Thanks to their last price increase I looked in to the previously not available .com and .fr for my side project and got them both for less than the .io I was using.
Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
131–140 of 309 posts
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#132FYI Cloudflare currently charges $30 per year for .io domains.
Chances are they'll have to follow this price increase, at least, if they don't want to start actively losing money on each domain purchase.
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#133The .io TLD is owned by Ethos Capital. The same private equity company that tried to buy the .org TLD a while ago. Go figure...
According to their website, they do not own .io https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio...
IANA has it as Internet Computer Bureau Ltd [0], which was bought by Afilias in 2017 [1] and is operated as a subsidiary, and Afilias itself was bought by Donuts in 2020 [2], and Ethos Capital acquired a controlling interest in Donuts in 2021 [3].
So it's accurate to say that ICB (inasmuch as it exists) operates .io, as a subsidiary of Afilias, a Donuts company, controlled by Ethos Capital.
Simple!
[0] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/io.html
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Computer_Bureau
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#134The .io TLD is owned by Ethos Capital. The same private equity company that tried to buy the .org TLD a while ago. Go figure...
Ethos Capital has a mortgage operation. My experience with them lead me to the conclusion that their name does not imply "ethical".
The sunnier the name, the darker the reality.
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#135How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? At first glance I was happy to see the headline because it means it’ll be more expensive for squatters to profit, but then I do sympathize with people using these domains for legitimate non-commercial purposes.
For .io specifically, there are practically no legitimate non-commercial purposes since almost nobody lives in the British Indian Ocean Territories. Anybody with a .io domain is using it for branding rather than the original purpose of two-letter TLDs.
It's like renting a space on a fashionable commercial street — if rent goes up, there's not much point complaining.
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#136I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters. When even the lowest price for a domain you're squating on is 2k you can sit and pay 50 a year for 50+ years and still come out on top. Kinda sucks since I have some .io domains and I could only renew them as far as 2025.
> I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters That does not make any sense in any world. If a squatter successfully makes money on a single domain, for example, they can reinvest on dozens or hundreds of domains next and therefore squat as much as they like just the same. And early, lucky squatters always exist. This does not solve anything. You are just pricing out people with legitimat…
It makes sense in this world, you just dislike it.
I can buy a domain that costs $50 a year and I can squat on that 40 years until I would be in the loss margin for a $2,000 resell value and $2,000 is minor money for resell values. You make it $200 and then it's only 10-years, 10-years is a long time but not that long if you look at how long some people have been squating on domains. You increase the risk of not making a profit.
This talk of outpricing people, people are buying domains for thousands for their pet projects, so let's remain in the world of here and now.
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#137I like how the .nl tld in the Netherlands is managed by the non-profit SIDN [0]. They are dedicated to an open internet, and they make sure that I can very easily move my domain between (hosting) providers for example (and indeed it was easy to transfer from transip to vimexx for me). They are truly independent. It's how it should be if you ask me. When I read about the .org issues and now .io, I'm happy with my .nl…
> and they make sure that I can very easily move my domain between (hosting) providers Is it so easy that I could "do it for you"?
Hehe, no, at least, not without my credentials (and I turn on 2fa everywhere). You need a key from one provider and provide it to the next, for example Transip (one of the biggest Dutch providers) has the procedure to import a domain outlined here: [0]. To move away from Transip do this: [1]. I bet it's similar for other tlds, not? I have no experience with others. I went through this, no downtime, no issues, DNS was propagated on the same evening I initiated the transfer.
[0]: https://www.transip.eu/knowledgebase/entry/24-transfering-yo...
[1]: https://www.transip.co.uk/knowledgebase/entry/28-how-transfe...
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#138FYI Cloudflare currently charges $30 per year for .io domains.
Probably only for first year. Most TLDs are discounted significantly for the first year to get you in the door, then when you've built your business on the domain they hit you with the real fee when the renewal rolls around.
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought is to require all domains be sold for the same set price (or at least constant for each TLD). If someone wants to register 1,000 domains let them, but don't allow them to profit off that. If someone breaks the rule, revoke the domain. I'd like to hear reasons why this is a bad idea so I can stop thinking about it every time I get priced out.
What’s the next step? Communism for the Internet?
Communism is embedded in the core Internet protocols. And "we've" been doing our best to build a capitalist system on top of it ever since. :)
Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)
#140I used to work for a registrar and had the job of connecting up to the registries, who are the entities that ultimately allocate the domain names. (Yeah great naming choice, no chance of those words being confused with each other.) Registrars talk to registries via EPP, an xml based specification. While there is a spec, the registries variously mess it up in odd and interesting ways, all of which I got to discover as we did these integrations. .io was by far the worst. I remember that you could renew domain names in units of either 1, 2, or 5 years. It was like a developer had done the dynamic programming problem with coins and decided that they would put that in their api.
Considering that .io seems to have been adopted as a signal of "geeky tech cred", I always laugh, and think really it stands for .ironic.