I’ve started to receive emails from domain registrars announcing an increase in the price of .com and .net domain names, “based on the VeriSign and Neustar announcements” of price increases in 2012.
The price you pay for .com and .net domain names depends on the domain registrar you use, but I imagine the increases will generally be across the board. You’ll probably receive an email announcing a pricing change sometime in the next few weeks.
You may consider paying for additional years of registration for domain names you plan to keep for a while, and you may wish to renew soon to expire domain names before the increase takes effect. If you don’t receive a notice of a price increase, you should reach out to the support department at your preferred registrar to ask, or ask an account representative.
I received an email from ENOM CENTRAL, saying $49.00 – but it didn’t specify any extension. Just the number $49.00.
Can this possibly be .COM ? That would f*cking insane, I assumed the email was spam or related to something else
@ mrg
You should reply and ask for clarification.
If the above mentioned $49 is going to be true for either .com or .net, things are going to be pretty difficult for new players. Perhaps the other domain names might become popular? What if domain names are not going to expire soon – Can one still renew them for 3-4 years at the current price, now?
@ Raj
What one domain registrar charges doesn’t have much to do with what others will charge.
Yes. That’s what some people do whenever there’s an upcoming price increase.
From Enom’s letter:
“As with previous VeriSign price increases, eNomCentral must adjust our pricing such that we can absorb the increased costs for reselling VeriSign’s TLDs.
Effective January 14, 2012 the new customer pricing will be:
New Tier Price: $39.95”
Is eNom actually trying to lose business? Major players including GoDaddy are now reversing the course that made them profitable and famous. Thus creating an exodus to registrars like Name.com where pricing is reasonable.
I have a GoDaddy reseller account so my pricing remains good through that channel, but the homepage GoDaddy prices are obviously designed for the single domain owner who does not mind paying $25/year for renewal.
There’s a discussion about that in WebHostingTalk. I think that email was meant for eNom’s “retail” customers because some resellers got a similar email but with much lower pricing.
@ Dave
I am not sure on who or pricing. since it was a Verisign decision, I assume most registrars will raise prices.
Dynadot.com where most of our domains are now just sent an email that dot com prices will be increasing from $7.99 to $8.50 for the super bulk pricing we are at. Not a big increase, but for those like us with 1,000 domains, it adds up to another $510 a year.
If anyone can find the supporting documentation that confirms Verysad is really incurring costs that warrant an increase that large, I would like to see them.
Is there any oversight? Oh, that’s right, it’s the Internet…..
@ Chris
Verisign announced it in July: https://investor.verisign.com/releaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=591560
There was oversight once, until our clueless, corrupt congressmen decided to open up domain registration to the Free Market were anyone can charge anything they wanted. *That* was a good idea. Now every TV network has a domain name registered in Tuvalu.