19 ms·

Price increase on .io domains on January 1, 2022 (Renewal: $55.00)

286 points by leroman 5y ago

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
A while ago I went on a shopping spree buying domains with the name of our project in various TLDs. I did consider .io, but decided to pass at $29 registration price. Now I'm glad I did, because while the money aren't great, I would have had to drop this domain on a principle. You know, to stick it to them!
josephh 5y ago
A reminder: just because you don't see any meaningful activities happening on www., don't assume that the owner is domain squatting. Folks make use of their domains in a variety of ways, not just for hosting a website on www.
- franklampard 5y ago
  Exactly. I use it for email
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- thuccess129 5y ago
  Can namecheap.com do a package deal for hosting a Gemini site with down the line add-on for VPS? I don't want the Wordpress stuff.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters. When even the lowest price for a domain you're squating on is 2k you can sit and pay 50 a year for 50+ years and still come out on top. Kinda sucks since I have some .io domains and I could only renew them as far as 2025.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters That does not make any sense in any world. If a squatter successfully makes money on a single domain, for example, they can reinvest on dozens or hundreds of domains next and therefore squat as much as they like just the same. And early, lucky squatters always exist. This does not solve anything. You are just pricing out people with legitimate domain name use and not much money, as usual.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    It makes sense in this world, you just dislike it. I can buy a domain that costs $50 a year and I can squat on that 40 years until I would be in the loss margin for a $2,000 resell value and $2,000 is minor money for resell values. You make it $200 and then it's only 10-years, 10-years is a long time but not that long if you look at how long some people have been squating on domains. You increase the risk of not making a profit. This talk of outpricing people, people are buying domains for thousands for their pet projects, so let's remain in the world of here and now.
    - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      > This talk of outpricing people, people are buying domains for thousands for their pet projects, so let's remain in the world of here and now. The world of "here and now" would be acknowledging that "thousands of dollars" outprices a significant majority of the world. Even if you take a US-centric view, that's going to outprice the majority of the population. If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr with a pet project on the side, a $1,000 domain would take 83 hours of work to pay for. That's two weeks and change of full-time work. You're not going to be able to pay for that while also paying rent and other bills.
      - that_guy_iain 5y ago
        > The world of "here and now" would be acknowledging that "thousands of dollars" outprices a significant majority of the world. Even if you take a US-centric view, that's going to outprice the majority of the population. It's significant for me. But I would still be willing to spend it to work on something i cared about. Just like I was willing to spend money on forming a company to protect myself legally. I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of domains that are owned but not being used aren't truly being squated on for profit but have people sitting on them for side projects they never started/finished and the cost of holding the domain is so little that they'll pay out $20-50 a year. I say this owning about 40 domains and I am not selling domains or even advertising domains. I just bought a bunch in the last year for projects and then decided I didn't like that domain so bought another one. The cost is so low that I can do that without worrying and without thought. > If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr with a pet project on the side, a $1,000 domain would take 83 hours of work to pay for. That's two weeks and change of full-time work. You're not going to be able to pay for that while also paying rent and other bills. If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr you gotta bigger problems like being able to afford an apartment to stay in. Saying they can't afford luxuries such as domain names when they can't afford the basics such as somewhere to stay, food, etc. is pointless. They can't afford a domain just now.
mrv_dev 5y ago
Build an amazing app/platform/service. Host it on whatever tld is cheaper/convenient/some_other_criteria. No one will care what the extension is - especially with current and upcoming consumption models (mobile apps, vr/ar, and so on).
- throwvirtever 5y ago
  Is there any objective reason (performance, reliability, etc) to avoid certain TLDs?
  - eropple 5y ago
    ccTLDs are perhaps marginally less reliable given who has overriding control over them (.ly is Libya, for example), but beyond that it's probably pretty low on your list of things to care about.
    - SanchoPanda 5y ago
      This is not true if you want email to come from you main domain and you choose a remotely exotic TLD. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me, choose a boring TLD, worry about less stupid things - there are so so many already.
      - eropple 5y ago
        That's a good point, I was thinking of it from a web perspective.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Some country tlds are risky because they don't necessarily check residency requirements when you purchase, but might later if your domain catches their attention. Not all have residency requirements, but some do. There's also some TLDs that are well known for web spam, phishing, or email spam, sometimes because of free or cheap subdomains. Those might have issues getting indexed in Google, or issues with SMTP delivery. Google once deindexed the entirety of *.co.cc, for example.
echelon 5y ago
Any perspective on the best TLDs for startups? .com is obviously the preferred choice, but from my perspective these are the next best picks: - .io for B2B, SAAS, etc. startups. Occasionally makes sense for B2C (itch.io, etc.) Seems to be falling out of fashion, though. - .ai is the top choice for ML-based startups. These are really hot now. - .dev for the occasional SAAS or library. Doesn't make sense B2C. - .app if you're linking to a mobile app or have a SPA-like functionality. Not super popular, though. AFAIK, the other TLDs seem like spam/noise. That might just be personal perception and I could be totally wrong. Am I missing anything?
- fortran77 5y ago
  I think ".co" doesn't look too awful and most people "get it." If it's a B-to-B you have more flexibility
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    I wouldn't want a .co if I didn't also own the .com variant, though.
- sgeisenh 5y ago
  Not for a startup, but .codes is pretty nice for personal or portfolio websites.
  - cvhashim 5y ago
