Wincent vs GoDaddy, January 2007 Edition

It’s time to renew again and anyone who reads this blog knows how disappointed I am with GoDaddy’s renewal prices (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Unable to find a quick link to GoDaddy’s current renewal prices on their home page, I did a quick Google search for "godaddy renewal prices" and was pleasantly surprised to see that the top two hits at the time of writing are both articles on my site: "GoDaddy’s renewal prices are too high" (May 2006) and "GoDaddy scam" (July 2006). GoDaddy itself comes in at third place with this ironically titled page, "Why Our Prices Are So Low".

So, thankyou Google, for putting a smile on my face prior to today’s battle with GoDaddy… But it seems that there is no easy way of finding out renewal prices without actually starting the renewal process (could it be that GoDaddy doesn’t want you to know?), although I did finally find this (but don’t expect the link to survive for long).

Lessons to be learned from that table:

• Multi-year registrations don’t give you any discount at all unless you renew more than five domains at once.
• If you renew more than five days at once you’ll be getting a discount anyway in most cases (although not a very steep one).
• Take dot-com domains for example: you’ll save a dollar per domain if you renew more than 5, but in order to save a further 18 cents you’ll have to renew all five for five years (the equivalent of at least 30 years in one go) and to get the final 22 cents you’ll need to do ten-year renewals (the equivalent of paying GoDaddy for 60 years in one go).
• As already noted, suckers who get lured in by the offer of discounted privacy will find their renewal prices doubled, forever, until the end of time.

To multi/bulk, or not to multi/bulk?

Multi-year or bulk-registrations involve handing over a great deal of money to GoDaddy in one hit. Even before we start talking about private registration 60 "domain-years" at $7.50 (plus 25 cent ICANN fee) is $465. If you can wangle the $4.95 price for privacy then you’re looking at a cool $765.

The problem with this is that you’re tying up your money with GoDaddy and they’re making money off it when you could be earning interest off it. The only benefit to you is that longer term renewals lock you in to a set price for that period and protect you from the inevitable price increases that we can expect from Verisign (who sets the wholesale price that GoDaddy pays) which are likely to be of the order of 7% per year.

It’s really up to you do decide whether it’s worth it to go for bulk or multi-year renewals. If you can get a cheap price on private registration then it may be worth thinking about it seeing as GoDaddy seems quite intractable about their ridiculous pricing. You may also consider switching to another registrar; there are several with non-promotional, standard prices that beat GoDaddy’s non-promotional price. Netfirms, for example, sells domains for $4.95 per year.

In fact, it is a good idea to keep an eye on Netcraft’s "Domains" category for reports on industry movements. Promotional prices do drop below the $3 mark although few beat GoDaddy’s own $1.99 domains (new registrations, when purchasing a non-domain product). But that’s really only helpful for new domain purchases: remember that GoDaddy’s motto is "suck 'em in cheap, then gouge and scrape till there’s nothing left".

The current state of play, however, is that none of the alternatives to GoDaddy are attractive enough to allow me to migrate away. Take Netfirms, for example: their domains are cheap, they even come with free private registration, but the $4.95 is for the first year only and renewals are at $9.95 per year after that. This effectively makes the $4.95 offer a promotional price, although the fact that privacy is included still puts them in front of GoDaddy, who doesn’t even come close to offering renewals of a private domain for less than $10. The deal-breaker, however, is that there is a limit of 5 discounted domains per customer.

1&1 also offers free private registration and cheap domains ($5.99) but I am unable to find any information on their site about renewal costs. It seems unlikely that the below-wholesale price of $5.99 would apply for renewals.

Hostway’s "Domain Protector" is a non-contender at nearly $10 per domain.

My one and only transaction with GoDaddy for 2007

This month alone I’ve let four domains expire because I refused to cave in to GoDaddy’s bait and switch tactics. There are five more domains due to expire in 2007 that I won’t be renewing. This is lost business for GoDaddy. It’s pained me a bit to do so as it has meant letting some product-name domains go which I’ve given out so that users could have easy-to-remember shortcuts to my product websites but these will eventually all go away, all references to them will die off, and everything will just live under wincent.dev.

I think the signs are already in place that GoDaddy’s days of private-registration abuse are numbered. Numbered not in the sense that they’ll stop doing it, rather in the sense that there will be alternatives for people like me who care about privacy but don’t want to treated with corporate contempt. There are already companies offering free private registration and Netfirms looks to be the most promising prospect at this stage: given that the wholesale price of a domain is $6, Netfirms’ $9.95 renewal price, inclusive of private registration, is starting to look fair. It’s still a huge margin, but it’s starting to look reasonable. If market forces can push things down by a couple of dollars then I’ll be very satisfied.

So taking into consideration that market forces will soon inevitably produce escape routes from GoDaddy I decided to handle my remaining GoDaddy renewals for 2007 in one go, and it may well be the last time I ever pay GoDaddy a cent.

I had six more domains registered with GoDaddy and due to expire 2007; these were essential domains like wincent.dev which I just can’t allow to expire. Until a clear, reputable competitor to GoDaddy emerges with a proven track record (and Netfirms looks to be the best candidate right now), I figured I would do one more renewal with GoDaddy. By renewing all six at once I qualified for the first tier of special bulk pricing. I first tried to renew them for ten years but GoDaddy informed me that I had exceeded the "maximum renewal period" (is that something arbitrary imposed by them to stop people ever getting the maximum discount level? or is it an ICANN thing?). So the next best thing was to do 9-year renewals, thus allowing me to forget about private registration hassles and increasing wholesale prices until 2016.

Market forces will exert downwards pressure on domain prices, but it is inevitable that the wholesale price will go up. I fear in part that this is because of the ridiculous amount of domain-parking being down trying to generate revenue from advertisements. But in my view, raising the price of domains is not the correct solution to this problem; the correct solution is to switch to advertisements which are pay-per-sale rather than pay-per-view or pay-per-click.

I did my usual trick of cancelling my private registration just prior to renewing and then re-adding it so as to get it for $4.99 instead of $8.99 (still too much, but better than no discount at all). I also scoured the web looking for GoDaddy promo codes. The base price for the six domains, nine years each, with private registration and ICANN fees was $739.03. The promo code zine3 brought it down to $716.89, and TODD did slightly better, bringing it down to $710.67. But the best code of all was actually one that GoDaddy itself had sent me a few days ago, begging me to renew my expired domains: GDBBREN8; with this the final price came down to $681.15, or $12.61 per domain, per year. Still far too much money for a dream customer who over the years has registered a lot of domains; I think $7 to $10 would be a much fairer price per domain.

I still have some other domains at GoDaddy but the renewal dates are a few years off (in the 2010 to 2015 range). The domains I renewed today will expire in 2016. So basically, it looks like GoDaddy has seen the last it will ever see of my cash. When these domains expire I’ll either be letting the non-essential ones go, or transferring the essential ones to a new registrar.

Update (19 January 2006):

Jim Hoyt contacted me to recommend sitelutions.com as an inexpensive registrar ($8.75 per year); I don’t know if they offer private registrations.