Yahoo Domains

Yep. They did it. They jacked the price up to $34.95 on the renewal years for domain names.

Yahoo has gone off the deep end here.  They start by getting people in the door at $9.95 per year and they try to get you to register for multiple years with the scare tactic that your price is going to be $34.95 after that.  This change affects millions of domain names.  I’ve been in this business a long time…got into it when domains cost about $50 per year to start.  I started out with NetSol, then Verio, then Godaddy, and Registerfly. Finally, settled back down at Godaddy after trying many others.

Over time – the price of domains had come down to about $7-8 per year. This was the good ol days of domain pricing when godaddy had the best pricing in town. Then ICANN started letting the registry get rich off the deal and they allowed extra charges for domain name registration that goes straight to the registry that registrars have to collect.

We are seeing a reversal in pricing right now on the web. Prices are rising. When will it stop and level off? We have no idea. The registry (NSI) wants to keep raising their fees and therefore – raising the price of domains. We have some large registrars like register.com, godaddy, and networksolutions – along with Yahoo – that are starting to raise rates because they control such a large part of the market. The other share is controlled by Tucows (which has resellers, but they don’t sell domains directly).  Independent web hosting services use tucows a lot to offer their customers domain names.

Why is this Yahoo Domain Pricing change a problem?  It’s the writing on the wall…when will they change the price of the Yahoo Web Hosting? I don’t know, but I don’t like the prospects here. They are already using the tactic of switching your price. They start you out just under $9/month for the first 3 months then they jack you up to about $12 after those first 3. They want you to get in there and build a website…get used to there template system and use their features that make it almost impossible to transfer your site – unless you want to rebuild the entire thing from scratch.

It’s just sad. They don’t even offer good service (I’ve had services through Yahoo in the past). They are already one of the more expensive. It would probably do the company and all their customers a favor if they would sell to some other company and do an overhaul of there services.   If you’re with Yahoo – you should probably get out now-  you can compare hosts on the web.