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

[Edwin]

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 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.

I'm imagining (purely as a thought exercise) a registrar that does literally nothing more than offer domain registrations. DNS provision etc. is left up to the client. Basically just the same as Nominet: you can set the NS but beyond that you have to sort things out. So it would be for people who don't want the hassle/cost of registering with Nominet.

Somehow LCN.com seem to manage it when you look at their domain pricing https://www.lcn.com/domain-names/bulk-pricing

Perhaps one way would be to require a minimum number of domains under management per customer, e.g. 100. That way, each client brings a useful amount of income, and you're not having to support people with only one or a handful of names. At £1 over Nominet, each client would be worth £100+ a year. So strictly a "bulk domain registrar", not end-user facing. There's still a small gap between sticking with a retail registrar, and going direct to Nominet. And since Nominet charges £100/year for membership, £1 per domain across 100 domains means you wind up in exactly the same situation price-wise.

 

[RobM]

That's not 50p or 1 pound per domain though That's 2.43 per domain - quite a difference in costs. Where you needed 100,000 domains per year in our example you now only need 40,000. Anyway it's digressing. This is hardly an 'automated' system with one person charging 1 pound per domain profit. Business models already exist. That doesn't mean they're all profitable or reliable.

 

[twikamltd]

Prices are getting silly now for *.uk domains, but what do you expect after the Godaddy/HEG deal

https://www.freevirtualservers.com/

£6.99+VAT recurring standard price, £5.99+VAT recurring using code 'NOMINET599', price rises will only match Nominet, you also get a small free cPanel account with each domain registration for DNS, 1 email account, email forwarding, Free Weebly etc.

Plus if you transfer any .co.uk/.me.uk/.org.uk domain for which you have the .uk rights for before the end of October, you can register the .uk for free for 2 years until end of October.

 

[Edwin]

That's not 50p or 1 pound per domain though That's 2.43 per domain - quite a difference in costs. Where you needed 100,000 domains per year in our example you now only need 40,000.

Why? LCN charge £4.95+VAT. Nominet charge £3.75+VAT. That's £1.20 per domain. And the gap decreases rapidly with volume. If you have 100 domains with LCN, you're paying just £0.50 per domain over Nominet pricing.

 

[RobM]

Well I just clicked on the link you posted and was confronted with '€6.18 +vat for co.uk'. Anyway I was just saying why I don't think people can do it on an 'automated' system for 50p or 1 pound profit per domain per year as you originally asked.
*edit* doh - euros!! my bad.

 

[Edwin]

Well I just clicked on the link you posted and was confronted with '€6.18 +vat for co.uk'. Anyway I was just saying why I don't think people can do it on an 'automated' system for 50p or 1 pound profit per domain per year as you originally asked.

Perhaps because you're outside the UK you're being shown a price in Euro? Anyway, I don't disagree with the fundamentals of your analysis. I was just nibbling away at the edges of some of the sums.

 

[RobM]

Yeah sorry my mistake. I would love to see some tagholders do this. There are hundreds of tagholders who *could* yet a handful that *have*. I was just saying there is a reason for that.

 

[martin-s]

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...

Yes, you have to hand over your credit card, but they won't charge it for DNS use, only cloud hosting/files/etc.

 

[Edwin]

Yes, you have to hand over your credit card, but they won't charge it for DNS use, only cloud hosting/files/etc.

Thanks for clarifying that.

 

[lazarus]

I find that cloudflare offers some great DNS and a lot of other useful stuff like security and speed features included their free account too. Their GUI is really nice and easy to use.

 

[TinkyWinky]

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.

True it was a while back - March 2016.

However, looking at the bigger/mid term picture and the NEED for a huge 50% increase stinks.

Well Nom stinks really... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/25/nominet_raises_price_uk_domains/ - but we know this.

Is there a desperate need for additional funds right now? Do Nominet not have £millions in funds at their disposal? They could always remove a few of the over paid execs and remove bonuses (as it is a monopoly) if they need to liquidate some funds?

More than that, there was never really going to be any resistance and Nom know that. Larger registrars were never going to fight against the ridiculous hike, because they stand to gain most from the increase thanks to the sheer volume of domains that are registered and paid for through them. And whilst the changes in the way Nom can push things through - I am sure if a few of the larger boys had leaned hard enough - it woudln't have been so easy.

As per my example - I know Fasthosts have over 1 million .uk domains (or that's what they have promoted in the past) - so adding £3 per domain, per year, means instant £3m+ additional income. Are their systems going to get any better - who knows - maybe.

