Comment on The prices differences of different providers for the same domain is crazy.
Mikina@programming.dev 18 hours ago
If you want the cheapest, go with Cloudfare. They guarantee to ask for the wholesale price, which is the price the registrar pays to the top level domain owner, so you can’t go lower without footing the bill.
What most of registrars do is foot the difference for the first year, so you get a domain for super cheap, then add 50%+ cut on top, so you pay i.e 5$ for the first year for a TLD that has wholesale cost of 10$, while they loose 5$ on that sale, and then you pay 25$ for the second, so they now gain 15$ on holding your domain hostage.
Cloudfare guarantees that they will sell you that domain for 10$, and only raise it when the TLD owner raises the price.
I’m not aware of any other registrar that guarantees wholesale prices.
If you want to get the best deal, buy your first yeae with the scammy registrar, i.e get the 5$ sale on Namecheap, and before the year is up transfer it to Cloudfare so you don’t pay extra for the second year and can continue with the wholesale price.
philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.club 16 hours ago Thank you for a detailed and thoughtful reply.
I think I just don’t know enough about this. I like the xyz 1.1111b because its $1 a year. But I have no idea what type of things I need to consider before buying one
I thought it was basically just buying a URL name but it seems its more complex than that
Redjard@reddthat.com 14 hours ago xyz get you on renews, it’s a scam. Once you are set up with the domain and it’s hard to switch, prices explode. This is enforced as tld pricing.
philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.club 11 hours ago Even.the $1 a year ones?
Redjard@reddthat.com 3 hours ago All are that the first year. I had someone in person tell me how they were put on a severely increased price despite being on a domain that should be very cheap. Sadly I don’t recall who it was, so I can’t ask them for the details.
The jist iirc was their domain got popular (due to their website), so xyz decided it belonged to a higher price category.
This was definitely not 1.1111b specifically, but with a short search there I found reports that xyz has apparently decreased the scope of the 1.1111b category before, making the minimum length 6 instead of 3, and then refused renewals for people that had 3-digit domains under the old price.
So I would expect arbitrary price increases on 1.1111b too, it’s not something I’d rely on. xyz always has the right to charge whatever they want, so you are one policy decision away from switching everything with no notice or shelling out whatever they think they can charge.
Compared to say .com, where there is a rigid contract of what verisign can charge, mandating a single price categories, a set number of price increases with a set maximum increase, no difference between first year and renewal, …
Or .eu which is free and only has registrar fees, so you could just migrate to a different registrar.
Add that you can also pre-purchase quite a few years, (up to 9?) to lock in their rock bottom price.
Issue is you are locked into the cloudflare system that is gradually enshittifying. Apparently NS changes are blocked, so you are stuck with them. This is not the case for other registrars.
Also for .com they are below wholesale, so they are banking on that enshittification.