being a registrar

RobM · Oct 22, 2018

Have any of you tagholders ever thought about being a public registrar? I tend to switch between thinking it's not worth the time setting up a site but other times I wonder if people would go for it. Today is a 'maybe it's worth it' day - we'll see tomorrow lol

dee · Oct 22, 2018

You mean deal with the general public buying domain names on your tag? Seem like it would need to be a big numbers game to me.

omcgb · Oct 22, 2018

The marketing spend would be too high to compete and will bring a whole load of hassle.

dee · Oct 22, 2018

inteldigital said:
Well, I'm giving it a shot. I think the thing with this industry is that it doesn't happen overnight. It's a long game. Look at most registrars and they've been around for a while before "coming up". Check out Krystal Hosting for one great example.

Whats your customer interface / backend ? I guess it need to be as hands off as possible. What do you use for billing / customer control panel if you dont mind me asking ?

RobM · Oct 22, 2018

Maybe I'll just create a 'registrar in a box' solution like the public dropcatching. ie one that does all the paperwork, billing, reminders etc Still doesn't really get round the problem of people's costs for customer support.

Skinner · Oct 22, 2018

I think there maybe room for a domainer registrar, which in time could go public but really don't think its worth the hassle.

Whois-Search · Oct 23, 2018

RobM said:
Have any of you tagholders ever thought about being a public registrar? I tend to switch between thinking it's not worth the time setting up a site but other times I wonder if people would go for it. Today is a 'maybe it's worth it' day - we'll see tomorrow lol

I’ve spent 5 years developing Netistrar.com so far and I can tell you there is a lot of expense and time that goes in to it.

Instead of dealing with just Nominet (very easy to manage with their WDM and credit limit) imagine dealing with 20 Nominet’s each with their own different EPP back-end and payment terms.

Then imagine when you get in to gTLD world there is often no “credit limit” and everything is pre-pay or post-pay. Also unlike .uk they auto-renew on expiry (from your balance) until they are deleted. That’s even before you get in to selling premium new gTLDs and the 1k 2k 3k credit has to be with Donuts first etc

So if you want to sell .com .net etc you have got to send thousands of dollars a time to Verisign (via a US checking account) and keep a live balance on the screen in the office! Watching it burn down and trying to predict volume both on expiry and registrations.

Unless of course you are a Godaddy and just send them a million or two every so often

RobM · Oct 23, 2018

Yes I was just thinking of uk registration only. Seems little point in going for other extensions unless you're going to lease out your epp to snapnames or the like and not much margin for resellers.