My point really is, had Nominet pushed their pricing up by say £0.50 per domain per year - then would the big registrars be looking at £9.99 per year reg fees - possibly, but unlikely imho.

That was my point - so yes a bash at Nom because I don't remember seeing any nailed down reason for the need for such a big increase - which in turn has allowed others to increase the prices as they see fit.

TW

 

[RobM]

If I was on the board I would do a deal with registrars to increase prices at my end enabling them to increase prices (non-proportionally) at their end for a nice 'reward'. Even better if I have a friend or relative running it.... I would also introduce an unnecessary extension which they could also sell. Any extra money I would either swallow up in pay rises as much as I can get away with, unnecessary expensive business trips, or funnel the funds to non-related domain industries (preferably ones run by my friends or relatives). I'm not on the board though so I'm sure that doesn't happen.

 

[dog]

Somehow these guys made it work.

https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/namesilo-reaches-1-million-domain-milestone.149394/

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).

 

[martin-s]

Somehow these guys made it work.

https://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/namesilo-reaches-1-million-domain-milestone.149394/

Yes, but there isn't the volume to do that in the UK market I wouldn't have thought.

 

[dog]

There are 10+ million .UK domains namespace. Sounds like a good market to me.

 

[Edwin]

There are 10+ million .UK domains namespace. Sounds like a good market to me.

But millions of those are owned by people who only have 1-5 domains or less. That's a very, very expensive market to go after.

And because becoming a member of Nominet only costs £400 one time and £100 a year (to get access to per-domain pricing that no registrar can match) most people with over about 250 domains will be members.

So the potential universe of valuable clients (those with a decent number of registrations, yet who are NOT Nominet members) will be correspondingly restricted.

It's instructive that .uk/.co.uk seem to be some of the few extensions that NameSilo don't offer despite their lean, streamlined operation...

 

[Skinner]

My database is a little out of date at the moment after screw up at Jolt Nuked my database, but I'm showing the following top 30 tags. Spot number 4 is domains past drop, or unscanned due to database issue, not a mystery tag.

Rank - Tag - Count - Percentage
1 123-REG 2,224,342 20.1355
2 1AND1 1,184,262 10.7203
3 GODADDY 1,002,729 9.0770
5 LIVEDOMAINS 848,829 7.6839
6 NAMESCO 316,809 2.8679
7 HEARTINTERNET 314,096 2.8433
8 ENOM 248,794 2.2522
9 TUCOWS-CA 236,205 2.1382
10 LCN 208,165 1.8844
11 UK2NET 176,724 1.5998
12 EASYSPACE 126,552 1.1456
13 ASCIO 124,652 1.1284
14 WEBCONSULTANCY 117,390 1.0627
15 PDR-IN 106,888 0.9676
16 EXTEND 104,647 0.9473
17 BTNAMES 101,807 0.9216
18 TJNF-DK 100,384 0.9087
19 GANDI 97,139 0.8793
20 KEY-SYSTEMS-DE 88,768 0.8036
21 MONSTER 88,535 0.8014
22 CSC-CORP-DOMAINS 83,656 0.7573
23 NSI-US 82,717 0.7488
24 DAILY 77,165 0.6985
25 UKWEBHOSTING 76,911 0.6962
26 THERMAL 74,661 0.6759
27 CRAZYDOMAINS-AE 47,223 0.4275
28 1API-DE 43,703 0.3956
29 FREEPARKING 35,171 0.3184
30 MARKMONITOR 34,760 0.3147

If you join up the "connected" tags, you can see 1 tag holds about 1/3 of the total domains, which happens to be the same tag pushing the price up.

Now adjust your math, from 1m domains to say 4,000,000 and the £2-3 increase suddenly it starts to make nominets profits look smaller.

p.s. I haven't followed recent moves and shakes, if anyone wants to pair up al the connected tags, maybe interesting. I know GoDaddy, 123-Reg, Monster and Heart, but not sure on others.

 

[Blossom]

I know GoDaddy, 123-Reg, Monster and Heart, but not sure on others.

Daily is in with those too.

Also one of the above will be leaving that list permanently in the near future

 

[Blossom]

Somehow LCN.com seem to manage it when you look at their domain pricing https://www.lcn.com/domain-names/bulk-pricing

A lot of registrars sell domains at break-even or loss to get customers in. Hosting and add-ons is where the profit is.

The US industry can be a bit different; some of them do stupid low sales on domains, but they have massively priced domain privacy, and then after that renewals are often much higher/double the average market price.

 

[Skinner]

If Daily is in, does that mean paragon, tso, Vida are all in too ? Or am I mixing it up ? I'm sure daily took Evohosting, but also paragon group, but not been keeping up.