11 ms·

Price increase on .io on January 21, 2021

139 points by wilsonfiifi 6y ago

posguy 6y ago
Rent seeking behavior from a fallen empire that violently evicted the native people they called "Tarzans" from the very islands .io is supposed to serve? Tell me it ain't so! History of British Indian Ocean Territories: http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io Anyone building a brand atop a ccTLD with this kind of history is taking a huge risk.
- jjcon 6y ago
  Take your random off topic outrage somewhere else please.
- not_really 6y ago
  I guess "pos" doesn't stand for positive in your case
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    Debate the comment, don’t attack the person.
    - aww_dang 6y ago
      HN isn't the place for a debate about colonialism. I'm not sure there is much 'intellectual curiosity' surrounding any supposed alternatives. Judging the past by the standards of the present isn't a starting point for a discussion.
      - lern_too_spel 6y ago
        The past? This is late 1960s to the present.
        sieabahlpark 6y ago
        Yes, I consider consider something 80 years ago in the past. Hell, we think RAZR phones are relics of the past.
        Stratoscope 6y ago
        One might argue that the "late 1960s to the present" does constitute at least part of the past. Even if we only go back to my childhood in the 1960s, standards and mores were quite different back then.
      - Razengan 6y ago
        Yet when other countries are brought up HN's Western userbase appears eager to dig up 100 year old atrocities to judge their present populace by.
        aww_dang 6y ago
        Agree that those discussions are a waste. Hope that HN isn't striving for equivalence or equality in illogical assertions along an east/west dichotomy.
      - dsohn0 6y ago
        Who the hell are you to gatekeep what people want to talk about
        aww_dang 6y ago
        I'm suggesting the quality won't be worthwhile, the premises are flawed and the descent into flames will be predictable. Please don't consider this as gate-keeping. Merry Christmas.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > I guess "pos" doesn't stand for positive in your case Gen Z: It's not his job to entertain or validate you. Got it? You will do better in life if you take that to heart.
- mahkoh 6y ago
  BITO was uninhabited before it was settled by Europeans. It doesn't have "native people" according to Wikipedia. Unlike .us/au/ca etc. Are those tlds controlled by their native people?
  - robinoh 6y ago
    > On 22 May 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution [...] demanding that the United Kingdom unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from the area within six months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians#2018_ICJ_hearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians#2...
    - zzanak 6y ago
      Any reason to downvote? PS I think it could a good idea to require some reason when downvoting, otherwise sometimes the context for doing that is completely unclear.
      - forgotmypw17 6y ago
        Many communities have adopted the downvote reason functionality, as well as upvote reason.
  - 3131s 6y ago
    > BITO was uninhabited before it was settled by Europeans. This is completely wrong. BIOT includes these islands where the native people were forcibly removed and the story is terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians It's not like this hasn't been discussed many times on HN before. I own a .io but come on!
    - makomk 6y ago
      The Chagossians aren't a counter-example to that at all - they were moved to the islands by European colonialists as a slave labour force, which as I understand it were uninhabited before.
- bzb6 6y ago
  Might is right. Also I don’t see the risk, as I see the British as much more dependable than the “tarzans”.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
I always find it strange seeing security companies and other high risk industries using io. It's been hijacked multiple times before from shoddy practices. Are you really willing to trust the Internet Computer Bureau once more with every single service under your domain? I guess the desire to look cool outweighs the prime objective and if it goes pearshaped you can always blame someone else for a choice your company made. Even more strange is how companies with outspoken social justice execs and employees happily fork out thousands a year to tld that has incredibly bad optics, the amount of mental gymnastics these people must perform to justify needing these particular two letters above all else is surely remarkable.
systemvoltage 6y ago
What's stopping a gTLD owner, .foo to get a bunch of customers onboard with $1.99/year deal and then 5 years later, increase that to $49.99/year? Surely, people who've built businesses on top of their .foo domains will fork up. Any laws preventing this?
- techsupporter 6y ago
  > What's stopping a gTLD owner... Nothing, absent a provision in the registration contract to the contrary, except the risk of everyone fleeing. > Any laws preventing this? No. Remember that [ccTLD - I originally wrote gTLD but those are a different thing, as corrected below] are assigned to the countries that they represent (or, in this case, the country that holds sovereignty over the named territory) so subject to their jurisdiction and there’s no real motivation for a country to pass such a law.
