Thanks - I ended up going with netfirms.ca - 10.45 after tax. Now I just need to alias the entry across to the real site (hosted on site5).
On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 23:10 -0700, William Astle wrote: > 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. > _______________________________________________ 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