    My personal website uses .one
  - echelon 5y ago
    I used that TLD for word play on vocoder with https://vo.codes https://vo.codes
    - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      Ha, this is great. I cracked up at the SpongeBob ones.
TonyBagODonuts 5y ago
My .com renewal was $14, namecheap.
- bluk 5y ago
  Cloudflare renews ".com" for $8.57 USD/year (if anyone is looking for cheaper; not sure if they are the cheapest). Namecheap seemed to have the lowest price for ".io" for a while.
  - koolba 5y ago
    With the proviso that you must use their DNS service.
  - syshum 5y ago
    The Base Cost of a .com is $8 then there a $4,000 annual ICANN fee for the Accredited Register such costs are spread over how ever many domains under their management of course name cheap has over 10 million domains under management so that fee is nothing per domain. It can price out small competitors though
- bxparks 5y ago
  Cloudflare Registrar is "at cost". Hard to get cheaper than that.
  - dazc 5y ago
    Is it a good idea to have your domain and dns controlled by the same company though? Say something bad happens at Cloudflare - you're kinda stuffed.
    - bxparks 5y ago
      If their DNS service goes down, I can transfer to another DNS in about 2h. I tested that. The bigger problem is if Cloudflare's AI bans my account and I lose access to their Registrar. My hope is that Cloudflare is small enough that it still has human beings in control of their AI. Unlike Google's AI which can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, which doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or sympathy. I have friends at Google, but I don't have any confidence that they will be able to help when their Terminator strikes. I'm in the process of de-Googlifying my digital life as much as possible. Getting out of Google Domains into Cloudflare was the first step. Setting up backup accounts and workflows that will continue work after a catastrophic Google AI termination can be a bit tricky.
eclipsetheworld 5y ago
The .io TLD is owned by Ethos Capital. The same private equity company that tried to buy the .org TLD a while ago. Go figure...
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  I think it's pretty sad how the rights for this get sold around, but the territory to which it belongs gets little to no revenue from domain sales. There's an ongoing complaint seeking repatriation of the domain, and I really hope I'm wrong in speculating that nothing will be done about it.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Man, that is early-Web levels of sordid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History FYI, apparently this is the current state of UN affairs: https://www.lexpress.mu/node/388292 https://www.lexpress.mu/node/388292 (previous and recent decisions referenced)
  - wwalexander 5y ago
    I’m always mind-boggled at the level of acceptance in the industry of clear misuse of ccTLDs. Is having “input/output” in your domain really so cute that it’s worth tying your entire business to an incorrect ccTLD? Especially when we have so many new cute, built-for-purpose geek-cred gTLDs like .dev.
  - andylynch 5y ago
    It’s much worse than that. The Chagosian islanders who lived in this territory were all exiled by the British to make room for a military base on their land. They have been fighting in the legal system for decades just for the right to go home.
- sschueller 5y ago
  From their website: "OUR ETHOS Drive prosperity for all stakeholders We believe that long-term success is best accomplished through a thriving ecosystem in which prosperity is shared amongst all stakeholders." [1] Bullshit, they exist to squeeze every little penny left in a company out and then dump the hollowed out remains on the stock market to die. [1] https://ethoscapital.com/about-us/ https://ethoscapital.com/about-us/
cpach 5y ago
Related: I strongly prefer to renew yearly, so that I have a working routine for renewal.
- cxr 5y ago
  This works: Make use of the "renew yearly" strategy, but make sure that at any given time you're already paid up for the next 2–3 years. This will give you a wide margin for error (and a comfortable timetable to fix them).
cj 5y ago
How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? At first glance I was happy to see the headline because it means it’ll be more expensive for squatters to profit, but then I do sympathize with people using these domains for legitimate non-commercial purposes.
- Kinrany 5y ago
  This is the same problem as land value tax that was never solved.
  - syshum 5y ago
    it was not solved by those that advocate for land value tax because it is not seen as a problem, just like many do not see domain "squatting" as a problem
  - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    It's solved in some [rather left leaning] countries. When you buy land you must put it to use, and if it's unused after X years, it's considered abandoned and it goes up for sale again. TBH, I think it's a solid model -- buying a finite resource like land merely with the intent to deprive others of it and make a profit in the long term is as unethical as it gets. Though completely legal is most places, of course.
    - loonster 5y ago
      With land, not using it is the equivalent to a privately funded conservation site. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Many capitalistic countries also have adverse possession laws, where if someone uses the land for X number of years, it becomes theirs.
      - have_faith 5y ago
        This loophole is solved by making it that declaring the land as such status means the land is commited to that use for a minimum number of years that makes the conservation meaningful. Something like a decade minimum with a high bar for converting it for other usage afterwards. Farmers in the UK for instance already have some incentives to leave some fields alone.
PinguTS 5y ago
It seems, that .io is rising the price every year this time around. Just about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25534498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25534498
- andruby 5y ago
  That's because it is owned by Ethos Capital, and is the reason they shouldn't own .org
junon 5y ago
Same thing with .sh Domains among a few others. .sh in particular is going up from 40-something to 80-something, renewal.
aimor 5y ago
What's the reasoning or history behind why domain prices A) vary between TLDs and B) are allowed to be sold at any price (think huge markups from domain speculating)?
- tyingq 5y ago
  There were always different entities in charge of different TLDs. ICANN, for example, has no leverage over CCTLDs. Basically because "no central authority". Then, within a TLD, some allow resellers, so competition.
