.Com prices jump 7% in January.
Time is running out if you want to save money (or not spend more) on your .com and .net domain name renewals.
VeriSign’s price hikes on its wholesale cost for the domains goes into effect January 15. The wholesale cost from VeriSign for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.
That doesn’t include ICANN’s 18 cent tax, which bumps the .com price up to over $8.00.
If you have a portfolio of 5,000 .com domain names then the extra renewal cost will be $2,550.
It won’t give you a heart attack on a bill of nearly $40,000, but it’s much more than you would have paid five years ago before all of these 7% price hikes began.
I just renewed the bulk of my .com and .net domains that expire next year at GoDaddy. As an added bonus, if you use cash accounting and renew before the end of the year then you can deduct your costs from this year’s income.
Price increases in other extensions are also on their way.
Ms Domainer says
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GoDaddy has already raised prices for new regs.
When I logged in today, the price of $14.99 showed (as crossed out) with $12.99 shown as a “sales” price.
So dust those coupons off!
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Tim Pearson says
I too saw Go Daddy price hike, I guess they think they are doing us a favour by putting a “Sale” price 🙂 Yep, get the coupons out!
Top Domain Deal says
This price only means could mean two things:
1: Demand for domains is growing
Or
2: Demand is decreasing
Chris says
In every industry “production of scale” (in this industry increasing domain registrations and decreasing hardware costs) and/or “productivity increases” (in this industry increasing efficiencies and managing more domains with less people) result in price DECREASES! (not INCREASES)
The only economic justification for INCREASES would be rising cost of supplies (domains are a virtual property and have no procurement cost) or rising labor costs (also unlikely in this economy and in light of increasing efficiencies).
The only explanations for Verisign’s price INCREASE are greed and/or monopoly, pure and simple.
I really wish someone would investigate and regulate this industry!
Chris says
Addendum: de facto they are very similar to a utility company (they enjoy a monopoly and they supply a type of infrastructure service), and they should be regulated as such.
Bhavesh says
looks like to increase sales for international or country specific domain names.
Nat Cohen says
Verisign has a captive client base of established .com sites, and benefits from the market awareness that comes from billions of dollars being spent by third party companies that promote their .com websites.
Verisign was granted a perpetual monopoly by ICANN.
ICANN failed to fulfill its responsibility to look after the interests of the Internet community by allowing Verisign to both have a monopoly and to allow it to increase prices in a falling cost environment.
Ironically, when .Net was put out to bid, Verisign dropped its price. This is in spite of the fact that spreading registry costs over a smaller base of registered domains should result in higher costs for each domain registration.
This demonstrates one or both of two points: a) Verisign’s profit margins are enormous on .com registrations, and b) Verisign can use its profits and the infrastructure investments it made to run .com to subsidize its costs of running other registries.