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.