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  Once you have enough users, you can raise the price and they can't easily flee. For example, I (regrettably) have a .io domain with my own email, and moving away from it would be super painful. I'd have to make sure that I update my email *everywhere* (or risk my accounts getting hijacked), and even reach out to people with whom I communicate very infrequently. TBH, I _should_ do it, but I can image that taking around a year.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    If you have a good .com that's tech themed you basically have to eat the cost on the matching .io for brand protection even if you don't use it for anything.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    > TBH, I _should_ do it, but I can image that taking around a year. And even then, it will probably feel bad to let it expire just because you might have forgotten an account. That's why I still have my very first email. And it's a lot of effort for saving a few bucks a year (at least in the US and the EU, for poorer countries the story might be different). Unfortunately, that's exactly what Ethos is exploiting.
    - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
      Yeah, it's not purely about the money, but also knowing where it's going. I might spend that much money on takeout in a week, and it's fine cause the money goes to the kid who biked it over, and the chef who cooked it, etc. But the same amount of money going to a corp trying to squeeze as much money as possible giving no extra value in return, and depriving the original owners of that revenue... that does tend to make me feel dirtier.
cibomahto 5y ago
It might be helpful to look at this as a percentage change- it looks like they were currently charging $42.18/year as the standard price (1), so this is a 30% price increase. (1) https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/10/enjoy-our-io-promotion-before-this-year-ends/ https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/10/enjoy-our-io-promotion-bef...
- account42 5y ago
  As another commenter pointed out they already raised the price a year ago - sot this is a 30% YOY increase.
  - progbits 5y ago
    Well that is one way to get 30% YoY company growth... I wonder how many new domains got registered and what the total revenue diff is. Actually, could it be that the .io hype went down and this is their attempt at compensating?
baybal2 5y ago
Why .io domains are so popular?
- adzm 5y ago
  Because they are cool! Also identifies something as having developers or technical folk as the target audience. And because of it's popularity, it's one of the few generally trusted top-level domains (by both humans and mail daemons)
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  I/O is used frequently in tech as an acronym for Input/Output. I suppose that's why it's popular for techy stuff like SaaS providers and such. It's also a moon of Jupiter which adds to the nerdgasm.
- xxpor 5y ago
  For me personally, it came down to the fact that $firstname.io was available, but .com, .org, .net, and whatever else I checked wasn't. Kind of regret it now, not so much for the price but because of the questionable political situation with the continued availability of the TLD doing forward.
swalsh 5y ago
The last time I suggested domains should be NFT's managed by a DAO i got a boat load of downvotes. But you have to admit, ENS's community governance model is superior to this. Its nice that domain owners have a vote in decision making process, where as here the community has no say at all.
- rvz 5y ago
  > ENS's community governance model is superior to this. ENS is no different and it is just you registering a .eth subdomain (collides with Ethiopia's three letter reserved TLD) in a decentralised blockchain but is on a centralised root with the key-holders sitting on a DAO. The fact that 'trust' is involved is the vulnerability with these DAOs.
noja 5y ago
OT, but I gotta say I love this retro-design (it's more visible on their homepage). A nice break from every website looking identical.
Indra_33 5y ago
Hi
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
teekert 5y ago
I like how the .nl tld in the Netherlands is managed by the non-profit SIDN [0]. They are dedicated to an open internet, and they make sure that I can very easily move my domain between (hosting) providers for example (and indeed it was easy to transfer from transip to vimexx for me). They are truly independent. It's how it should be if you ask me. When I read about the .org issues and now .io, I'm happy with my .nl domain, for personal use. [0]: https://www.sidn.nl/en/about-sidn/what-we-stand-for https://www.sidn.nl/en/about-sidn/what-we-stand-for
- authed 5y ago
  > and they make sure that I can very easily move my domain between (hosting) providers Is it so easy that I could "do it for you"?
  - teekert 5y ago
    Hehe, no, at least, not without my credentials (and I turn on 2fa everywhere). You need a key from one provider and provide it to the next, for example Transip (one of the biggest Dutch providers) has the procedure to import a domain outlined here: [0]. To move away from Transip do this: [1]. I bet it's similar for other tlds, not? I have no experience with others. I went through this, no downtime, no issues, DNS was propagated on the same evening I initiated the transfer. [0]: https://www.transip.eu/knowledgebase/entry/24-transfering-your-domain-name-transip/ https://www.transip.eu/knowledgebase/entry/24-transfering-yo... [1]: https://www.transip.co.uk/knowledgebase/entry/28-how-transfer-domain-another-provider/ https://www.transip.co.uk/knowledgebase/entry/28-how-transfe...
    - necovek 5y ago
      If you are not changing any DNS records (A/MX/CNAME... though you can change the NS records if you move the entire zone correctly, and the old NS servers keep it for a while too), there should never be any downtime related to a domain registrar change. DNS propagation is not completely under your control (there can be caching DNS servers that ignore the TTL of records), so you should always give it at least 24h by serving the same zone from both (if you've changed NS records). I'd instead avoid that worry by using non-registrar provided DNS servers. I would hope that TLD registries that fail to provide this are very few if not non-existent.
talawahtech 5y ago
FYI Cloudflare currently charges $30 per year for .io domains.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Chances are they'll have to follow this price increase, at least, if they don't want to start actively losing money on each domain purchase.
  - talawahtech 5y ago
    Sure, I was just pointing out that their current rates are cheaper than gandi, especially for renewals. So if someone wants to renew for multiple years it may make sense to switch.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Probably only for first year. Most TLDs are discounted significantly for the first year to get you in the door, then when you've built your business on the domain they hit you with the real fee when the renewal rolls around.
  - talawahtech 5y ago
    No, I confirmed that it is for all years. They deliberately don't make money on domain name registration. The use it to attract/retain business for their other services.
vmoore 5y ago
