Is this not a sign that letsencrypt has taken away their golden goose?
Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
221–230 of 352 posts
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
.com is the most desirable TLD by far and also one of the least expensive. .io, .me, .shop, .info, .site are all more, often significantly more. Like everyone else I would love less expensive .com prices but honestly Verisign could 10x the cost of .com and only lose a mild percentage of registrations.
It’s also the most exhausted. The min char available now is in the 7 range. Prefixes and/or suffixes and even hyphens are being used to find land. It’s brutal.
Hence, a x100 price hike on .com would ensure that low-cost domain parking is squeezed out.
It’s not linear. A domain at $2000, which costs the squatter $14 a year, would certainly go down by 75% if it costed the squatter $200 a year. Because the prospect of keeping it for 10 years goes from $140 to $2000, so the seller would make more benefit selling at $500 today than $2500 in 10 years.
A squatter who’s squatting 1000 domain would go from $14k a year to $1m.
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#223$15.88 per .com is pretty steep , damn. Dynadot shows $10.99 per renewal. How legitimate is the Namecheap claim about "its out of our control" part? I have a number of domains with Namecheap, enough to be an annoyance to transfer them all but that number seems excessively high.
It's $5 over a year. If that's a meaningful amount of money you probably have no business owning domain names. Namecheap has always been good for me in terms of service and reliability. I only own a few domains but if $15/year was unaffordable I think I'd just let them expire.
What if you are not a business?
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#224I think this is because of Google Domains going away. They could afford to sell domains pretty cheaply so they were the price setter in the industry. Now that they're going away. I bet everyone is going to start raising prices.
No. They’re contractually allowed to raise prices by 7% for a 4 year period.
2020 = 7.85
2021 = 7.85 x 1.07 = 8.39
2022 = 8.39 x 1.07 = 8.97
2023 = 8.97 x 1.07 = 9.59
2024 = 9.59 x 1.07 = 10.26Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Namecheap should use some of this new revenue to fix their UI. Owning more than 10 domains on Namecheap is a burden. Trying to manage more than 50 is an outright headache [1]. I'm nearly to the point where I'm going to transfer all of my domains just to escape the poor management console. I've been giving them this same complaint for awhile [2]. I'm no fan of Godaddy [3], but they really did a good job with bulk mana…
Have you considered managing DNS records with Terraform or Pulumi? That way you can easily automate (bulk) changes. Edit: this is possible with Namecheap as well, see https://registry.terraform.io/providers/namecheap/namecheap/... .
"Bring your own UI" is the ideal user experience.
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#226Namecheap's current .com renewal price of $14.58 is broken down as: $0.18 ICANN fee $8.97 Verisign's current registry fee $5.43 Namecheap's markup Namecheap's new .com renewal price of $15.88 will be broken down as: $0.18 ICANN fee (no change) $9.59 Verisign's new registry fee (7% increase) $6.11 Namecheap's new markup (13% increase) So the price increase is not entirely "out of [Namecheap's] control". They are also…
Is that just tracking inflation though? What was the date of their last markup increase, and what has inflation been since then?
Presumably their employees need to be paid more to keep with inflation and all.
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Namecheap can hand over their records to another registar before they go out of business or ICANN can step in after the fact and give their domains to another registar to manage. The new registar would likely reach out to introduce themselves.
Additionally there is a good chance that a different registrar would buy it up to acquire the customers and then transfer them to their system, etc.
This happened several years ago with a registrar I had at my domains at called RegisterFly. Upper management fraud and fighting led to the company spiraling, ICANN accreditation getting canceled and the site shutting down. ICANN transferred all ownership over to GoDaddy at the time.
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They should just prohibit selling domain names. So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for. Or something like that... I don't really disagree with you as such, but where there's a will, there's way, and never underestimate the creativity and twattery people will come up with to make a buck. Banning this will be hard, and I'm…
> So Joe Squatter will retain ownership, but permits company.com to use it for 99 years for the same price as he would have sold it for. Then company.com is going to object that they would lose the domain they've had for 99 years or be subject to an extortionate price increase, because they really actually do want to own it. And you can prohibit leasing domain names too. I mean this isn't that hard. You know who thes…
> company.com is going to object that they would lose the domain they've had for 99 years or be subject to an extortionate price increase
Then do a perpetual lease, or 999 year lease, or pay every year, or [...]
How would you enforce a prohibition of leases? Plus, the tricky bit here is there are lots of reasons for a domain owned by entity A to be used by entity B (companies might be related, might just be allowing a friend to use a domain, etc.)
I don't think it's defeatism at all, by my estimation it will do very little or nothing at all, while creating a hassle for everyone. I guess I could be wrong about that, but that's what I'd expect.
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#229Ted from Namecheap here. We have launched a new beta registrar, Spaceship.com, which has wholesale pricing on most extensions. A reminder that wholesale pricing is set by each TLD’s registry, not us.
Would love your feedback on this early version of Spaceship.
Re: Upcoming .com and .xyz domain price increase
#230Namecheap's current .com renewal price of $14.58 is broken down as: $0.18 ICANN fee $8.97 Verisign's current registry fee $5.43 Namecheap's markup Namecheap's new .com renewal price of $15.88 will be broken down as: $0.18 ICANN fee (no change) $9.59 Verisign's new registry fee (7% increase) $6.11 Namecheap's new markup (13% increase) So the price increase is not entirely "out of [Namecheap's] control". They are also…
.com is the most desirable TLD by far and also one of the least expensive. .io, .me, .shop, .info, .site are all more, often significantly more. Like everyone else I would love less expensive .com prices but honestly Verisign could 10x the cost of .com and only lose a mild percentage of registrations.
10x price increase would mean a lot of broken links and significant destruction of value on the web.