  - axaxs 6y ago
    Minor correction...that's ccTLD, which .io is. And you're right about the rest. But gTLDs are basically every other TLD that's not a country code.
    - AndyMcConachie 6y ago
      There are also sponsored TLDs(.edu, .gov), generic restricted(.biz), and the single infrastructure TLD .arpa. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- axaxs 6y ago
  At least for the old TLDs, the ICANN contract specified the max it could be raised each year. I want to say it was 10 or 15 percent anually. Not sure about the new gTLDs but I'd imagine they have similar provisions.
helsinki 6y ago
How is a $4.18 price increase worthy of millions of HN readers’ attention on Christmas? This post is currently #3 on the homepage. Hm, times are tough, people are losing it.
- echelon 6y ago
  Because this indicative of the direction things are heading. The prices of many TLDs are inching upwards. It's not just gTLDs doing it, but also the ccTLDs. The .org takeover attempt was recent. We've had bad .com leadership with Verisign. Domain registrars themselves can be pretty scummy. In an effort to outperform the squatters, many gTLDs are pre-allocating "premium domains" and charging $500, $2500/yr for them. There's lots of greed in domain names. Or opportunity. Depends upon what your perspective is.
  - harikb 6y ago
    Google charging higher for shorter domains or hey.com charging higher for shorter email handles is still way better than having to buy it from a squatter or lost-for-ever to a squatter who is unwilling to sell
    - abhinav22 6y ago
      Agreed - as long as Google doesn’t become the squatter themselves and charge exorbitant prices. I got my dream domain because I paid a premium for it to Google. I have to pay the premium every year, which I am fine with unless it increases too much, but I can imagine squatters said no to it because it’s hard to make a profit when you have shell out so much each year for the domain (whereas with .com it is just the starting price + nominal reg fees each year).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rualca 6y ago
  > How is a $4.18 price increase worthy of millions of HN readers’ attention on Christmas? Because, personally, I was already bit in the ass by these price hikes from a gTLD. I started a personal website with a gTLD (.site) that I registered for about $1, and when it was close to expire suddenly the registrar demanded about $30 for it. I decided to jump ship to another gTLD and let the old one expire, to not support this kind of extorsion. Since then I've been monitoring the state of the old domain name. Oddly enough my old domain name was parked as a premium domain, being on the market for close to $22, while other domain names from the same gTLD are sold for about $1.55. In my opinion these gTLDs have been managed through extortion tactics, and I welcome any chance of discussing the subject.
abhinav22 6y ago
I am the owner of a premium gTLD (.dev), which I pay $1,000 per year for. Google runs .dev. I read the contract carefully, there is nothing preventing Google from increasing the price to 10,000 or 100,0000. It’s my biggest fear. My only hope is that Google wouldn’t do it from a PR perspective, which I think is a safe and fair assumption. The real worry is they sell the rights to .dev to GoDaddy or somebody else, because then I am screwed. Google is one of the best things to happen to domain registrations. I highly recommend them. Even though I’m contractually exposed, to date, Google have been conducting themselves very well in the domain registration market. One of the great things about .com is that there is a contractual cap on price increases. However the domain I bought would cost in the 10s of millions if it was a .com; so at 1,000 per year, it’s a good deal for the .dev version as long as they don’t significantly increase it (I’m okay with 10% per year increases).
- Semaphor 6y ago
  > In a sea of unscrupulous players (who track what names you search and grab them before you do in case they are any good) Not really… There are many reputable ones. Gandi, namecheap and cloudflare are ones I can immediately think of. It’s just that some shady ones like GoDaddy do a lot of marketing.
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Fair point. A lot of the dodgy stuff happens in the secondary market, which biased my original note, I’ll edit it if I can
  - 52-6F-62 6y ago
    I’ve been with Namecheap for years and they’ve been great. No complaints.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    Gandi has started locking some TLDs away behind a 'corporate membership' subscription at €60 per month.
- ship_it 6y ago
_huayra_ 6y ago
Are there any "safe" gTLDs, i.e. those that are either unlikely or contractually obligated to not rent seek in a few years time? I've been using the 'casa' gTLD (the only others I see that are relatively bargain bin are 'link', 'site', and maybe 'click'). I don't need a brand. I just need to type something in that's not the IP address of my VPS...
- dheera 6y ago
  If you don't care about brand why do you want a gTLD? Just get somethingreallyobscure.com. It will stay cheap.