Long time buyer of random domains here. Over the years I've heard reports of people trying to get back their ccTLD because they weren't a citizen of that country and had to fight back-and-forth to reclaim their domain, oftentimes handing ownership of the domain over to a trusted citizen of that country so they can keep their domain. This is why I don't build important stuff on a ccTLD and go for generic ones like .club .party etc. In my country, I have a single ccTLD that I registered with a passport scan and had to verify my legal name with the registrar, which is good because I don't have to fight to get it back in a rug-pull scenario. I don't have anything too important on it, just a few links to projects I worked on, and a contact page. The domain price could be hiked at any moment so I don't take the domain too seriously. (I've often thought of just not renewing it, and retiring it).
- rasengan 5y ago
  The issue is you will always be leasing versus owning unless you use Handshake. The same entity of interest, Ethos, owns most of the generic top level domain names since they own Donuts [1]. [1] https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio/ https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio...
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    While I like the idea of using blockchain-determined name ownership; there's a few problems. First, you have the problems that you get just because of how blockchains work[0]. But moreso there are specific chicken-and-egg problems with migrating away from standard DNS: - Because DNS is well-established and everyone uses it, most websites want to be registered in DNS, and blockchain names provide little to no value to them. - Because blockchain names see little usage, most ISPs see no need to resolve them in addition to or overlapping standard DNS names. For a blockchain name system to actually succeed, you need buy-in from large network operators. Most network operators, for better or for worse, have just decided to trust ICANN and ICANN alone. At the very least, you would need IANA and ICANN to agree to set certain TLDs aside for competing naming systems so that network operators could be confident that resolving them wouldn't cause security problems. [0] specifically the whole 'immutability' and 'no central authority' thing legalizes certain kinds of theft
conradfr 5y ago
Thanks to their last price increase I looked in to the previously not available .com and .fr for my side project and got them both for less than the .io I was using.
da-bacon 5y ago
I used to work for a registrar and had the job of connecting up to the registries, who are the entities that ultimately allocate the domain names. (Yeah great naming choice, no chance of those words being confused with each other.) Registrars talk to registries via EPP, an xml based specification. While there is a spec, the registries variously mess it up in odd and interesting ways, all of which I got to discover as we did these integrations. .io was by far the worst. I remember that you could renew domain names in units of either 1, 2, or 5 years. It was like a developer had done the dynamic programming problem with coins and decided that they would put that in their api. Considering that .io seems to have been adopted as a signal of "geeky tech cred", I always laugh, and think really it stands for .ironic.
- ted0 5y ago
  The .io infrastructure under ICB was indeed quite slow. Everything moved to Afilias (and now Donuts) many years ago though and EPP is quite performant now fortunately. We deal with a few independent ccTLDs these days that are still horribly unreliable though. Not going to name any names but some of these are quite popular and still either don't run on EPP and/or run on an old outdated server in a local DC.
- ted0 5y ago
  Btw, would you mind sharing what registrar you worked for? No worries if not but it's a small industry!
mthoodlum 5y ago
For me, not having good domains available of hoarding is a bigger problem than paying $55/year. I'm glad there is a TLD that is useful and expensive.
peter_retief 5y ago
More reasons to move to a decentralised p2p web. 55 usd is a ridiculous amount for renewal.
_huayra_ 5y ago
This is why I only use .com and .{country code of stable country, like iceland}, as the likelihood of shenanigans on these is so low. .io definitely is one of those cool CS street cred domains, but 2x- or 3xing the price is just ridiculous :(
newfonewhodis 5y ago
I have my .io domain registered until 2023 which gives me enough time to look for an alternative and migrate all my self-hosted services over. What are the best TLDs these days to own that aren't owned by large PE companies just wanting to make a quick buck?
flotwig 5y ago
Does ICANN already have rules around what prices registrars can charge for domains? It seems like that's the only solution in the current TLD system - ICANN needs to step in and prevent anti-consumer practices like year-over-year price increases that vastly outstrip inflation.
DeathArrow 5y ago
I bought my .io domain for like 5 USD. If renewal is 55, I might let it go.
- sintaxi 5y ago
  Please cancel if you can. My .io domain is going to be extremely difficult to migrate off of so I feel a bit stuck.
ted0 5y ago
Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers. It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small amount, if at all.
- fady 5y ago
  Thanks Ted for the update. I bought my io domain from you guys many years ago when it was $70 or so. Thanks for keeping the price low over the years and for the update.
  - ted0 5y ago
    Thanks for choosing us!
- ricardo81 5y ago
  TBF to Gandhi, IIRC they tend to give favourable prices when you buy domains or deposit funds in bulk. Their opening tier of prices are indeed pricey. Their API is excellent though. I've always found Namecheap to be price competitive and their customer service is pretty good also. API was always a bit basic (think that had a lot to do with enom implementation)
  - ted0 5y ago
    I'm sure they do indeed have special pricing for bulk customers. Although, not sure how much has changed with them since they were acquired by private equity a couple of years ago. I do admit that our API needs some love - fortunately we have a lot of major backend updates in the works and a new API will follow at some point. Unrelated but we did roll out a new API (entirely separate from the API you're referring to) for our Auctions platform: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/12017783/TW6wKUfy https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/12017783/TW6wKUfy. Curious to get your feedback if you're interested in taking it for a spin!
  - 5y ago
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
What is the groups preference for "best" registrar? Good balance of usability, available TLD's, pricing and security?
908B64B197 5y ago
I understand the initial design of ccTLDs but can we just admit it's mostly a failure? People use them as vanity URLs and there is little to no consistency in how they are used. .io, .ai and .tv are good examples. Then you have .ly where the local warlord can decide to ban your domain for no reasons. At least .gov, .edu, .com and .org are somewhat consistent.

