If it seems like 2023 is not only the hottest year, but the most expensive, I wouldn’t blame you. I have some unfortunate news I must share with everyone and that is Verisign, the company that runs the .COM TLD, is increasing the wholesale price from $8.97 to $9.59 on September 1, 2023. Last year, I said it would be nice if the price would decrease but that it was unlikely. It is indeed very unlikely.
Why am I sharing you the wholesale price? Because at NodeSpace, we believe in transparency. Part of that is we’re not a registrar. We are a register. When you order a domain from us, we’re registering it on your behalf with a registrar. It’s true, this is a service we’re a middleman for and that means our vendor has to make money and we have to make money.
Our new price starting September 1 is $15. If you do some basic math, we don’t make much of a profit off domains. And 18¢ of that goes to ICANN. Yeah, it sucks. The only “winner” here is Verisign.
That’s why we’re urging you and our customers to renew, transfer or register domains now through September 1 so you can avoid giving Verisign more money than you need to.
Why domains keep increasing
Several years ago, ICANN and the United States government gave Verisign the right to increase the cost of .COM 7% every year in the last 4 years of each 6 year contract. Since this is the third year Verisign has increased the price, it’s expected that they will do it again next year, bringing the wholesale price to $10.26 in 2024. If that happens, our price will be increasing to $18/year. After all, we’ve got bills to pay.
How to save now
The only way to save is to renew your .COM domains early and add extra years to them now, “locking” in the current price. If you’re thinking about buying a domain, now is the time to do it.
.COM domains are permitted to be registered for a maximum of 10 years. That means if you register a domain today or are going to renew, you can add up to the year 2033 at the current price of $12/year.
How we’re fighting this
We think it’s wrong to price gouge on domains. .COM is the most popular TLD. Each price increase means Verisign gets richer while their costs to operate the domain go down.
That’s why we keep our domain price as low as possible. We make our money on our hosting and our servers. Oh yeah, and our managed services.
So how do we fight a company traded on the NYSE and has a lot more money and lawyers than we do? We participate with ICANN and we write our Congress representatives. Only they can put an end to this madness. You can too. Imagine if your property taxes increased without your ability to vote on it. That’s what’s happening.
The Internet doesn’t belong to corporations. It belongs to the people. That is a belief that we will always hold. People over profits!