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    Good point. The gTLDs I listed are typically cheaper than .com registrations when I look on namecheap, but the governance of the original TLDs is definitely more regulated, except for that damn .org hijack attempt :( However, if I want to have {my last name}.tld, is there any gTLD that would be unlikely to jack up the price? I actually have {my last name}.casa for this reason. Unfortunately {my last name}.{com,org,net} were all registered when I was in diapers. I'm assuming that the land of gTLDs is the wild west of potential price shenanigans, but I'm wondering if I'm wrong.
    - gravitas 6y ago
      A .com will cost < $100 for 10 years at most registrars and as you've noted, this is for personal use (not company branding, e.g.) so the name is not that important. I'll posit that most folks know how bad the name squatting business is around the internet and nobody really thinks hard about somethingreallyobscure.com so long as it's not confrontational in some way (religion, politics, swearing, etc.). But I will say "anything ending in .com has more implicit trust" - I'm always mentally questioning if any link from one of the new gTLDs is just a spammer/ne'er do well. Been here, done what you're doing, there's a .com out there with a fun and interesting name which somehow resonates with your personality. Think long term - avoid trademark/copyright branded words in the name, avoid being too narrow in case your hobby changes, easy to type and spend some time really thinking about plurality - I've discarded a lot of ideas simply because it would lead to other people going "was that with or without an (s) on the end?" - same with double-letters in the middle, just avoid them. I try and focus on 5-6 syllables max which break on natural language barriers (English).
ksec 6y ago
On the subject of gTLD, ( I ask this every time when I get the chance ) What happened to .web ? Verisign CEO said in their last investor conference that it will be coming soon but then all record of that was deleted from the web.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Lawsuits.
- ksec 6y ago
  I find the answer myself [1], searching for ".Web" online is very hard as even google doesn't really take "." into account when searching. I had to go and read the Verisign Q3 investor notes and find a link mentioning it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25545130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25545130
diebeforei485 6y ago
It's quite crazy how expensive the .io and .ai domains are, versus .com and .net and other vanilla domains.
- zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
  With Everyday High Prices, these TLDs make “domain investing” uneconomical. This way, premium domain revenue is captured by the registrar and not a third-party speculator.
sdwolfz 6y ago
Got an alert from namecheap saying my `.pro` domain renewal will cost 16.98$ starting Jan 5, also price increases for 15 other that I don't really care about. My first thought was, I should pre-pay for the next 9 years now to lock it in cheap... then I looked at the price I pay now, 15.88$ and I paid about 4$ initial registration. Honestly there's no rush, it's a minor price increase, and I expect things to get more expensive as time flies anyway, that's what happens to literraly every subscription I pay (rent, watter, energy, council tax, internet, phone, email are all "subscriptions" I pay and all of them have increased in price, and will undoubtedly increase again). Not that there's anything you can do about it, it's the "cost of doing business". I'll have to consider what's the lifetime of this domain, should I pay now, or am I going to throw it away in a few years/months for something else. I'll probably keep it as it's a good one, and I'll put an alarm for the 4th so I have enough time to think this through. The `.io` price increase looks a bit bigger relatively speaking, but nothing earth shattering... so try following the same logic as I detailed above. Now the question: how often do these increase?
- chrisandchris 6y ago
  It‘s a minor increase for you, but a business is making 3 times more money for not providing more to you than before.
- metaphor 6y ago
  > Now the question: how often do these increase? With respect to .io renewal on Gandi.net based on personal records: US$35.00/yr through 2018 US$38.00/yr (+8.6%) into 2019 US$42.18/yr (+11%) into 2021 If I recall correctly, .io renewal was limited to something like 1- or 2-year intervals not too long ago; this appears to have changed, but I'm unsure when that happened.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Can somebody fill me in on the security status of the .io registrar now? In 2017, a Google security researcher took over the registrar, meaning he could update the zone files externally. It was best practice to stop using .io at the time. I heard a rumor that a more professional registrar got involved after that, but don't know the details. Anybody know the story today?
j1elo 6y ago
