The bottom just fell out of the domain registration market
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005
A few years ago we paid $70 to register a domain. Then the likes of Doster and GoDaddy came around, offering domains for under $15. 1&1 offers them for $5.99, which means they actually lose a penny on .com registrations.
Now you can register a domain for $2.95 with no strings attached. This isn’t like the GoDaddy offer that requires you to buy another service. After the first year the price increases to $8.25. That’s not bad, but if you want you can just transfer it to another registrar.
IPOWER is offering this deal. I checked out their domain registration terms and it appears they are using Tucows domain system. I’m not sure how easy it is to manage domains with them, but this offer could result in massive registrations.
UPDATE: I registered 4 domains with IPOWER on Wednesday. They are all managed through Tucows’ OpenSRS. Unfortunately you can’t change your domains DNS servers through OpenSRS if the domains are locked. You must contact IPOWER to unlock the domains, then you can change the nameservers. If you want to lock the domains again you must contact IPOWER again 
UPDATE 2: Just got an email from someone who registered 50 domains with IPOWER. OpenSRS generates an entirely new login for each domain. There’s no central management. So here’s the deal. Is it worth saving $5 per domain to have to email support to unlock domains, and have to manage a different account for each domain? If it makes you feel better, IPOWER loses $3.30 in hard costs on each registration.
Further Reading:
[...] 55,000. Here are the most visited posts in November: VideosGratis.com sells for $66,204 The bottom just fell out of the domain registration [...]
[...] IPOWER adds free Whois Privacy
Last month IPOWER sent a ripple through the domain name market by offering $2 [...]