Domain pricing is always an emotive subject.
In recent discussions among Nominet members it came up as part of a discussion on drop-catching and domaining. Some people feel that the fees are too high, while others feel that they need to be increased significantly in order to discourage domainers.
Within the Irish internet community the upcoming change to policy regarding “personal domain names” has led to some discussion on how registrars set their pricing.
While at an ICANN level there’s been a lot of mixed messages flying about.
For anyone interested in domains at any level it can all get a bit confusing.
So what exactly is going on?
ICANN announced a drop in their fees a few months ago. Several of the larger ICANN registrars passed on the savings directly to their clients, with some of them even refunding people.
Of course registrars can be a fickle bunch, so you may not always get the full picture.
Do the registrars pass on savings to their clients all the time?
In short – no.
Do registrars pass on costs to their client?
A lot of the time – yes.
So what costs are affecting registrars?
Both Verisign and Afflilias are upping their fees as of October 15
And some of the registrars will have to pass on those increases to their clients since their pricing has always been set with such a narrow margin.
Enom, for example, has already announced a 50 cent increase for all their resellers for com / net / org / info / biz / name and .us.
But what about .mobi?
From what I have been able to gather a lot of the registrars have been treating .mobi as some sort of “premium” domain name since its launch last year.
What does that mean?
Basically we’ve all been charged extra for the “honour” of registering the domains.
DotMobi domains are not manually checked, as is the case with say .ie domains, so there’s no reason for charging a premium on them unless you want to do so as a marketing ploy.
Dotmobi, it transpires, are currently offering registrars promotional pricing on .mobi domains, but a lot of registrants will never see the full benefit of the pricing promotion as the registrars will be pocketing the profit.
If your registrar isn’t offering any discount at present on dotmobi domains, then maybe you should ask them why….