Offtopic but related question: is there any TLD for which a first-level wildcard is allowed in SSL certs? (I mean "* .tld" instead of second-level such as "* .foo.tld"). TLDR; I feel like there should be a special dev-only TLD for certs that go on example code, which skipped all the certificate management limitations. Suggestions are welcome! It is so cumbersome to provide WebRTC sample apps and tutorials that can be universally run for testing purposes. WebRTC requires HTTPS, and thankfully an untrusted self-signed cert will do for Firefox and Chrome (they will show a warning page that the user can accept); iOS further requires that the certificate is trusted (so no warning page is shown and the load silently hangs on an infinite reload loop, which is nasty if you ask me; to avoid this, you can manually install custom Root CAs to the device). So, my WebRTC tutorials and demos need to include a self-signed cert that allows users to deploy in their LAN and do a quick test [0]. Browsers tend to accept "localhost" as a safe origin, but what happens with testing on LAN? I feel there should be some convention there, it's not very helpful to test a WebRTC application just on localhost. To not assume any given LAN subnet, I create my self-signed certs for these domains [1]: 127.0.0.1 ::1 localhost *.test.local That way, users can create a quick DNS redirection from some .test.local domain to their server (e.g. using avahi-publish command), install the root cert in iOS, and test from an Apple device. But I'd love if it was possible to just define a first level wildcard: *.test *.local or similar. Actually the .local domain would be perfect! Thanks to mDNS, when available, all hostnames automatically get their <hostname>.local address, which would be great for an easier than ever setup. Alas, MacOS seems to reject first-level wildcards. To add to the problem, these demo self-signed certs were created for 10 years, which is fine because I want to drop then on the Git repo and forget about them. But now the maximum allowed longevity for newly created certs is enforced to be a measly 398 days. Why does all this need to be so needlessly complicated? I guess people will tell me to put in place a cert-renewal scheme, using some CI for all repos that contain demo code or tutorials, but that's highly undesired... There are even people suggesting that certs should live for just days or hours, I guess they are not thinking on this simple use case, for which I don't know if there is an escape hatch. As mentioned in the TLDR; suggestions are welcome! [0]: https://github.com/Kurento/mediasoup-demos https://github.com/Kurento/mediasoup-demos [1]: https://doc-kurento.readthedocs.io/en/latest/features/security.html#generating-a-self-signed-certificate https://doc-kurento.readthedocs.io/en/latest/features/securi...
mysterydip 6y ago
I was looking at getting a short gTLD for a website I'm starting, but I'm wondering how well they're supported (meaning will DNS resolve, can people send me email, will I get rejected for using the address for account creation on sites, etc). The com/net/org/etc and ccTLD's I know are almost universally supported, but if I had example.whatever, how likely am I to run into issues?
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  I use .tf Apart from a few sites like ticketmaster (not resolved) and discord (now resolved) not recognizing the TD I've had no major issues. Your email reputation will likely be lower rated and likely be thrown in spam with major providers(Microsoft/Google) but that may also be because I am hosting my own email server.
bob1029 6y ago
I don't mind the price increases if it helps to deter squatters (i.e. GoDaddy). It was hell trying to find a reasonable domain for our new company (i.e. one that we would like to have in our email addresses forever). Only 5-10% of the domains we attempted were legitimately in use by some other business or individual. Everything else is a fucking godaddy parking page offering their domain realtor scam experience.
- jjice 6y ago
  A domain I'd pay upwards of $300 to buy is behind a GoDaddy parked page, and I'd have to pay $70 just to message the owner to begin negotiating. The chances that person would be unreasonable is pretty damn high too, so I haven't been able to justify it. Edit: Looks like it's $120 to pay for a "broker" now to contact the owner and then a 20% commission on top.
  - sfusato 6y ago
    Do a whois query and email the owner directly. For low amount offers going through a broker is definitely the wrong approach in my opinion. GoDaddy has a free monitoring service [1] where you add the domain(s) you are interested in and it will email you each time that domain WHOIS data is updated. This is very useful to get notified when a domain name is about to expire and then get deleted (redemptionPeriod, pendingDelete). Over a 5+ year time period, quite a few domain names I was monitoring were eventually dropped by their previous owners. These weren't highly sought after, but your local insignificant city .com, some rather unique first/last name...these type of domain names. [1] https://www.godaddy.com/help/setting-up-domain-monitoring-579 https://www.godaddy.com/help/setting-up-domain-monitoring-57... (not affiliated with GoDaddy; not even using them as a registrar, but this tool proved useful for me)
    - Ligrev 6y ago
      GoDaddy have been caught doing some dodgy things in the past. Like taking your money for brokerage and not doing any work afterwards. Or registering domains and parking them if lot of people search for them e.g. via who is or the registration form. Hopefully they've turned it around and actually working on useful services nowadays...
denimnerd42 6y ago
Any time i buy a domain I buy 10 years worth. I only buy gTLD domains that are on sale though. I figure if I'm still using it after 10years then whatever the renewal is, it must be worth it.
amelius 6y ago
The Wikipedia page on the company that manages this domain is surprisingly short: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Computer_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Computer_Bureau

