Real world benefits of being a TAG holder...?

[willbon]

Considering getting my own TAG with Nominet as a channel partner...

...with hosting cock-ups and imminent price hikes just about everywhere, I'm thinking now might be a good time to get a TAG....

What are the real world benefits of this?

- Is it easy to renew domains with your own TAG?.. is most of it automated?

- Is there a user friendly control panel?

- Can you get software to 'resell' the domains.. i.e. take online orders. Or is it best to keep to manual regging?

.. Please say what it is that made you become a TAG holder... and why you still use the service.. or have gone back to a 3rd party?

All info appreciated... I'm guessing there's one or two others thinking of taking the leap too.

Thanks

W

 

[willbon]

Read this and onward from it if you haven't already.

Thanks for that... saw the other pages through a link but managed to miss this!... I see getting your own domain reg client software at about £1K+ and annual maintenance... server costs... then there's the payment side etc...
I'm guessing entry costs require at least 1500 to 2000 minimum registrations per year to make it pay for itself... with no profit... tens of thousands to make it start working for you...

Public domain registration.....That's a no from me!



From portfolio management with a 'few' clients... I'm still interested in the tag, however....

 

[Edwin]

One very obvious benefit is you'll save money. The payoff comes much quicker with the forthcoming price hike.

To become a Nominet member is £400 (there's also an annual fee of £100 after the first year).

So if you think of a 2-year period, that's a total of £500.

Divide that by the number of domains you own, and that's the overhead per domain of becoming a member.

For example, if you own 200 domains, then that's £2.50 per domain of Membership overhead for the first 2 years.

Now let's see what happens if you had those 200 domains at a registrar like 123-Reg. From 1 March they're going to be £6.99+VAT per year with no price break for a 2-year registration. So those same 200 domains would cost you £2,796+VAT to own over a 2-year period.

Going directly to Nominet, you would only be paying £1,500+VAT for the same 2-year period for those 200 domains (that's the actual reg/renewal fee) plus another £500 for membership.

So from the above (and assuming I haven't boobed on the math) the break-even point for Nominet membership is well under 200 names.

If you're talking about registering/renewing for yourself, you can do all that through Nominet's online interface, so the additional development cost is £0.

 

[willbon]

So from the above (and assuming I haven't boobed on the math) the break-even point for Nominet membership is well under 200 names.

Nice Maths Edwin! - I'll take your word for it... but looks OK!

I've done the sums on mine and realised that I would.. with the 2 yr regging rather than 1 actually halve the domain name renewal bill!

It's a wonder that some domainers even with small portfolios are not clubbing together on a shared tag... or are they?

 

[Edwin]

Nice Maths Edwin! - I'll take your word for it... but looks OK!

I've done the sums on mine and realised that I would.. with the 2 yr regging rather than 1 actually halve the domain name renewal bill!

It's a wonder that some domainers even with small portfolios are not clubbing together on a shared tag... or are they?

If you've got the funds for it, you'd better get cracking if you want to beat the 1 March deadline, get a Membership and a TAG and then renew out into the future!

Because then you save an additional £1.25/name/year compared to what you will pay post 1 March.

 

[Edwin]

The fee schedule is here. The first year is £400 joining + £100 annual (unless one joins within the latter 6 months until August when it is reduced to £50) + VAT. The first two years would therefore be either £550 or £600 + VAT.

Thanks. Their wording was far more ambiguous than that table, and could have been read both ways. That clarifies things (and shifts the tipping point a few more domains down the line)

 

[monaghan]

In my opinion, the most valuable benefit of being a member and a tag holder is that you can remove yourself from the cock-ups of other registrars Of course, you are still free to make mistakes of your own!

Software wise, if you don't want to write your own system, take a look at something like WHMCS. This has a Nominet module, you can pop this on a domain, tweak the module settings with your TAG settings and sell domains, pop in a payment processor and you can more or less do hands free domain reselling. If you connect this to a cPanel reseller account or dedicated server, you can run the whole thing more or less hands free.

I joined years ago and have never looked back.

Additionally you get the benefit of having your name or company name as your TAG which looks much better than asking a client to transfer a name to a registrar's tag so you can manage it for them.

 

[Kari]

I always thought it was more than that ..

hmm may give this some thought