Price increase for .COM, .XYZ, and more domains | Hacker News Reader

Price increase for .COM, .XYZ, and more domains

namecheap.com

58 pointskassner48 comments

Verisign is clearly abusing, with major rise of their registry fees for com, net, ... domains every 6 months or years. With without any actual relation to the cost to the registry but just to get an explosion of income.

Now, the price for owning such a basic domain name is insanely high compared to what it is. By now, in a free market, price should be close to zero and not the opposite.

These ass are abusing of their monopoly position to racket us all, I would like so much that something could be done by someone.

For custom root domains like CEO, I don't care that much, but .com, .net, should be kind of a common good.

Otherwise, maybe we should push for an alternative global domain name system.

A "Let's Encrypt" style org for a 3 letter TLD would be interesting. And it doesn't even have to be in the "completely free" sense, just an industry backed org interested in providing a well managed TLD without an interest in making a profit from doing so.

I know there were places like tk but they were less an organization managing the TLD and more a phishing and SPAM pit which still had a paid side of the business anyways. Other places offer varying things on this spectrum for subdomains but it's not a TLD and they often don't attempt to solve any of the actual problems offering domains does.

An alternative root just feels excessive given we only need 1 "good natured" TLD for the way we use the web to remain unchanged while preventing price gouging to host on it.

Agreed.

Let's never forget our homies and bredrin over at https://freedns.afraid.org/

Absolutely abysmal of verisign. I still remember back when they made every NXDOMAIN resolve to their shitty web-search breaking the internet. Lasted about a week.

There's absolutely no reason to raise the prices.

I put bbs.io on there for use with online/telnet bulletin boards... I also put a couple other domains I have on there as well.

Not sure I'd want a free tld, but would definitely like one that doesn't allow some of the seo gaming allowed on the other tlds and had something closer to a fixed price that allowed the registrar to operate as well as other reg's to make say $2/yr on... maybe $5/yr or something.

I love the vibes of this site.

While I’d love to see that, it’s known that anything free will be majorly abused for various attacks. Heck, even paid but cheap TLDs like xyz are often completely blocked in corporate networks.

I agree, that's why I think it's less about being free and more about not being for-profit and given lots of funding by major industry backers for that purpose to help keep revenue incentives less interesting. It's fine to pay a good price for proper identity validation, abuse mediation, avoiding low dollar scams, and the like. The cost to be avoiding is just ramping up the price year by year to increase margin.

.com domains get blocked too. Any security based on the assumption that a site is good or bad based solely on the tld is a complete failure.

I meant blocking the entire TLD. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28554400

ISOC/PIR (who run .org) was kinda supposed to be this, but then they tried to sell .org to private equity. See: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/what-the-heck-happened-w...

With all of the upsells and other offerings that monthly services that also can allow a user to use a domain name, I think you're right.

> Verisign is clearly abusing,

They have stakeholders, you know. /s

It's not hard to guess where this is heading. Unless you are wealthy enough, you will eventually be priced out of owning domains with certain TLDs. We need domains for the internet to function, and we all want domains to remain predictably priced. So let's nationalize the .com and .net TLDs and loosen Verisign's grip. Combining that with price controls would provide a secure alternative to trusting privately owned TLDs.

On positive side, cyber squatters will be priced out from holding millions of domains.

Is there any way to actually own a domain name rather than perpetually lease it?

Yes.

Host your own root DNS server for your tld, make it public and convince folk to use it.

Additional resources:

https://opennic.org/

https://wiki.opennic.org/opennic/creating_new_tlds

No.

This desperately needs a solution.

I mean, there are other nets you can use - you can create and own a .onion address, for example. The public internet being fully leased is a feature, not a bug.

You could also just start your own country - you'll have just about as much luck convincing anyone.

This is just annoying. I maintain an XYZ domain because it cost me pennies to buy. But geez, the renewal fees. That is how they get you. Now, I will go back to using github.io, netlify.app, or whatever Cloudflare Pages have. It just isn't worth it to maintain a domain for a personal page.

Most things in life have a reasonable cost set by market forces. My expectations for a domain is in the $10-20 price range. Anything lower than that means I have to pay attention to marketing gimmicks.

There are also plenty of “free forever” subdomains if you are looking for, i.e.: afraid.org

Namecheap is cheap but not in the primary meaning of the word.

It is wild to me that they have 1700+ employees. With that headcount, it’s easy to see why there are dozens of places undercutting their price on .COM.

Yeah, but mostly in Ukraine and other places outside of the States. Most companies make money not from registrations but from added services (email, hosting, etc.) or from aftermarket sales and dropped/expired domain auctions.