139 points by wilsonfiifi 6y ago

Rent seeking behavior from a fallen empire that violently evicted the native people they called "Tarzans" from the very islands .io is supposed to serve? Tell me it ain't so! History of British Indian Ocean Territories: http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io http://citizen-ex.com/stories/io Anyone building a brand atop a ccTLD with this kind of history is taking a huge risk.

jjcon 6y ago
Take your random off topic outrage somewhere else please.
not_really 6y ago
I guess "pos" doesn't stand for positive in your case
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Debate the comment, don’t attack the person.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    HN isn't the place for a debate about colonialism. I'm not sure there is much 'intellectual curiosity' surrounding any supposed alternatives. Judging the past by the standards of the present isn't a starting point for a discussion.
    - lern_too_spel 6y ago
      The past? This is late 1960s to the present.
      - sieabahlpark 6y ago
        Yes, I consider consider something 80 years ago in the past. Hell, we think RAZR phones are relics of the past.
      - Stratoscope 6y ago
        One might argue that the "late 1960s to the present" does constitute at least part of the past. Even if we only go back to my childhood in the 1960s, standards and mores were quite different back then.
    - Razengan 6y ago
      Yet when other countries are brought up HN's Western userbase appears eager to dig up 100 year old atrocities to judge their present populace by.
      - aww_dang 6y ago
        Agree that those discussions are a waste. Hope that HN isn't striving for equivalence or equality in illogical assertions along an east/west dichotomy.
    - dsohn0 6y ago
      Who the hell are you to gatekeep what people want to talk about
      - aww_dang 6y ago
        I'm suggesting the quality won't be worthwhile, the premises are flawed and the descent into flames will be predictable. Please don't consider this as gate-keeping. Merry Christmas.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > I guess "pos" doesn't stand for positive in your case Gen Z: It's not his job to entertain or validate you. Got it? You will do better in life if you take that to heart.
mahkoh 6y ago
BITO was uninhabited before it was settled by Europeans. It doesn't have "native people" according to Wikipedia. Unlike .us/au/ca etc. Are those tlds controlled by their native people?
- robinoh 6y ago
  > On 22 May 2019, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution [...] demanding that the United Kingdom unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from the area within six months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians#2018_ICJ_hearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians#2...
  - zzanak 6y ago
    Any reason to downvote? PS I think it could a good idea to require some reason when downvoting, otherwise sometimes the context for doing that is completely unclear.
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      Many communities have adopted the downvote reason functionality, as well as upvote reason.
- 3131s 6y ago
  > BITO was uninhabited before it was settled by Europeans. This is completely wrong. BIOT includes these islands where the native people were forcibly removed and the story is terrible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_the_Chagossians It's not like this hasn't been discussed many times on HN before. I own a .io but come on!
  - makomk 6y ago
    The Chagossians aren't a counter-example to that at all - they were moved to the islands by European colonialists as a slave labour force, which as I understand it were uninhabited before.
bzb6 6y ago
Might is right. Also I don’t see the risk, as I see the British as much more dependable than the “tarzans”.

DarthGhandi 6y ago

I always find it strange seeing security companies and other high risk industries using io. It's been hijacked multiple times before from shoddy practices. Are you really willing to trust the Internet Computer Bureau once more with every single service under your domain? I guess the desire to look cool outweighs the prime objective and if it goes pearshaped you can always blame someone else for a choice your company made. Even more strange is how companies with outspoken social justice execs and employees happily fork out thousands a year to tld that has incredibly bad optics, the amount of mental gymnastics these people must perform to justify needing these particular two letters above all else is surely remarkable.

systemvoltage 6y ago

What's stopping a gTLD owner, .foo to get a bunch of customers onboard with $1.99/year deal and then 5 years later, increase that to $49.99/year? Surely, people who've built businesses on top of their .foo domains will fork up. Any laws preventing this?

techsupporter 6y ago
> What's stopping a gTLD owner... Nothing, absent a provision in the registration contract to the contrary, except the risk of everyone fleeing. > Any laws preventing this? No. Remember that [ccTLD - I originally wrote gTLD but those are a different thing, as corrected below] are assigned to the countries that they represent (or, in this case, the country that holds sovereignty over the named territory) so subject to their jurisdiction and there’s no real motivation for a country to pass such a law.
- axaxs 6y ago
  Minor correction...that's ccTLD, which .io is. And you're right about the rest. But gTLDs are basically every other TLD that's not a country code.
  - AndyMcConachie 6y ago
    There are also sponsored TLDs(.edu, .gov), generic restricted(.biz), and the single infrastructure TLD .arpa. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
axaxs 6y ago
At least for the old TLDs, the ICANN contract specified the max it could be raised each year. I want to say it was 10 or 15 percent anually. Not sure about the new gTLDs but I'd imagine they have similar provisions.

