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Price increase on .com domain names starting September 1, 2021
- ctoth 5y ago•Create: $16.59* (current price $15.50) •Renewal: $16.59 (current price $15.50) •Transfer: $13.38 (current price $12.50) •Restore: $139.10 (current price $130.00*)
- dheera 5y agoNamecheap: $8.88
- mot2ba 5y agoIt's not going to end. Verisign was allowed to increase the wholesale price to registrars for .COM domains by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. Edited: in more detail from thread[0] last year: [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22292348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22292348
- orra 5y agoThat's incredibly fucked up. The .com contract needs to go out to tender.
- ericd 5y agoI think the huge amount of domain camping implies that .com could stand to be a whole lot more expensive to hold and do nothing with. If you're using it for something important, $20/yr probably isn't going to break the bank. If anything, I think it should be much more.
- sfe22 5y agoEven if i agree with you, why should a monopoly get the money? I am sure we can figure a better way to spend it.
- xxpor 5y agoHow are they a monopoly? There's literally thousands of TLDs now. It's like saying Apple has a monopoly on iPhones.
- Kye 5y agoThey're a monopoly on .com. Reasonable or not, .com is still widely seen as more authoritative than other TLDs, even .net and .org.
- xxpor 5y agoSo why shouldn't Verisign be able to capture the value they're providing?
- Kye 5y agoWhat value do you imagine Verisign provides? Verisign has nothing to do with .com's reputation. Most people have never heard of it. They didn't even run it until the peak of the .com bubble when everyone had already made their associations with .com.
- johnwheeler 5y agoThe other top level domains aren’t as credible, and everyone knows that.
- culpable_pickle 5y agocredible? Ubiquitous, sure, but credible? Who ensures that a .com is a credible website?
- johnwheeler 5y agoWhoever said anyone ensures a .com is credible? I don’t think anyone said a .com guarantees credibility. I said, other tlds aren’t as credible, and everyone knows that.
- sleavey 5y ago> $20/yr probably isn't going to break the bank 13 year old me would disagree. A .co.uk domain at the time was if I recall correctly about £5/year, equivalent to a week's wages from my paper round. A .com was around £12-15/year which I found too expensive. I learned a lot hacking around with DNS, subdomains, etc. and I wouldn't want to price today's kids out of doing the same. Saying that, back then there were only a few TLDs to choose from. I guess if there are still at least _some_ super cheap TLDs available then I probably wouldn't mind if .com in particular got more expensive given it seems to suffer the most from squatting.
- Kye 5y agoI'm surprised no one has given Namezero's concept another try. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namezero https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/namezero There's probably ways to monetize now that aren't trivially bypassed with a line of JavaScript. Think CloudFlare and their app injections. New Namezero could require you to use their ad-injecting/enforcing nameserver.
- ericd 5y agoYeah, as a kid these days, I'd just go with a different TLD.
- gen3 5y agoIt currently costs me 3x$8.18 a year to renew my personal domain, my parents, and a hobby site. It will cost me $409ea over the next 50 years. $1200 vs $3000 isn’t nothing to me.
- rootusrootus 5y agoThat seems like taking it to a logical absurdity. A developer making okay (non-SV) money right now with only cost-of-living adjustments for the next 50 years (assuming they'd work that long...) will make over 10 million dollars. $3000 is nothing on that scale.
- orra 5y agoDespite the original intention of .com, not everybody using a .com domain is running a for profit business...
- vecinu 5y ago> next 50 years (assuming they'd work that long...) I don't think this is reasonable, even if you started working at age 20 at a FAANG, you're not going to work until you're 70. Keep in mind this industry is very ageist, you'd be lucky to even get 30 years of high salary income if you're not exceptionally good. That's assuming you don't burn out. I'm surprised folks still use unrealistic examples such as these to move discussions in a certain direction.