286 points by leroman 5y ago

A while ago I went on a shopping spree buying domains with the name of our project in various TLDs. I did consider .io, but decided to pass at $29 registration price. Now I'm glad I did, because while the money aren't great, I would have had to drop this domain on a principle. You know, to stick it to them!

josephh 5y ago

A reminder: just because you don't see any meaningful activities happening on www., don't assume that the owner is domain squatting. Folks make use of their domains in a variety of ways, not just for hosting a website on www.

franklampard 5y ago
Exactly. I use it for email
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thuccess129 5y ago
Can namecheap.com do a package deal for hosting a Gemini site with down the line add-on for VPS? I don't want the Wordpress stuff.

that_guy_iain 5y ago

I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters. When even the lowest price for a domain you're squating on is 2k you can sit and pay 50 a year for 50+ years and still come out on top. Kinda sucks since I have some .io domains and I could only renew them as far as 2025.

ekianjo 5y ago
> I think raising the price of TLDs is the only way to stop domain squaters That does not make any sense in any world. If a squatter successfully makes money on a single domain, for example, they can reinvest on dozens or hundreds of domains next and therefore squat as much as they like just the same. And early, lucky squatters always exist. This does not solve anything. You are just pricing out people with legitimate domain name use and not much money, as usual.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  It makes sense in this world, you just dislike it. I can buy a domain that costs $50 a year and I can squat on that 40 years until I would be in the loss margin for a $2,000 resell value and $2,000 is minor money for resell values. You make it $200 and then it's only 10-years, 10-years is a long time but not that long if you look at how long some people have been squating on domains. You increase the risk of not making a profit. This talk of outpricing people, people are buying domains for thousands for their pet projects, so let's remain in the world of here and now.
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > This talk of outpricing people, people are buying domains for thousands for their pet projects, so let's remain in the world of here and now. The world of "here and now" would be acknowledging that "thousands of dollars" outprices a significant majority of the world. Even if you take a US-centric view, that's going to outprice the majority of the population. If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr with a pet project on the side, a $1,000 domain would take 83 hours of work to pay for. That's two weeks and change of full-time work. You're not going to be able to pay for that while also paying rent and other bills.
    - that_guy_iain 5y ago
      > The world of "here and now" would be acknowledging that "thousands of dollars" outprices a significant majority of the world. Even if you take a US-centric view, that's going to outprice the majority of the population. It's significant for me. But I would still be willing to spend it to work on something i cared about. Just like I was willing to spend money on forming a company to protect myself legally. I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of domains that are owned but not being used aren't truly being squated on for profit but have people sitting on them for side projects they never started/finished and the cost of holding the domain is so little that they'll pay out $20-50 a year. I say this owning about 40 domains and I am not selling domains or even advertising domains. I just bought a bunch in the last year for projects and then decided I didn't like that domain so bought another one. The cost is so low that I can do that without worrying and without thought. > If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr with a pet project on the side, a $1,000 domain would take 83 hours of work to pay for. That's two weeks and change of full-time work. You're not going to be able to pay for that while also paying rent and other bills. If you're working at McDonalds for $12/hr you gotta bigger problems like being able to afford an apartment to stay in. Saying they can't afford luxuries such as domain names when they can't afford the basics such as somewhere to stay, food, etc. is pointless. They can't afford a domain just now.

mrv_dev 5y ago

Build an amazing app/platform/service. Host it on whatever tld is cheaper/convenient/some_other_criteria. No one will care what the extension is - especially with current and upcoming consumption models (mobile apps, vr/ar, and so on).

throwvirtever 5y ago
Is there any objective reason (performance, reliability, etc) to avoid certain TLDs?
- eropple 5y ago
  ccTLDs are perhaps marginally less reliable given who has overriding control over them (.ly is Libya, for example), but beyond that it's probably pretty low on your list of things to care about.
  - SanchoPanda 5y ago
    This is not true if you want email to come from you main domain and you choose a remotely exotic TLD. I learned this the hard way. Don't be like me, choose a boring TLD, worry about less stupid things - there are so so many already.
    - eropple 5y ago
      That's a good point, I was thinking of it from a web perspective.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Some country tlds are risky because they don't necessarily check residency requirements when you purchase, but might later if your domain catches their attention. Not all have residency requirements, but some do. There's also some TLDs that are well known for web spam, phishing, or email spam, sometimes because of free or cheap subdomains. Those might have issues getting indexed in Google, or issues with SMTP delivery. Google once deindexed the entirety of *.co.cc, for example.

echelon 5y ago

Any perspective on the best TLDs for startups? .com is obviously the preferred choice, but from my perspective these are the next best picks: - .io for B2B, SAAS, etc. startups. Occasionally makes sense for B2C (itch.io, etc.) Seems to be falling out of fashion, though. - .ai is the top choice for ML-based startups. These are really hot now. - .dev for the occasional SAAS or library. Doesn't make sense B2C. - .app if you're linking to a mobile app or have a SPA-like functionality. Not super popular, though. AFAIK, the other TLDs seem like spam/noise. That might just be personal perception and I could be totally wrong. Am I missing anything?

fortran77 5y ago
I think ".co" doesn't look too awful and most people "get it." If it's a B-to-B you have more flexibility
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  I wouldn't want a .co if I didn't also own the .com variant, though.
sgeisenh 5y ago
Not for a startup, but .codes is pretty nice for personal or portfolio websites.
- cvhashim 5y ago
  My personal website uses .one
- echelon 5y ago
  I used that TLD for word play on vocoder with https://vo.codes https://vo.codes
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    Ha, this is great. I cracked up at the SpongeBob ones.

