John Jardine wrote: > I know some of you set up web sites on a regular basis. I do 1 every > couple of years so this kinda surprised me: Domain names with U.S. > registrars are CHEAP compared to Canadian registrars. I paid US$9/yr > for .com & .org. The cheapest I've found so far for .ca is CAD$10/yr - > but alot of sites are charging $30 to $50. What's behind the high > registration prices?
<puts on CIRA certified registrar hat> CIRA currently charges C$8.50/domain/year to registrars. Registrars also pay a fixed $1000/year for CIRA certification so that $1000 has to be amortized over all domain registrations handled by that registrar each year. When you add in the transaction costs for processing credit cards, an amount to operational overhead (servers, etc.), and an amount for profit, you end up with a price that's about 50% to 75% above the rate from CIRA. Note that the cost of developing a web site interface to handle the registrations has to be paid for from that profit amount, too. And, believe me, it is *not* cheap to develop a site to handle .ca registrations. (If you hired a web development company to do it, it would be anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 or higher, depending on the features implemented.) The other factor in the equation is volume. As volume goes up, the cost per transaction on credit cards goes down. Also, the basically fixed costs of running the registry amortize over a much larger number of registrations so the registry can reduce the fees. (CIRA as done so over the years - the original fee to registrars was $20/domain/year.) Many of the .com/.org registrars do a substantially higher volume of registrations (due to .com) than .ca registrars meaning they get a much better economy of scale going for them. Basically, if you find a .ca registrar charging less than around $10, they're losing money on the proposition once you add in the transaction fees and other overhead. -- William Astle _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