Not sure what you mean. Pay peanuts - get monkeys is exactly what namecheap is about.

On the contrary! By not charging peanuts for domain names, you won't attract customers for peripheral services, which are the only ones making decent revenue! Domain registrations are a small business opportunity!

In the 'shop' sense of the word, they're spot on.

They are far from cheap, and they are not secure either. I removed the 2FA from an account via chat without any authentication, and others said on HN that they managed to do the same. They are a terrible company - stay away! You can spend millions protecting your infrastructure, but if your domain is not well-protected, all can go down the drain instantly!

What is the inherent value Verisign offers here? Is it hosting an entry for my domain in a database somewhere that someone can lookup using DNS?

And if so, why can't we just solve that problem using some sort of decentralized solution?

Globally distributed critical infra isn't free.

"As of March 31, 2024, we had 172.5 million .com and .net registrations in the domain name base."

https://investor.verisign.com/static-files/2412702e-e744-485...

"1865 instances operated by the 12 independent root server operators."

Verisign maintains root servers at 209 locations. ("A" and "J") https://root-servers.org/

Latency https://a.root-servers.org/metrics

13 root servers https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers

> What is the inherent value Verisign offers here?

Given most other TLDs have a similar price, it’s fair to assume that’s roughly what it takes to run a TLD. For the 2014-era of gTLDs, you already start with a $180k/year ICANN fee before you even have a DNS server online.

> Is it hosting an entry for my domain in a database somewhere that someone can lookup using DNS?

I’d say the main value comes from making sure the DB record isn’t tampered, so you can trust that you own the domain and no random actor can take it from you. Value would tank significantly if you couldn’t trust that. Although most of that work is done by the registrars nowadays, it’s on the registry’s behalf.

> can't we just solve that problem using some sort of decentralized solution

There are over 1500 TLDs and Verisign controls only a handful of them. For me that can be seen as decentralized already.

> And if so, why can't we just solve that problem using some sort of decentralized solution?

Because _we need to make a profit_.

I used to have all my domains on namecheap and they used to be good but I transferred all my domains away years ago and seeing this I have no regrets. I would be paying at least $100 more per year if I stayed with them at this point.

I don't like Namecheap, but this particular price increase is caused by the registry. I just checked Cloudflare, which sells domains at cost, and they're raising prices too:

https://paste.debian.net/plainh/2ae79637

.com is listed separately at $10.44

I don't think they have a public link for this.

Verisign hiked prices, once again: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/verisign-vrsn-q4-domain-name...

> VeriSign announced that from Sep 1, 2024, it will increase the annual registry-level wholesale price for .net domain names by 67 cents to $10.26 from $9.59.

Same here- I used to have all my domains on Namecheap until their CEO came on HN to announce that anybody who forced their parents to give birth to them in Russia has exactly 1 week to transfer all their domains away somewhere else.

I don't fall into that category, but this was so ignorant and insulting that I transferred away all my domains to Cloudflare and never looked back.

Yep, same here. The second they decided to just drop all their customers with a specific nationality I immediately transferred everything I had elsewhere.

Why choose to do business with a company like that when there's other companies they aren't doing things like that? Why choose to stay with a company where tomorrow your government could do something they disapprove of and they're now dropping you and now you're scrambling to rectify things?

But you don't understand: what "your government" is doing is really bad. And a big part of Namecheap's team is the recipient of what "your government" is doing. And you paying taxes to "your government", or even at the grocery store as you live your nondescript life, is you implicitly supporting "your government" in doing those bad things.

Therefore dropping you as a customer with almost zero notice is warranted (you monster).

If you don't like it, then email our team and plead with us and justify yourself. Tell us you're one of the good ones. We might deign to give you a bit more time to pack your bags.

(To sarcastically paraphrase the Namecheap CEO's statements here on HN.)

> Tell us you're one of the good ones.

I guess it depends on the definition of "good" which seems to be quiet volatile. /s

Good, thank you for doing that. I see the peanut gallery is triggered by the R-word and is trying to silence you. Before pressing that down button, please familiarize yourself with the announcement and see how much problems it created for the already very troubled Russian opposition at the worst possible time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812

Fuck Namecheap. I'll be spreading the word around until I die. I have already costed them half a dozen potential clients who cared about my opinion enough to decide to look elsewhere.

Of course this makes perfect sense. Why should people be responsible for actions of a dictator? I can't believe this comment is downvoted

wondering whether namecheap is blocked rn on Israel

Yeah as soon as I heard that news, I left Namecheap.

Where did you transfer them?

Porkbun, seems like the best deal I’ve found so far.

Transfer as many domains as possible to Cloudflare.

God no we don't need to centralize the internet even more into their hands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com