TonyBagODonuts 5y ago

My .com renewal was $14, namecheap.

bluk 5y ago
Cloudflare renews ".com" for $8.57 USD/year (if anyone is looking for cheaper; not sure if they are the cheapest). Namecheap seemed to have the lowest price for ".io" for a while.
- koolba 5y ago
  With the proviso that you must use their DNS service.
- syshum 5y ago
  The Base Cost of a .com is $8 then there a $4,000 annual ICANN fee for the Accredited Register such costs are spread over how ever many domains under their management of course name cheap has over 10 million domains under management so that fee is nothing per domain. It can price out small competitors though
bxparks 5y ago
Cloudflare Registrar is "at cost". Hard to get cheaper than that.
- dazc 5y ago
  Is it a good idea to have your domain and dns controlled by the same company though? Say something bad happens at Cloudflare - you're kinda stuffed.
  - bxparks 5y ago
    If their DNS service goes down, I can transfer to another DNS in about 2h. I tested that. The bigger problem is if Cloudflare's AI bans my account and I lose access to their Registrar. My hope is that Cloudflare is small enough that it still has human beings in control of their AI. Unlike Google's AI which can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, which doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or sympathy. I have friends at Google, but I don't have any confidence that they will be able to help when their Terminator strikes. I'm in the process of de-Googlifying my digital life as much as possible. Getting out of Google Domains into Cloudflare was the first step. Setting up backup accounts and workflows that will continue work after a catastrophic Google AI termination can be a bit tricky.

eclipsetheworld 5y ago

The .io TLD is owned by Ethos Capital. The same private equity company that tried to buy the .org TLD a while ago. Go figure...

WhyNotHugo 5y ago
I think it's pretty sad how the rights for this get sold around, but the territory to which it belongs gets little to no revenue from domain sales. There's an ongoing complaint seeking repatriation of the domain, and I really hope I'm wrong in speculating that nothing will be done about it.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Man, that is early-Web levels of sordid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#History FYI, apparently this is the current state of UN affairs: https://www.lexpress.mu/node/388292 https://www.lexpress.mu/node/388292 (previous and recent decisions referenced)
- wwalexander 5y ago
  I’m always mind-boggled at the level of acceptance in the industry of clear misuse of ccTLDs. Is having “input/output” in your domain really so cute that it’s worth tying your entire business to an incorrect ccTLD? Especially when we have so many new cute, built-for-purpose geek-cred gTLDs like .dev.
- andylynch 5y ago
  It’s much worse than that. The Chagosian islanders who lived in this territory were all exiled by the British to make room for a military base on their land. They have been fighting in the legal system for decades just for the right to go home.
sschueller 5y ago
From their website: "OUR ETHOS Drive prosperity for all stakeholders We believe that long-term success is best accomplished through a thriving ecosystem in which prosperity is shared amongst all stakeholders." [1] Bullshit, they exist to squeeze every little penny left in a company out and then dump the hollowed out remains on the stock market to die. [1] https://ethoscapital.com/about-us/ https://ethoscapital.com/about-us/

cpach 5y ago

Related: I strongly prefer to renew yearly, so that I have a working routine for renewal.

cxr 5y ago
This works: Make use of the "renew yearly" strategy, but make sure that at any given time you're already paid up for the next 2–3 years. This will give you a wide margin for error (and a comfortable timetable to fix them).

cj 5y ago

How do we create an incentive model that kills the “parked domain” industry without out pricing people who want to host a legitimate non-commercial personal site? At first glance I was happy to see the headline because it means it’ll be more expensive for squatters to profit, but then I do sympathize with people using these domains for legitimate non-commercial purposes.

Kinrany 5y ago
This is the same problem as land value tax that was never solved.
- syshum 5y ago
  it was not solved by those that advocate for land value tax because it is not seen as a problem, just like many do not see domain "squatting" as a problem
- WhyNotHugo 5y ago
  It's solved in some [rather left leaning] countries. When you buy land you must put it to use, and if it's unused after X years, it's considered abandoned and it goes up for sale again. TBH, I think it's a solid model -- buying a finite resource like land merely with the intent to deprive others of it and make a profit in the long term is as unethical as it gets. Though completely legal is most places, of course.
  - loonster 5y ago
    With land, not using it is the equivalent to a privately funded conservation site. Its not necessarily a bad thing. Many capitalistic countries also have adverse possession laws, where if someone uses the land for X number of years, it becomes theirs.
    - have_faith 5y ago
      This loophole is solved by making it that declaring the land as such status means the land is commited to that use for a minimum number of years that makes the conservation meaningful. Something like a decade minimum with a high bar for converting it for other usage afterwards. Farmers in the UK for instance already have some incentives to leave some fields alone.

PinguTS 5y ago

It seems, that .io is rising the price every year this time around. Just about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25534498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25534498

andruby 5y ago
That's because it is owned by Ethos Capital, and is the reason they shouldn't own .org

junon 5y ago

Same thing with .sh Domains among a few others. .sh in particular is going up from 40-something to 80-something, renewal.

aimor 5y ago

What's the reasoning or history behind why domain prices A) vary between TLDs and B) are allowed to be sold at any price (think huge markups from domain speculating)?

tyingq 5y ago
There were always different entities in charge of different TLDs. ICANN, for example, has no leverage over CCTLDs. Basically because "no central authority". Then, within a TLD, some allow resellers, so competition.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
Once you have enough users, you can raise the price and they can't easily flee. For example, I (regrettably) have a .io domain with my own email, and moving away from it would be super painful. I'd have to make sure that I update my email *everywhere* (or risk my accounts getting hijacked), and even reach out to people with whom I communicate very infrequently. TBH, I _should_ do it, but I can image that taking around a year.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  If you have a good .com that's tech themed you basically have to eat the cost on the matching .io for brand protection even if you don't use it for anything.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > TBH, I _should_ do it, but I can image that taking around a year. And even then, it will probably feel bad to let it expire just because you might have forgotten an account. That's why I still have my very first email. And it's a lot of effort for saving a few bucks a year (at least in the US and the EU, for poorer countries the story might be different). Unfortunately, that's exactly what Ethos is exploiting.
  - WhyNotHugo 5y ago
    Yeah, it's not purely about the money, but also knowing where it's going. I might spend that much money on takeout in a week, and it's fine cause the money goes to the kid who biked it over, and the chef who cooked it, etc. But the same amount of money going to a corp trying to squeeze as much money as possible giving no extra value in return, and depriving the original owners of that revenue... that does tend to make me feel dirtier.

