Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

gandi.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 309 posts

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#211

Post by dgb23 »

jayshua wrote: post #171
maccolgan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is state ownership of the means of production embedded in the core Internet protocols?

Pretty sure that's socialism. Communism is envisioned as a stateless society. Which is kind of what the internet is. There's standards bodies, but they don't really have any enforcement power. And ICANN, one of the few bodies with actual power, (by controlling domain name distribution) leads to problems like in this article.

> Pretty sure that's socialism.

State socialism specifically.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#212

Post by zhte415 »

InsomniacL wrote: post #101
cj wrote: post #15

How 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.

Don't Sell domains, instead sell a licence to use that domain. You cannot sell the licence to somebody else, however if you sell the business/website etc, the domain transfers with it. Sure, there will be a black market, however with the threat of having your domain licence revoked for breaking the licence agreement, I'm sure this will act as a sufficient deterrent. Kind of like an OS licence, I can sell the desktop…

Business: Unincorporated or incorporated? If the latter, just have a shell company and park some lorem ipsum, package some similar domains into the shell. This raises administrative hurdles, cost of enforcing, and makes it relatively easier for professional over a low barriers system. Domain name companies win.

Interest: Who defines an interest, community or other?

Personal?

Website? Domains are used for a lot more than WWW on port 80 or 443.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#213

Post by ted0 »

MerelyMortal wrote: post #204
ted0 wrote: post #186

Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers. It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small am…

Former Namecheap customer here, thank you for the transparancy. (I only left Namecheap because of the interface, I found that Dynadot was comparable in price and features, but with a nicer GUI. NC seems like a good company otherwise, so I'm always open to the possibility of switching back.)

Sorry to hear you had trouble with our interface. We do have some pretty substantial updates planned for 2022 and would love to have you back. Feel free to shoot any feedback to ted [at] namecheap.com.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#214

Post by kmeisthax »

rasengan wrote: post #128
vmoore wrote: post #119

Long time buyer of random domains here. Over the years I've heard reports of people trying to get back their ccTLD because they weren't a citizen of that country and had to fight back-and-forth to reclaim their domain, oftentimes handing ownership of the domain over to a trusted citizen of that country so they can keep their domain. This is why I don't build important stuff on a ccTLD and go for generic ones like .cl…

The issue is you will always be leasing versus owning unless you use Handshake. The same entity of interest, Ethos, owns most of the generic top level domain names since they own Donuts [1]. [1] https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio...

While I like the idea of using blockchain-determined name ownership; there's a few problems. First, you have the problems that you get just because of how blockchains work[0]. But moreso there are specific chicken-and-egg problems with migrating away from standard DNS:

- Because DNS is well-established and everyone uses it, most websites want to be registered in DNS, and blockchain names provide little to no value to them.

- Because blockchain names see little usage, most ISPs see no need to resolve them in addition to or overlapping standard DNS names.

For a blockchain name system to actually succeed, you need buy-in from large network operators. Most network operators, for better or for worse, have just decided to trust ICANN and ICANN alone. At the very least, you would need IANA and ICANN to agree to set certain TLDs aside for competing naming systems so that network operators could be confident that resolving them wouldn't cause security problems.

[0] specifically the whole 'immutability' and 'no central authority' thing legalizes certain kinds of theft

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#215

Post by ted0 »

hutrdvnj wrote: post #203
ted0 wrote: post #186

Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers. It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small am…

Hey Ted, will Namecheap go public anytime soon?

No plans for that. We have never even taken any investment and luckily have been growing substantially over the last few years as a bootstrapped company.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#216

Post by ted0 »

da-bacon wrote: post #140

I 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…

Btw, would you mind sharing what registrar you worked for? No worries if not but it's a small industry!

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#217

Post by dannylandau »

ted0 wrote: post #186

Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers. It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small am…

I use Namecheap to host more than 10 domains and some shared hosting, and found customer support to be awesome! Just wanted to mention it. Wondering if you have a special promo plan for guys like me that depend on Namecheap for all their personal and business domains?

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#218

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Pxtl wrote: post #183
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How 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? The simplest solution would be to revoke domains with domain parking pages on them. If the domain contains an offer to sell the domain, you lose the domain. That wouldn't solve 100% of the problem, but it would solve 80% of the problem, and that's better…

This will only result in more sophisticated parked domain sites. That's what happens to phone numbers - companies buy phone numbers and put whatever trash phone services they can on them just to say "see we're using it for business we've got some pre-recorded phonesex running there".

Do it anyway. It makes their lives harder.

If someone can go to the domain and buy the domain, you lose the domain. It doesn't matter what else is there. If doesn't matter if nothing else is there. What matters is that something isn't: The ability to buy the domain.

That means Joe Schmoe can't go to the domain, put in his credit card number and enrich the scalper. Because if he can, they lose the domain.

If they come up with some convoluted scam to get around it, they'll get less business and scare away buyers who perceive it to be the subterfuge that it is, which is good.

The best thing about it is the low cost to honest people not trying to sell domains for money, who shouldn't be affected at all.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#219

Post by InsomniacL »

zhte415 wrote: post #212
InsomniacL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't Sell domains, instead sell a licence to use that domain. You cannot sell the licence to somebody else, however if you sell the business/website etc, the domain transfers with it. Sure, there will be a black market, however with the threat of having your domain licence revoked for breaking the licence agreement, I'm sure this will act as a sufficient deterrent. Kind of like an OS licence, I can sell the desktop…

Business: Unincorporated or incorporated? If the latter, just have a shell company and park some lorem ipsum, package some similar domains into the shell. This raises administrative hurdles, cost of enforcing, and makes it relatively easier for professional over a low barriers system. Domain name companies win. Interest: Who defines an interest, community or other? Personal? Website? Domains are used for a lot more t…

> business

The logistics of setting up as many shell companies and domains which are squatted seems unreasonable. The onus is on the purchaser not to illegally purchase a domain against the licence agreement or the domain is revoked. Both of these would likely massively reduce the financial incentives domain squatters enjoy.

> personal

They can still licence a domain, but when they're done with it, it returns to the pool of available domains for others to purchase.

> Websites

sure, and websites are the major driving force behind domain squatting though.

Maybe I'm explaining this poorly, and I know I haven't solved the worlds problems in a single post but it's fun to theorise, however if I purchase a software licence, I cannot sell that on. If a business purchases a software licence and that business changes ownership, the licence isn't always void.

Re: Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

#220

Post by beardedman »

ted0 wrote: post #186

Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers. It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small am…

Ted, you guys are awesome. Been a happy customer for the last maybe 7 years. Keep up the good work!
Post reply on HN