Price Increase for .COM/.NET/.BIZ
By Leland Vandervort on Monday 26 December 2011, 12:25 - General - Permalink
As you may already know, ICANN, the regulatory authority for domain names, authorized the principal registries (.com, .net, .org ...) to increase their pricing in 2007. Of course, the registries were not slow to take advantage of the opportunity. A 7% increase in 2007, and a further 7% in 2008, was followed by yet another 7% increase in mid 2010. Now, Verisign will once again be increasing prices, theortically for the last time, on 15 January 2012 by a further 7%. This makes for a total real increase of 31%, which, given the margins on the product is an enormous pill to swallow. Here is what we will do for you...
Not wanting to pass these price increases on to you, our customers, we absorbed the increases in 2007 and 2008. We were helped in this by the low dollar to euro exchange rate, and you benefitted accordingly: our pricing did not change. In 2010, we did increase prices, but eased the pain by applying the increase solely to domain renewals, making sure that we would maintain your confidence through our hard work to be more efficient. Of course, we were also hoping that the economic situation would not deteriorate, destroying this delicate balance.... you know the rest, unfortunately.
We have now reached the point where, if we wish to continue to improve the quality of our service, keep the passionate, dedicated, development team we have happily innovating (a rare and wonderful thing), we are forced to pass on this latest price increase by the registries. That is why our domain creation and renewal rates will finally change.
Looking at our global sales figures, we can see that you place high value on our honesty and our long-term competence in this industry, traits we stay true to, and are constantly seeking to improve. We think this honesty, the respect we have for your privacy, and our dedication to quality are all the more important in a market that is being consolidated by unscrupulous companies. It seems that for some, the domain name services have no value in themselves, and are used merely as bait to capture new clients. These companies seek to sell you other products, where they make a profit. In coming years we believe they plan to be far less generous.
At Gandi, as our 10th anniversary promotion last year proved, we have a different approach. We believe that each year we need to actually prove the quality of our work is worth the price we ask, that we have a stable and sustainable business, and that you can trust us to tell you the truth, just as we are right now. The fact that we do this is why our loyal customers are our best ambassadors, and the reason why we value these customers so much: you ensure our success by believing in us. We hope that you know we understand the importance of your domain names, and that you can continue to trust us to manage them with complete honesty, transparency, and stability, like we always have.
In conclusion:
- On 15 January, the rates for .COM, and .NET will rise by $0.50 (fifty cents) on creations and transfers across all pricing grids, and for renewals.
- On 1 February, the rates for .BIZ will rise by $0.50 (fifty cents) on creations, transfers and renewals across all pricing grids.
As always, we are available to discuss these increases with you. Please feel free to share your comments.
Comments
It is almost 2012. I was promised DNSSEC almost a year ago.
Can you please give a realistic time frame when you will deploy it? It must be accurate this time.
The one thing that Gandi doesn't tell us here is that Verisign has now implemented DNSSEC, so at least the registry offers new features for the price increase. Gandi on the other hand just passes on the price increase, but doesn't pass on the new features that have already been implemented by the registry.
And with Gandi's history of promising everything in a few months, but never keeping these promises, it's hard to be sympathetic here...
@Niklas
Let me get this straight -- you're begging for DNSSEC from Gandi without realizing that the majority of the DNS software on the planet hasn't even finalized an implementation of it? Do you expect Gandi to just rewrite an entire DNS software stack to appease you? The entire concept of DNSSEC is very alpha, so how about you sit back down and wait a few years until the standard is properly implemented and then you can point fingers.
You folks have done much already for the benefit of the customer, with plenty of your competition already providing similar services for far higher prices. I thank you for your sacrifices so far. A $0.50 increase is a pittance to continue supporting such commitment.
Wow... reading through the blog post I was expecting a rather substantial price increase. I'm really surprised to see it's only $.50. I appreciate y'all being so upfront about such a small price increase. It's stuff like this that keeps me renewing my domains with y'all.
I would love to see a blog entry to understand how ICANN is actually influenced by the big players like GoDaddy/Verisign. Who is really in favour of these 1273189732198 new TLDs. I read CircleID and it all seems incredibly biased towards marketing people rather than the core values of the Domain Name System. It's hard to keep track of the atrocities that companies like Verisign have done to DNS, and it seems like the system continues to regress.
I would love to see a simplified history showing what has happened over the last two decades to get where we are. Why there was once a phase where domain sampling was possible. Why automated botnet systems actually go through the effort of registering domains based on PRNGs, etc.
@anonymous
No, I require DNSSEC because it is 2012 soon and we have been promised support for over a year now. I do not require Gandi to rewrite anything, just to deliver what was promised.
I could not care less that you think it is not ready for deployment. I run my other domains under another registrar fully signed and I expect to do that with all my domains. I should have transferred all my domains there but I believed the lies.
Registries have almost all open DNSSEC or give specifications about it. We will finish work on it first to give the possibility to use DNSSEC with your own DNS server , in a second step we will add it on our dns server.
Thank you for the reassurance regarding DNSSEC support Nicolas. I realize that this has been an ongoing request for over a year and I'm glad to hear Gandi is still committed to making it happen. I just recently transferred my domains to Gandi in part because DNSSEC was on your roadmap. I very much look forward to this feature.
Swan,
Thanks for suggesting that "history" article. I'm looking into it, and will post something on the gandibar about how we got where we are, and where we are going. To me it seems that the roller coaster ride is far from over.