cibomahto 5y ago

It might be helpful to look at this as a percentage change- it looks like they were currently charging $42.18/year as the standard price (1), so this is a 30% price increase. (1) https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/10/enjoy-our-io-promotion-before-this-year-ends/ https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/10/enjoy-our-io-promotion-bef...

account42 5y ago
As another commenter pointed out they already raised the price a year ago - sot this is a 30% YOY increase.
- progbits 5y ago
  Well that is one way to get 30% YoY company growth... I wonder how many new domains got registered and what the total revenue diff is. Actually, could it be that the .io hype went down and this is their attempt at compensating?

baybal2 5y ago

Why .io domains are so popular?

adzm 5y ago
Because they are cool! Also identifies something as having developers or technical folk as the target audience. And because of it's popularity, it's one of the few generally trusted top-level domains (by both humans and mail daemons)
mekkkkkk 5y ago
I/O is used frequently in tech as an acronym for Input/Output. I suppose that's why it's popular for techy stuff like SaaS providers and such. It's also a moon of Jupiter which adds to the nerdgasm.
xxpor 5y ago
For me personally, it came down to the fact that $firstname.io was available, but .com, .org, .net, and whatever else I checked wasn't. Kind of regret it now, not so much for the price but because of the questionable political situation with the continued availability of the TLD doing forward.

swalsh 5y ago

The last time I suggested domains should be NFT's managed by a DAO i got a boat load of downvotes. But you have to admit, ENS's community governance model is superior to this. Its nice that domain owners have a vote in decision making process, where as here the community has no say at all.

rvz 5y ago
> ENS's community governance model is superior to this. ENS is no different and it is just you registering a .eth subdomain (collides with Ethiopia's three letter reserved TLD) in a decentralised blockchain but is on a centralised root with the key-holders sitting on a DAO. The fact that 'trust' is involved is the vulnerability with these DAOs.

noja 5y ago

OT, but I gotta say I love this retro-design (it's more visible on their homepage). A nice break from every website looking identical.

Indra_33 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

teekert 5y ago

I like how the .nl tld in the Netherlands is managed by the non-profit SIDN [0]. They are dedicated to an open internet, and they make sure that I can very easily move my domain between (hosting) providers for example (and indeed it was easy to transfer from transip to vimexx for me). They are truly independent. It's how it should be if you ask me. When I read about the .org issues and now .io, I'm happy with my .nl domain, for personal use. [0]: https://www.sidn.nl/en/about-sidn/what-we-stand-for https://www.sidn.nl/en/about-sidn/what-we-stand-for

authed 5y ago
> and they make sure that I can very easily move my domain between (hosting) providers Is it so easy that I could "do it for you"?
- teekert 5y ago
  Hehe, no, at least, not without my credentials (and I turn on 2fa everywhere). You need a key from one provider and provide it to the next, for example Transip (one of the biggest Dutch providers) has the procedure to import a domain outlined here: [0]. To move away from Transip do this: [1]. I bet it's similar for other tlds, not? I have no experience with others. I went through this, no downtime, no issues, DNS was propagated on the same evening I initiated the transfer. [0]: https://www.transip.eu/knowledgebase/entry/24-transfering-your-domain-name-transip/ https://www.transip.eu/knowledgebase/entry/24-transfering-yo... [1]: https://www.transip.co.uk/knowledgebase/entry/28-how-transfer-domain-another-provider/ https://www.transip.co.uk/knowledgebase/entry/28-how-transfe...
  - necovek 5y ago
    If you are not changing any DNS records (A/MX/CNAME... though you can change the NS records if you move the entire zone correctly, and the old NS servers keep it for a while too), there should never be any downtime related to a domain registrar change. DNS propagation is not completely under your control (there can be caching DNS servers that ignore the TTL of records), so you should always give it at least 24h by serving the same zone from both (if you've changed NS records). I'd instead avoid that worry by using non-registrar provided DNS servers. I would hope that TLD registries that fail to provide this are very few if not non-existent.

talawahtech 5y ago

FYI Cloudflare currently charges $30 per year for .io domains.

judge2020 5y ago
Chances are they'll have to follow this price increase, at least, if they don't want to start actively losing money on each domain purchase.
- talawahtech 5y ago
  Sure, I was just pointing out that their current rates are cheaper than gandi, especially for renewals. So if someone wants to renew for multiple years it may make sense to switch.
kingcharles 5y ago
Probably only for first year. Most TLDs are discounted significantly for the first year to get you in the door, then when you've built your business on the domain they hit you with the real fee when the renewal rolls around.
- talawahtech 5y ago
  No, I confirmed that it is for all years. They deliberately don't make money on domain name registration. The use it to attract/retain business for their other services.

vmoore 5y ago

Long time buyer of random domains here. Over the years I've heard reports of people trying to get back their ccTLD because they weren't a citizen of that country and had to fight back-and-forth to reclaim their domain, oftentimes handing ownership of the domain over to a trusted citizen of that country so they can keep their domain. This is why I don't build important stuff on a ccTLD and go for generic ones like .club .party etc. In my country, I have a single ccTLD that I registered with a passport scan and had to verify my legal name with the registrar, which is good because I don't have to fight to get it back in a rug-pull scenario. I don't have anything too important on it, just a few links to projects I worked on, and a contact page. The domain price could be hiked at any moment so I don't take the domain too seriously. (I've often thought of just not renewing it, and retiring it).