- rootusrootus 5y ago> Keep in mind this industry is very ageist, you'd be lucky to even get 30 years of high salary income In the valley maybe, at a FAANG. In the regular world, esp F500 companies, there are lots of old folks. I work with several developers in their 60s. Could they get Google to hire them? Maybe not. They're still pulling down middle 100s. > I'm surprised folks still use unrealistic examples such as these You're referring, I hope, to the original comment that $3000 over 50 years was a deal breaker. I am not the one who thought that a 50 year time horizon made any sense at all for this discussion, I'm just playing along.
- PaywallBuster 5y agoThink about all the small websites. At some point the extra cost is no longer worth it, and the content either vanishes or it's moved to facebook/google/medium platform. We're leaving the open internet and further into the walled garden
- mikeiz404 5y agoAnd 2026 to 2029. > besides this year’s price increase, Verisign has been permitted to increase .com prices up to 7% in 2022 and 2023 as well as between 2026 to 2029.
- marto1 5y agoSo are we going to see a raise of alternative DNS roots ? Do modern browsers have integrations for something like that ?
- Someone1234 5y agoBecause DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is browser based instead of OS bound, it is actually much easier to have browser instances that point to a different DNS root (or multiple DNS root services). A lot of people have been very negative about browsers adding DoH but they're missing the big picture: We now have a real opportunity to create competitive roots/new DNS. Browsers really need to look at allowing multiple DoH connections concurrently that resolve different namespaces. I'm legitimately surprised this hasn't happened already.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"Because DNS over HTTPS (DoH) is browser based..." Is DoH browser-based. Optically, yes. Technically, no. I use it outside the browser every day. No disagreement with rest of comment. FWIW, I have run own custom root for decades, creating new "TLDs" and "domainnames" as I please, but also I have experimented with a non-DNS naming system just using a proxy. Maybe this sounds too simple, but the thing is, it is just as fast as DNS, maybe even faster. If everyone runs the same proxy software, and we share the list of names, it just works. This is 100% outside the browser. No reliance on ICANN and no reliance on Google/Apple/Mozila/Microsoft/Brave.
- Someone1234 5y ago> Is DoH browser-based. Optically, yes. Technically, no. I use it outside the browser every day. I don't understand what you're trying to say. Firefox and Chrome have an individual setting for DoH that doesn't depend on the underlying OS's DNS configuration/resolver. Therefore, you can run multiple instances of either browser (using profiles) that point to different DoH resolvers or are different from the underlying OS. This is very similar to using TOR in a browser instance but with even lower friction. Currently, the biggest friction is that one profile cannot point to two or more DoH resolvers at the same time, and instead you need two browser profiles for two browser instances that resolve to different endpoints.
- dheera 5y agoTFA is the price increase at some random registry called Gandi from $15.50 to $16.59. .com is still $8.88 at Namecheap.
- ohazi 5y agoIs there a price level that would noticably reduce the prevalence of namesquatting? Maybe at $100 or $1000? Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN?
- mulmen 5y agoNamesquatting has the effect of increasing prices so, no, there is no price at which namesquatting would be disincentivized. In fact the higher the prices the more appealing it becomes to our friends on wall street. > Is there a price level at which the nerds say "fuck this" and create new domain roots without ICANN? One without ICANN but what about namesquatting?
- vecinu 5y ago> becomes to our friends on wall street. Perhaps I'm misremembering but domain squatting was an issue for the last 20 years. Before "wall street" got a hold, I'm sure regular people like you and me just bought domains and sat on them for a while. I know I used to try and guess which domains to buy and hold for some time but by the time I figured it out, those domains were already reserved. It was also us engineers that figured out you can query ICANN for expiry information so you can catch domains that expire and steal them from other people. Not sure wall street had anything to do with that.
- mulmen 5y agoI invoked Wall Street because the capital involved right now probably isn’t worth their time. When domains cost 4+ figures from the registrar then maybe it’s worth paying attention to. This is all a response to the question of what point squatting is too expensive to continue. I submit that it can’t be.
