Good to see Nom have started the ball rolling on big hikes...

[TinkyWinky]

Fast on the heels of DomainMonster price increases...

Fasthosts obviously see the need to follow suit :

All .uk domains

Current Renewal Price £6.99pa

New Renewal Price* £9.99pa

From October 26th.

With over 1 million domains in .uk managed - that's a tidy increase in income.

Time to remove the remaining 10 or so domains I have there to another provider that is not quite so greedy - asuming there is one.

Any suggestions?

TW

 

[wonder_lander]

Get your own TAG or give Lowreg a look?

 

[Nigel]

What a greedy move - that's a massive increase

I'm sticking with Daily at the moment - if you buy credits they're really good value for .co.uk and .uk - not sure who's next best if they make a similar move to Fasthosts.

 

[dog]

LCN has good bulk pricing over 100+ domains.

 

[Nigel]

yes that looks pretty good. I've got a few with lcn - only thing I don't like is the fact that they automatically apply privacy to all .co.uk and .uk domains - I'd rather our company details are shown - think it looks better to potential buyers.

 

[scottmccloud]

I can't remember the exact amount of domains somebody worked out when it was cost-effective to get a tag but I'd highly recommend it even if you don't have this number. I used to have loads of problems with registrars like 1 and 1, GoDaddy and 123-Reg. Now I've got a tag, no such issues.

 

[Edwin]

I'm at the front of the queue to kick Nominet, but I'm not sure what the price rise has to do with them (thread title)? Their own price rise was quite a while ago. Smells more like large registrars profiteering "because they can" rather than anything Nominet has instigated.

 

[markb]

I can't remember the exact amount of domains somebody worked out when it was cost-effective to get a tag but I'd highly recommend it even if you don't have this number. I used to have loads of problems with registrars like 1 and 1, GoDaddy and 123-Reg. Now I've got a tag, no such issues.

If you have your own tag, how do you manage the dns and other settings for your domain names ?

 

[Edwin]

If you have your own tag, how do you manage the dns and other settings for your domain names ?

Most hosting packages offer DNS. If you're using a parking solution, then they will have DNS too. And if neither situation applies, there are plenty of free/cheap DNS providers. For example (not remotely an exhaustive list)

FREE
https://freedns.afraid.org/
https://www.cloudns.net/
https://www.namecheap.com/store/domains/freedns
https://dns.he.net/
https://www.dynu.com/en-US

CHEAP
http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/

 

[martin-s]

I'm at the front of the queue to kick Nominet, but I'm not sure what the price rise has to do with them (thread title)? Their own price rise was quite a while ago. Smells more like large registrars profiteering "because they can" rather than anything Nominet has instigated.

My instinct is that a lot of the registrars are using higher prices to balance (and improve) the books, having used Nominet co-marketing campaigns. Nominet increasing pricing has definitely unfrozen the race to the bottom though.

Being a registrar without being a hosting company probably isn't a viable business model. So are there commercial opportunities for lower cost registrars? I honestly don't know.

 

[martin-s]

A solid free DNS provider (with full api functionality): https://www.rackspace.com/en-gb/cloud/dns

 

[Edwin]

Being a registrar without being a hosting company probably isn't a viable business model. So are there commercial opportunities for lower cost registrars? I honestly don't know.

I would have thought that if you can automate absolutely everything, it should be possible to survive on a 50p to £1 per year per domain markup on Nominet's base price. But then I'm not trying to run a public-facing registrar, so it's easy for me to speculate...

 

[Edwin]

A solid free DNS provider (with full api functionality): https://www.rackspace.com/en-gb/cloud/dns

They seem to ask you to sign up to a paid cloud account. At least, they ask for credit card details as part of the signup process...

 

[Edwin]

BTW, there's something of an annoying chicken-and-egg situation with a lot of the DNS providers in that they won't activate the records you specify (or in some cases even allow you to edit the DNS in the first place) until you change the nameservers of the domain in question to theirs... but of course that takes down any live site you've got running until the new settings propagate. Still, that's the price of "free" I guess.

 

[RobM]

I would have thought that if you can automate absolutely everything, it should be possible to survive on a 50p to £1 per year per domain markup on Nominet's base price. But then I'm not trying to run a public-facing registrar, so it's easy for me to speculate...

How many domains would you have to sell to employ only one person to provide customer service? This was one reason I decided not to go ahead after a month of development. People want reliable service - that means multiple people, secure systems, large overheads. I already have staff and an office and even then the figures just couldn't make it worthwhile unless you want to charge more (which people don't want apparently).

 

[DomainManage]

I am offering .uk at £5.50 per year to a limited amount of users - PM me for details if interested.

 

[Edwin]

How many domains would you have to sell to employ only one person to provide customer service? This was one reason I decided not to go ahead after a month of development. People want reliable service - that means multiple people, secure systems, large overheads. I already have staff and an office and even then the figures just couldn't make it worthwhile unless you want to charge more (which people don't want apparently).

True. £1 a year is only 8.33p a month. You'd have to sell many thousands of domains to make that math work.

 

[RobM]

Well imagine you have 2 people for customer service as you'll need so many domains. Now multiply the average wage x 2 and you can provide support 40 hours per week. I don't know what the average wage in UK is but that alone is 50k per year. People want evening and weekend support (although nominet and others don't bother but seem to get away with it). So you have another person - that's another 25k per year. Now add in the cost of multiple servers you need for redundancy and service provision. Add on to that rent, electricity, internet, utility, accountant fees, lawyer fees. You're looking now at at least 100k per year running costs and that is without any profit for yourself. That's at least 100,000 domains every year to break even. People want low cost but they expect good support and infrastructure. You can't have both.

 

[Edwin]

Interesting figures. Though of course if they work from home remotely you don't need the office and much of the other stuff. Stick it all in the cloud and the multiple servers go away. And if they work offshore remotely the salary figures come way down. There's absolutely no reason to be obliged to provide telephone support, for instance, at a super-low registration price. Live chat and email should be enough.

But you're right, it's still going to be large numbers.

 

[RobM]

Would you trust your business to a fred-in-the-shed hiring remote workers, using a bog standard freelancer bootstrap website, a uk 'address' that we can all get ,to save money? I have a bricks and mortar business as well as online services and the biggest expense is always staff no matter where they work from. Basically I could die tomorrow and everything would still be run. If you are alone or have one or two remote staff you can't offer that. Don't get me wrong - I agree with you on what 'should' be enough. Unfortunately the paying public disagree. That is why nobody is filling the inexpensive niche. It's simply not worth the effort.