Is $9.43 too much to pay for a 1 year renewal of a domain name?

Every year it goes up, the original company gets bought & sold, they are not doing the hosting just name domain, should I switch away from the current owner http://domains.theplanet.com/? What is the best deal on non-promotional prices?

So many companies have gone down the tube in recent years (registerfly, etc...), that reliability is a definite factor when determining value. That said, godaddy charges $7.87 for .com domains, new or renewal. If you have hundreds of domains, like I do, their discount domain club can net decent savings. While I'm not crazy about their in-your-face adverticing, godaddy is unlikely to go anywhere and provides excellent value.

You might want to read the fine print at godaddy or do a google search on it -- I've read some complaints about them recently where they screw people over by holding their domains ransom. This may only apply if you use their anonymizer service so that they actually own it instead of you as far as the whois registry is concerned?

IMHO, internet.bs has a much cleaner interface than GoDaddy. New registration and transfer prices for com/net/org are cheaper.
For new/transfer/renewal .org and .net, you have to have GoDaddy's "discount club" or be buying more than 100 domains at once, and for new/transfer .com, even 200+ or "discount club" are still more expensive.
For renewal .com, you need 50+ (or "discount club") for GoDaddy to be cheaper. That discount club costs $90/year, and since GoDaddy is only cheaper for .com (by 36 cents on renewal only) out of those three TLDs...

Math for fun :
.net and .org are already cheaper all the time, unless GoDaddy is running a coupon, in which case they become cheaper immediately upon renewal, so ignoring those and going with .com
GoDaddy .com new registration with "discount club": $7.99
internet.bs .com new registration: $7.49
50 cents per domain extra on new registration. Using only one-year registration, you need to buy 200 or more domains (200*$0.50=$100), or "discount club" ($90). 200*$0.36=$72 savings on next year's renewal, which isn't enough to match the discount club, so discount club is cheaper for now.
W = years
X = base cost at internet.bs
Z = number of domains
best internet.bs cost for 1 year: $X
best GoDaddy cost for 1 year: $X+90+(Z*0.50) or $X+(Z*0.50), where Z is at least 200
Now for the renewal, you're going to save 36 cents per domain with GoDaddy.
best internet.bs cost for 2 years: $X*W
best GoDaddy cost for 2 years: $X+90*W+(Z*0.50)-(Z*0.36) or $X+W*(Z*0.50)-(Z*0.36), where Z is at least 200.

Graph out where XW and X+90W+0.5ZW-(W-1)0.36Z (or X+0.5ZW-(W-1)0.36Z where Z is at least 200) meet up to see how many domains you need to make GoDaddy cheaper for two years. The 36 cents will add up eventually, but you need quite a lot of .com domains to do so, and you'll be seeing lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of ads during that time

So what's the best deal now? $7.49 to renew?

c627627 said:

So what's the best deal now? $7.49 to renew?

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If you're willing to use two registrars and transfer back and forth every year, Name.com has $7.75 .com transfers and internet.bs has $7.45 .com transfers. Buy it first at internet.bs (currently $7.49 for new registrations) for one year, then transfer to Name.com for a year, then transfer back for a year. If you don't want to do the repeating transfer thing, internet.bs is cheapest overall (assuming only .net/.org/.com) unless you've got 200+ .com domains. The only other TLD's I have right now are a single domain each in .in and .mobi, and I haven't bothered yet to figure out the best way to penny-pinch them

OK. Thanks!

What about these stories about being careful who you use because they hold your domain hostage etc. etc. What do you need to look out for other than not let it expire of course.

I've never seen any of those stories about internet.bs or Name.com. I have seen many for GoDaddy, but with the quantity of domains registered through them, it's not really surprising there are a lot of complaints. They're a U.S.-based company, just like Verisign, so when the DHS and ICE get frisky, they're pretty much required to comply. I've never had problems with transfers between any of them.

My question was, what exactly happens with GoDaddy?

FWIW, I have 130+ domains with godaddy (been with them for 7 years now) and never had any issues transferring to or from them, renewing or removing. The ads are a nuisance, but as I stated before, they'll be here a few years from now. Ask yourself: is it worth several hours of hassle transferring names back and forth and stressing over whether the latest boiler room operation will be failing tomorrow to save 49 cents...

c627627 said:

My question was, what exactly happens with GoDaddy?

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See nodaddy.com, but keep a few grains of salt handy

hafa said:

Ask yourself: is it worth several hours of hassle transferring names back and forth and stressing over whether the latest boiler room operation will be failing tomorrow to save 49 cents...

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Name.com and internet.bs are hardly "boiler room operations". Name.com has been around since 1995 (four years longer than GoDaddy) and internet.bs started in 2003. Also, as I stated already, for .net and .org, there's no "hassle transferring", because they (internet.bs) are cheaper than both GoDaddy and Name.com in every case. For .com, unless you're dealing with at least 200 domains (that's .com only; 200 domains is excluding all other TLDs), internet.bs is still cheaper. The idea of transferring is to save ~$0.60/year/domain since internet.bs regular .com price is $8.35 (the $7.49 price is only for new registrations and transfers).

If you've got a huge quantity of .com domains to deal with, and you don't care about the ads, then GoDaddy is great. If you're not dealing with hundreds of .com's, then GoDaddy isn't the best deal around.

I find GoDaddy is the only registrar that would make bulk transfers take "several hours of hassle". Every other registrar will let me copy and paste EPP auth codes from the control panel, and both Name.com and internet.bs offer a free API I could write a script for to get whatever I need in comma-delimited format to paste into a transfer box, or even run a yearly (or bi-monthly for a year since you can transfer every 60 days, and have 6 years before I need to transfer again to save 60 cents again) cron job that transfers back and forth to save that 60 cents, if I were really that concerned about it. GoDaddy requires a $100/year reseller account to use their API. I'm not sure the 36-cents-per-domain savings of having 200+ .com domains with them would even be worth losing the ease of management available via the others' APIs. Surely, with hundreds of domains, you'd want to have some other method than clicking through the mass of excessively-user-friendly buttons and popups that GoDaddy control panel consists of.

Thank you.

internetbs.net domain name transfer includes a free 12 months extension to your domain name expiration, so that sounds like a good deal.

c627627 said:

Thank you.

internetbs.net domain name transfer includes a free 12 months extension to your domain name expiration, so that sounds like a good deal.

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All transfers, regardless of registrar, include a "free 1 year extension". That's just marketing speak A transfer is nothing more than a renewal at a different registrar than the current one, they just sometimes offer different prices on transfers to get you to switch to them.

Interesting tidbit, especially with all the fanbioism here. I use Godaddy, however with the recent passage of COICA. I have been looking to move my domain registration, as well as my DNS server somewhere that is not inforced by COICA. Im currently using google's DNS servers cause they claim they will NOT inforce COICA's blacklist. We shall see

jstutman said:

Interesting tidbit, especially with all the fanbioism here. I use Godaddy, however with the recent passage of COICA. I have been looking to move my domain registration, as well as my DNS server somewhere that is not inforced by COICA. Im currently using google's DNS servers cause they claim they will NOT inforce COICA's blacklist. We shall see

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COICA has not been passed yet.

jstutman said:

Interesting tidbit, especially with all the fanbioism here.

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Huh? Numbers are numbers. Thing A sells X for less than Thing B, so I'd rather buy X from Thing A. "Fanbioism" implies a lack of logic or facts. The price difference is purely factual.