rasengan 5y ago
The issue is you will always be leasing versus owning unless you use Handshake. The same entity of interest, Ethos, owns most of the generic top level domain names since they own Donuts [1]. [1] https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio/ https://donuts.domains/what-we-do/top-level-domain-portfolio...
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  While I like the idea of using blockchain-determined name ownership; there's a few problems. First, you have the problems that you get just because of how blockchains work[0]. But moreso there are specific chicken-and-egg problems with migrating away from standard DNS: - Because DNS is well-established and everyone uses it, most websites want to be registered in DNS, and blockchain names provide little to no value to them. - Because blockchain names see little usage, most ISPs see no need to resolve them in addition to or overlapping standard DNS names. For a blockchain name system to actually succeed, you need buy-in from large network operators. Most network operators, for better or for worse, have just decided to trust ICANN and ICANN alone. At the very least, you would need IANA and ICANN to agree to set certain TLDs aside for competing naming systems so that network operators could be confident that resolving them wouldn't cause security problems. [0] specifically the whole 'immutability' and 'no central authority' thing legalizes certain kinds of theft

conradfr 5y ago

Thanks to their last price increase I looked in to the previously not available .com and .fr for my side project and got them both for less than the .io I was using.

da-bacon 5y ago

I used to work for a registrar and had the job of connecting up to the registries, who are the entities that ultimately allocate the domain names. (Yeah great naming choice, no chance of those words being confused with each other.) Registrars talk to registries via EPP, an xml based specification. While there is a spec, the registries variously mess it up in odd and interesting ways, all of which I got to discover as we did these integrations. .io was by far the worst. I remember that you could renew domain names in units of either 1, 2, or 5 years. It was like a developer had done the dynamic programming problem with coins and decided that they would put that in their api. Considering that .io seems to have been adopted as a signal of "geeky tech cred", I always laugh, and think really it stands for .ironic.

ted0 5y ago
The .io infrastructure under ICB was indeed quite slow. Everything moved to Afilias (and now Donuts) many years ago though and EPP is quite performant now fortunately. We deal with a few independent ccTLDs these days that are still horribly unreliable though. Not going to name any names but some of these are quite popular and still either don't run on EPP and/or run on an old outdated server in a local DC.
ted0 5y ago
Btw, would you mind sharing what registrar you worked for? No worries if not but it's a small industry!

mthoodlum 5y ago

For me, not having good domains available of hoarding is a bigger problem than paying $55/year. I'm glad there is a TLD that is useful and expensive.

peter_retief 5y ago

More reasons to move to a decentralised p2p web. 55 usd is a ridiculous amount for renewal.

_huayra_ 5y ago

This is why I only use .com and .{country code of stable country, like iceland}, as the likelihood of shenanigans on these is so low. .io definitely is one of those cool CS street cred domains, but 2x- or 3xing the price is just ridiculous :(

newfonewhodis 5y ago

I have my .io domain registered until 2023 which gives me enough time to look for an alternative and migrate all my self-hosted services over. What are the best TLDs these days to own that aren't owned by large PE companies just wanting to make a quick buck?

flotwig 5y ago

Does ICANN already have rules around what prices registrars can charge for domains? It seems like that's the only solution in the current TLD system - ICANN needs to step in and prevent anti-consumer practices like year-over-year price increases that vastly outstrip inflation.

DeathArrow 5y ago

I bought my .io domain for like 5 USD. If renewal is 55, I might let it go.

sintaxi 5y ago
Please cancel if you can. My .io domain is going to be extremely difficult to migrate off of so I feel a bit stuck.

ted0 5y ago

Ted from Namecheap here. Donuts, who now operates the .io TLD, is only increasing the wholesale price by ~10%. We are still obviously not happy about this since it's always our goal to ensure that domain pricing is as accessible as possible to our customers. It would appear that Gandi has just chosen to substantially increase their markup as part of this Donuts update. Our pricing will likely only increase a small amount, if at all.

fady 5y ago
Thanks Ted for the update. I bought my io domain from you guys many years ago when it was $70 or so. Thanks for keeping the price low over the years and for the update.
- ted0 5y ago
  Thanks for choosing us!
ricardo81 5y ago
TBF to Gandhi, IIRC they tend to give favourable prices when you buy domains or deposit funds in bulk. Their opening tier of prices are indeed pricey. Their API is excellent though. I've always found Namecheap to be price competitive and their customer service is pretty good also. API was always a bit basic (think that had a lot to do with enom implementation)
- ted0 5y ago
  I'm sure they do indeed have special pricing for bulk customers. Although, not sure how much has changed with them since they were acquired by private equity a couple of years ago. I do admit that our API needs some love - fortunately we have a lot of major backend updates in the works and a new API will follow at some point. Unrelated but we did roll out a new API (entirely separate from the API you're referring to) for our Auctions platform: https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/12017783/TW6wKUfy https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/12017783/TW6wKUfy. Curious to get your feedback if you're interested in taking it for a spin!
- 5y ago

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

What is the groups preference for "best" registrar? Good balance of usability, available TLD's, pricing and security?

908B64B197 5y ago

I understand the initial design of ccTLDs but can we just admit it's mostly a failure? People use them as vanity URLs and there is little to no consistency in how they are used. .io, .ai and .tv are good examples. Then you have .ly where the local warlord can decide to ban your domain for no reasons. At least .gov, .edu, .com and .org are somewhat consistent.