helsinki 6y ago

How is a $4.18 price increase worthy of millions of HN readers’ attention on Christmas? This post is currently #3 on the homepage. Hm, times are tough, people are losing it.

echelon 6y ago
Because this indicative of the direction things are heading. The prices of many TLDs are inching upwards. It's not just gTLDs doing it, but also the ccTLDs. The .org takeover attempt was recent. We've had bad .com leadership with Verisign. Domain registrars themselves can be pretty scummy. In an effort to outperform the squatters, many gTLDs are pre-allocating "premium domains" and charging $500, $2500/yr for them. There's lots of greed in domain names. Or opportunity. Depends upon what your perspective is.
- harikb 6y ago
  Google charging higher for shorter domains or hey.com charging higher for shorter email handles is still way better than having to buy it from a squatter or lost-for-ever to a squatter who is unwilling to sell
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Agreed - as long as Google doesn’t become the squatter themselves and charge exorbitant prices. I got my dream domain because I paid a premium for it to Google. I have to pay the premium every year, which I am fine with unless it increases too much, but I can imagine squatters said no to it because it’s hard to make a profit when you have shell out so much each year for the domain (whereas with .com it is just the starting price + nominal reg fees each year).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rualca 6y ago
> How is a $4.18 price increase worthy of millions of HN readers’ attention on Christmas? Because, personally, I was already bit in the ass by these price hikes from a gTLD. I started a personal website with a gTLD (.site) that I registered for about $1, and when it was close to expire suddenly the registrar demanded about $30 for it. I decided to jump ship to another gTLD and let the old one expire, to not support this kind of extorsion. Since then I've been monitoring the state of the old domain name. Oddly enough my old domain name was parked as a premium domain, being on the market for close to $22, while other domain names from the same gTLD are sold for about $1.55. In my opinion these gTLDs have been managed through extortion tactics, and I welcome any chance of discussing the subject.

abhinav22 6y ago

I am the owner of a premium gTLD (.dev), which I pay $1,000 per year for. Google runs .dev. I read the contract carefully, there is nothing preventing Google from increasing the price to 10,000 or 100,0000. It’s my biggest fear. My only hope is that Google wouldn’t do it from a PR perspective, which I think is a safe and fair assumption. The real worry is they sell the rights to .dev to GoDaddy or somebody else, because then I am screwed. Google is one of the best things to happen to domain registrations. I highly recommend them. Even though I’m contractually exposed, to date, Google have been conducting themselves very well in the domain registration market. One of the great things about .com is that there is a contractual cap on price increases. However the domain I bought would cost in the 10s of millions if it was a .com; so at 1,000 per year, it’s a good deal for the .dev version as long as they don’t significantly increase it (I’m okay with 10% per year increases).

Semaphor 6y ago
> In a sea of unscrupulous players (who track what names you search and grab them before you do in case they are any good) Not really… There are many reputable ones. Gandi, namecheap and cloudflare are ones I can immediately think of. It’s just that some shady ones like GoDaddy do a lot of marketing.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Fair point. A lot of the dodgy stuff happens in the secondary market, which biased my original note, I’ll edit it if I can
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  I’ve been with Namecheap for years and they’ve been great. No complaints.
- dingaling 6y ago
  Gandi has started locking some TLDs away behind a 'corporate membership' subscription at €60 per month.
ship_it 6y ago

_huayra_ 6y ago

Are there any "safe" gTLDs, i.e. those that are either unlikely or contractually obligated to not rent seek in a few years time? I've been using the 'casa' gTLD (the only others I see that are relatively bargain bin are 'link', 'site', and maybe 'click'). I don't need a brand. I just need to type something in that's not the IP address of my VPS...

