At such low margins, what happens when your registrar goes belly up?
[I'm actually curious about the mechanics of that...]
I go with zid.com. They charge me $23/year, and they have supplemental
business, so I'm fairly confident that they will be in business for a
long time...
But even then, their web interface is sometimes lacking (ex. last I
checked, they don't provide me with way to specify more than two name
servers... I have to request that by email :(.
m@
On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, John Jardine wrote:
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.
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