Today (1st August 2013) we have introduced a brand new transparent pricing policy for domain names. All domains are now priced at cost plus a nominal management fee.
For many years now we have been absorbing regular price increases by the various domain registries and also riding out some quite severe exchange rate fluctuations, which has left us selling domain names for almost zero income in a number of cases. This is clearly not a sustainable business model and not good for ourselves or our clients in the longer term.
Going forwards we will be updating domain prices as and when necessary to accommodate changes occurring in the market place (e.g. one or more registries increasing their prices). All changes will be published to our domain name price list on this website on the day they occur.
Domain pricing formula:
Registry cost price
+ ICANN fees (where applicable)
+ Registrar fees (if applicable – e.g. Tucows OpenSRS management fee)
+ Bank charges (foreign currency conversion rates, card processing fees etc)
+ Ecological Hosting fee
+ VAT
For example, to register or renew a .com domain, the full breakdown of the fee shown on our current website price list (£13.15 plus VAT) is calculated as follows:
$7.85 registry fee
+ $0.18 ICANN fee
+ $3.00 OpenSRS fee
+ $0.34 US bank charges
= $11.37 = £7.50 at current exchange rates
+ £0.65 PayPal fees for a standard UK transaction
+ £5.00 Ecological Hosting fee
= £13.15
+ £2.63 VAT at 20%
= £15.78 per year
The Ecological Hosting fee is to help cover the ongoing management and running of each domain on our systems; including, for example, the operation of our DNS service and some of our basic office administration overheads in dealing with the domain.
Our fee element within the domain price is currently £5 for all domain registrations, renewals, transfers and trades except for .uk domain Nominet IPS tag transfers, which are free of charge and .ie domain transactions, where the fee is £10 because of the increased administration involved in processing these.
In addition to the new registration and renewal fees, we have also now published full redemption fee pricing for domains that have this charge as required by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).