dheera 6y ago
If you don't care about brand why do you want a gTLD? Just get somethingreallyobscure.com. It will stay cheap.
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  Good point. The gTLDs I listed are typically cheaper than .com registrations when I look on namecheap, but the governance of the original TLDs is definitely more regulated, except for that damn .org hijack attempt :( However, if I want to have {my last name}.tld, is there any gTLD that would be unlikely to jack up the price? I actually have {my last name}.casa for this reason. Unfortunately {my last name}.{com,org,net} were all registered when I was in diapers. I'm assuming that the land of gTLDs is the wild west of potential price shenanigans, but I'm wondering if I'm wrong.
  - gravitas 6y ago
    A .com will cost < $100 for 10 years at most registrars and as you've noted, this is for personal use (not company branding, e.g.) so the name is not that important. I'll posit that most folks know how bad the name squatting business is around the internet and nobody really thinks hard about somethingreallyobscure.com so long as it's not confrontational in some way (religion, politics, swearing, etc.). But I will say "anything ending in .com has more implicit trust" - I'm always mentally questioning if any link from one of the new gTLDs is just a spammer/ne'er do well. Been here, done what you're doing, there's a .com out there with a fun and interesting name which somehow resonates with your personality. Think long term - avoid trademark/copyright branded words in the name, avoid being too narrow in case your hobby changes, easy to type and spend some time really thinking about plurality - I've discarded a lot of ideas simply because it would lead to other people going "was that with or without an (s) on the end?" - same with double-letters in the middle, just avoid them. I try and focus on 5-6 syllables max which break on natural language barriers (English).

ksec 6y ago

On the subject of gTLD, ( I ask this every time when I get the chance ) What happened to .web ? Verisign CEO said in their last investor conference that it will be coming soon but then all record of that was deleted from the web.

CydeWeys 6y ago
Lawsuits.
ksec 6y ago
I find the answer myself [1], searching for ".Web" online is very hard as even google doesn't really take "." into account when searching. I had to go and read the Verisign Q3 investor notes and find a link mentioning it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25545130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25545130

diebeforei485 6y ago

It's quite crazy how expensive the .io and .ai domains are, versus .com and .net and other vanilla domains.

zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
With Everyday High Prices, these TLDs make “domain investing” uneconomical. This way, premium domain revenue is captured by the registrar and not a third-party speculator.

sdwolfz 6y ago

Got an alert from namecheap saying my `.pro` domain renewal will cost 16.98$ starting Jan 5, also price increases for 15 other that I don't really care about. My first thought was, I should pre-pay for the next 9 years now to lock it in cheap... then I looked at the price I pay now, 15.88$ and I paid about 4$ initial registration. Honestly there's no rush, it's a minor price increase, and I expect things to get more expensive as time flies anyway, that's what happens to literraly every subscription I pay (rent, watter, energy, council tax, internet, phone, email are all "subscriptions" I pay and all of them have increased in price, and will undoubtedly increase again). Not that there's anything you can do about it, it's the "cost of doing business". I'll have to consider what's the lifetime of this domain, should I pay now, or am I going to throw it away in a few years/months for something else. I'll probably keep it as it's a good one, and I'll put an alarm for the 4th so I have enough time to think this through. The `.io` price increase looks a bit bigger relatively speaking, but nothing earth shattering... so try following the same logic as I detailed above. Now the question: how often do these increase?

chrisandchris 6y ago
It‘s a minor increase for you, but a business is making 3 times more money for not providing more to you than before.
metaphor 6y ago
> Now the question: how often do these increase? With respect to .io renewal on Gandi.net based on personal records: US$35.00/yr through 2018 US$38.00/yr (+8.6%) into 2019 US$42.18/yr (+11%) into 2021 If I recall correctly, .io renewal was limited to something like 1- or 2-year intervals not too long ago; this appears to have changed, but I'm unsure when that happened.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Can somebody fill me in on the security status of the .io registrar now? In 2017, a Google security researcher took over the registrar, meaning he could update the zone files externally. It was best practice to stop using .io at the time. I heard a rumor that a more professional registrar got involved after that, but don't know the details. Anybody know the story today?

