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Comment by tqkxzugoaupvwqr | Hacker News Reader

Extend your domain lease by 10 years at the current yearly fee. Gives you some time to migrate if you choose to.

That's a bad deal unless you actually need ten years to migrate, which you probably don't. Better off to take a year or three at the 10% annual increase and then stop paying entirely (~364% of the existing rate for three years, with payments made in the future rather than the present) than to pay 1000% of the existing rate right now.

10 years is a long time, maybe until than its bought back to non-profit, you never know. Also it allows you the luxury of starting worrying about your migration later. If you could invest that money now with more than 4-5 times US interest rates (which is the price increase I would expect), then I would consider this a bad deal.

If it's reverted back to non-profit then prepaying is still a bad proposition because then you're paying today the same amount you would be able to pay years from now -- and paying it to the for-profit entity now instead of the non-profit entity later.

And I don't see any reason to expect the annual probability that it's transitioned back to a non-profit to be a lot different in the future than it is right now, which means that if it makes sense to migrate then it doesn't make sense to wait. Especially when continued use of the domain only increases the migration cost as it gets further distributed as your active contact information.

Isn't the price like $12 a year? So prepaying 10 years would be $120? That's not an insignificant amount, but it's not like you're going to make a life-changing profit by investing it either.

Locking down [your-name].org for 10 years carries its own value proposition beyond the mere calculation of price today vs in the future.

> Isn't the price like $12 a year? So prepaying 10 years would be $120? That's not an insignificant amount, but it's not like you're going to make a life-changing profit by investing it either.

For most people there aren't a lot of individual decisions that will cause you to make a life-changing profit on their own, but it's making little decisions again and again that adds up.

> Locking down [your-name].org for 10 years carries its own value proposition beyond the mere calculation of price today vs in the future.

The premise is that you're going to immediately migrate away from using the domain. Which means that any further use of the old domain just keeps you invested in it, and it's not worth a whole lot if you're not going to use it for anything.

There is also something to be said for minimizing the profits of the entity screwing you over, even if it's only by a little, because that adds up too.

If you stop leasing a domain, you should be very sure that you changed your e-mail address at all the services you ever used and informed all the contacts of your new e-mail address. Because the second you let your domain expire, someone else might gobble it up and receive all the e-mail addressed to you. If you keep leasing for multiple years even after migration, you can be sure to catch any services/people still mailing you at the old address.

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