- nostrademons 5y agoDoesn't follow. Namesquatting, ticket scalping, house flipping, Amazon book reselling, quant trading, etc. are all forms of arbitrage. There exist buyers who are willing to pay significantly more than sellers are willing to accept. Somebody gets to the seller first, buys the good, sits on it, and waits for one of these high-demand buyers to show up, then charges them the maximum that they're willing to pay. If the seller just raised their prices, there would be no profit for the arbitrager. They would capture all the consumer surplus and deal directly with the buyer. If Gandi charged $1B for a .com domain, nobody's going to namesquat - they'd lose too much on the common English words to make it up from the major corporations. I suspect a lot of the problem is the extreme power law in how much people are willing to pay for domains. Dropbox.com or Facebook.com is a bargain at $1M for DropBox and Facebook, but nobody is going to pay $1M for their personal homepage, and few local businesses are going to shell out more than a grand for a restaurant domain name. That indicates that perhaps some better pricing system (auctions?) is required. $16.99 is way low for a business domain name though.
- r3trohack3r 5y agoHonest question, are people outside the domain squatter economy (squatters and their customers) actually paying for .com domains? I’ve never been able to secure a .com for a project, they are all squatted and being sold at a massive (like 1000x+) markup.
- mottosso 5y agoSure am, never had a problem with it. E.g. https://ragdolldynamics.com https://ragdolldynamics.com The problem is finding a suitable name for a project that also has an available domain. The easy ones are all picked.
- mulmen 5y agoWell the fact that the practice continues suggests to me that someone is spending the money. But I don't know of any examples.
- ryantgtg 5y agoIt could also indicate that it’s relatively cheap to sit on domains for 20 years, patiently waiting for someone to pony up. It’s not like valuable domains are more expensive to renew.
- mulmen 5y agoRight but at some point there must be some return. Sitting on domains is cheap, not free.
- NathanielWest 5y agothen maybe it should be forbidden to renew domain if you haven't use it for a year instead of increasing prices for everyone, how convenient for domain registrars
- ryantgtg 5y agoHow would they define “using it”? I’m guessing there would be easy ways to skirt around any automated system that checks for whether a domain has been used. Update the text on the “for sale” landing page? Look, I used it!
- snksnk 5y agoI moved my domains last year from Gandi to Porkbun, very happy customer.
- asien 5y agoInflation is everywhere i guess, or should I say « stagflation ».
- nrmitchi 5y agoI'm not sure if the concept of "inflation" really applies to a situation where a company was effectively gifted monopolistic control over something in exchange for "promising" that they wouldn't do exactly what they're doing.
- encryptluks2 5y agoTime to get my decentralized ENS domain and setup my website on IPFS
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoTwo of the websites I use everyday do not even require a domain name. I just use the IP address. With the rise of shared hosting especially driven by added costs of https, it's not possible to use IP address with most sites today but it's sure nice to be free from the ICANN DNS cartel and to not have to run DNS software. Before long, I have the addresses memorised. I never try to memorise them, it just happens automatically after a while. Reminds me of how we memorise phone numbers.
- mdonahoe 5y agoAre you using https?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoYes.
- creeble 5y agoWhat are you using for CN?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoI am the client not the server. Maybe you are asking whether I check the CN or compare the certificates every time I connect against ones I have stored locally. I could, but for these two sites I don't. Am I worried about someone spying on the local rain radar images or wind speed data I am retrieving. No. There's nothing confidential about this information. Nor am I worried about being secretly routed to an "evil weather service impersonator" without me detecting the change. One of the adresses belongs to a government agency. These addresses do not change often, if ever. Doesn't Lets Encrypt allow IP adddresses for the CN.
- creeble 5y ago> Doesn't Lets Encrypt allow IP adddresses for the CN. No: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/ssl-on-a-ip-instead-of-domain/90635/2 https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/ssl-on-a-ip-instead-of-d...