[clug-talk] .ca domain registration pricing

[clug at matthew.mulrooney.ca]

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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