j1elo 6y ago

Offtopic but related question: is there any TLD for which a first-level wildcard is allowed in SSL certs? (I mean "* .tld" instead of second-level such as "* .foo.tld"). TLDR; I feel like there should be a special dev-only TLD for certs that go on example code, which skipped all the certificate management limitations. Suggestions are welcome! It is so cumbersome to provide WebRTC sample apps and tutorials that can be universally run for testing purposes. WebRTC requires HTTPS, and thankfully an untrusted self-signed cert will do for Firefox and Chrome (they will show a warning page that the user can accept); iOS further requires that the certificate is trusted (so no warning page is shown and the load silently hangs on an infinite reload loop, which is nasty if you ask me; to avoid this, you can manually install custom Root CAs to the device). So, my WebRTC tutorials and demos need to include a self-signed cert that allows users to deploy in their LAN and do a quick test [0]. Browsers tend to accept "localhost" as a safe origin, but what happens with testing on LAN? I feel there should be some convention there, it's not very helpful to test a WebRTC application just on localhost. To not assume any given LAN subnet, I create my self-signed certs for these domains [1]: 127.0.0.1 ::1 localhost *.test.local That way, users can create a quick DNS redirection from some .test.local domain to their server (e.g. using avahi-publish command), install the root cert in iOS, and test from an Apple device. But I'd love if it was possible to just define a first level wildcard: *.test *.local or similar. Actually the .local domain would be perfect! Thanks to mDNS, when available, all hostnames automatically get their <hostname>.local address, which would be great for an easier than ever setup. Alas, MacOS seems to reject first-level wildcards. To add to the problem, these demo self-signed certs were created for 10 years, which is fine because I want to drop then on the Git repo and forget about them. But now the maximum allowed longevity for newly created certs is enforced to be a measly 398 days. Why does all this need to be so needlessly complicated? I guess people will tell me to put in place a cert-renewal scheme, using some CI for all repos that contain demo code or tutorials, but that's highly undesired... There are even people suggesting that certs should live for just days or hours, I guess they are not thinking on this simple use case, for which I don't know if there is an escape hatch. As mentioned in the TLDR; suggestions are welcome! [0]: https://github.com/Kurento/mediasoup-demos https://github.com/Kurento/mediasoup-demos [1]: https://doc-kurento.readthedocs.io/en/latest/features/security.html#generating-a-self-signed-certificate https://doc-kurento.readthedocs.io/en/latest/features/securi...

mysterydip 6y ago

I was looking at getting a short gTLD for a website I'm starting, but I'm wondering how well they're supported (meaning will DNS resolve, can people send me email, will I get rejected for using the address for account creation on sites, etc). The com/net/org/etc and ccTLD's I know are almost universally supported, but if I had example.whatever, how likely am I to run into issues?

doublerabbit 6y ago
I use .tf Apart from a few sites like ticketmaster (not resolved) and discord (now resolved) not recognizing the TD I've had no major issues. Your email reputation will likely be lower rated and likely be thrown in spam with major providers(Microsoft/Google) but that may also be because I am hosting my own email server.

bob1029 6y ago

I don't mind the price increases if it helps to deter squatters (i.e. GoDaddy). It was hell trying to find a reasonable domain for our new company (i.e. one that we would like to have in our email addresses forever). Only 5-10% of the domains we attempted were legitimately in use by some other business or individual. Everything else is a fucking godaddy parking page offering their domain realtor scam experience.

jjice 6y ago
A domain I'd pay upwards of $300 to buy is behind a GoDaddy parked page, and I'd have to pay $70 just to message the owner to begin negotiating. The chances that person would be unreasonable is pretty damn high too, so I haven't been able to justify it. Edit: Looks like it's $120 to pay for a "broker" now to contact the owner and then a 20% commission on top.
- sfusato 6y ago
  Do a whois query and email the owner directly. For low amount offers going through a broker is definitely the wrong approach in my opinion. GoDaddy has a free monitoring service [1] where you add the domain(s) you are interested in and it will email you each time that domain WHOIS data is updated. This is very useful to get notified when a domain name is about to expire and then get deleted (redemptionPeriod, pendingDelete). Over a 5+ year time period, quite a few domain names I was monitoring were eventually dropped by their previous owners. These weren't highly sought after, but your local insignificant city .com, some rather unique first/last name...these type of domain names. [1] https://www.godaddy.com/help/setting-up-domain-monitoring-579 https://www.godaddy.com/help/setting-up-domain-monitoring-57... (not affiliated with GoDaddy; not even using them as a registrar, but this tool proved useful for me)
  - Ligrev 6y ago
    GoDaddy have been caught doing some dodgy things in the past. Like taking your money for brokerage and not doing any work afterwards. Or registering domains and parking them if lot of people search for them e.g. via who is or the registration form. Hopefully they've turned it around and actually working on useful services nowadays...

denimnerd42 6y ago

Any time i buy a domain I buy 10 years worth. I only buy gTLD domains that are on sale though. I figure if I'm still using it after 10years then whatever the renewal is, it must be worth it.

amelius 6y ago

The Wikipedia page on the company that manages this domain is surprisingly short: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Computer_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Computer_Bureau