to support the rest of their (very) profitable product lines.

Exactly. Depends how you define legacy registrars but I can agree with you to an extent. Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means — domains on their own are essentially commoditized — it all depends how much you value service and trust. Try calling Google if your domain is hijacked, your account is locked, or you have any number of other issues with a high value domain.

Others will do it cheaper and make it up with cloud, email, etc services. That’s why we’ve moved away from Namecheap (who were my go-to for many years).

If I’m really worried about domain hijacking, locking, etc I’d use something like MarkMonitor.

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