COM/NET/BIZ rate hike

With the .COM, .NET & .BIZ Registry Price Hike around the corner, we strongly advise you to Renew your Domain name(s) before the updated pricing comes into effect.

We have not yet increased the pricing within our system thereby giving you adequate time to renew your Domains. The price rate hike is expected to be 50 cents per domain per year. 

The new COM/NET Registration, Renewal and Transfer-In rates will be made live on January 14th, 2011.

Scheduled maintenance: .COM/.NET registrations, renewals, transfers and management

Due to the scheduled maintenance at the .COM/.NET Registry, the .COM/.NET Production environment would be undergoing a planned downtime for maintenance, as per the following schedule:

Maintenance Window:

Date: August 29, 2010

Time: 01:00 AM - 01:45 AM GMT

Duration: 45 minutes

Affected Systems - Domain Name Registrations, Renewals, Transfers, Management on the Live interface.

This outage shall have no impact on your domain names, which will continue to work properly. Please feel free to get in touch with our Support team, in case of any queries/doubts.

The "howdoyou.com" spam

Image by pvera via FlickrEarlier today our domain name wholesaler sent out an email as if it was sent from us, inviting you to participate in a contest. This email was sent out less than an hour after we were told about it, which is completely inadequate in terms of advance notice so we could opt out our customers. Needless to say, I have protested this action in the strongest terms.
I believe that the mass mailings functionality in the domain control panels are a useful means to disseminate information that is relevant to you, our customers, like for example to let you know that we switched phones, that there is a price increase coming or that somebody is sending out scam renewal letters through snail mail. Sending out this kind of third party invite was and is completely unacceptable.

Domains Price List Update

Well, the price jump is here!

The affected TLDs are .COM and .NET, the new registration price for these is $10.39/year. Transfers are still $9.89/year. As usual, all prices posted are the actual charge, there are NO hidden fees of any kind.

Verisign-imposed price increases are less than one month away

Domains Price List

We are down to the final stretch before Verisign raises their wholesale price, which means everyone is going to have to raise their domain prices. During this last month we have managed to secure a special deal for renewals only, for .com and .net domains. These renewals are priced so the cost drops with the number of years renewed: for example renewing a .com domain for a year is $9.89, renewing it for 10 years is $9.59 per year. The full price list can be found here.

As always, we insist on displaying a simple fee for the domains, instead of hiding certain fees like GoDaddy advertises their .com price as $10.69 but it is actually $10.87. The only reason they do this is so whenever you do a price comparison they rank higher. We charge you $9.89, that’s the flat price, you are not charged one penny more.

Verisign raises prices again

Link: Verisign raises prices again

The biggest (legal, privately owned) money printing operation in the world just raised their prices again, effective July 1st.

A domain name is nothing more than a small database record, just a few kb of space. For the privilege of controlling one of such little bits of text, Verisign owns, as a monopoly, the rights to ALL .com and .net domains in the world. They allow resellers to provide this service too, at a wholesale price that is 99.99% profit to Verisign.

Basically, they don’t do a fucking thing, yet they get to rake it in.

Smart wholesalers know this is a volume game: the winners are going to be the ones that manage to get the most registrations done, which means selling super cheap. This is why GoDaddy displays a sale price that is UNDER what it costs them to register the domain, because those few cents of difference is what makes sure that they are always listed on the top 5 for raw price.

With this new price raise from Verisign, they will keep advertising the same price, yet charge a little more for the Verisign/ICANN whatever fee. We won’t do that, we have always strived to advertise a flat price to the customer, the fee is our problem, not yours.

I don’t have final word from my wholesalers as to our new wholesale price, but they have preempted this mess by giving us a very generous discount on first year registrations.

New domains are going to be $7.14 for the first year, between March 8 and March 31 2010. This is $2.75 cheaper than our regular price of $9.89 per domain. Please keep in mind that this discounted price is only for the first year for new domains. There is no limit on how many domains are purchased.

Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Court Rules WHOIS Privacy Illegal For Spammers

Link: Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Court Rules WHOIS Privacy Illegal For Spammers

We have had WHOIS privacy as an opt-in service since it became available. Why? Because it is an effective speed bump against automated harvesting of personal information for spamming purposes. This speed bump is also very effective against the assholes that harvest our WHOIS information from our customers, then send them domain renewal letters to try to con them into switching over to a new domain that charges a hell of a lot more than we do, and without any value added.

If you are a spammer trying to hide behind WHOIS privacy, you are wasting your time because the second that we get a spam complaint, the registrar will immediately suspend the domain.