Renewed Reasons to Change Names
2014; American Institute of Certified Public Accountants; Volume: 217; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0021-8448
Autores Tópico(s)Web and Library Services
ResumoQ Our two website domain names are coming up for renewal soon, and our current domain-name-hosting company charges a renewal fee of $37.99 per year per domain name. (We use another company for web hosting.) This seems high compared with other advertised domain-name-hosting fees I see, so we are considering switching to another agent. Should we switch? How much should we expect to pay? Which domain-name-hosting company do you recommend? What factors should we consider? What advantages does one hosting company provide over the others? What is involved in switching domain name providers? A Most domain-name-hosting companies advertise low first-year rates to attract customers and then charge much higher renewal fees. Because $37.99 seems like a rather high renewal rate, I believe you should consider transferring your domain names to a lower-cost registrar. Presented below are comments that I hope will sufficiently answer all of your questions. 1. Registries. VeriSign owns all .com and .net domain names, and these names are sold (or rented) by registrars (domain-name-hosting companies) such as GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and lr a complete list of registrars is available at tinyurl.com/85v9xwl. GoDaddy is the top registrar with an estimated 31.5% market share. According to WebHosting.info, the top 10 U.S.-based registrars are those shown in Exhibit 1. Many of the domain-name-hosting companies you see advertised are actually partners (or resellers) that work on behalf of the larger registrars listed above. For example, Name.com, HostGator.com, Namecheap.com, and Rackspace.com are officially eNom resellers, i.e., they sell domain names on behalf of eNom. (You may or may not find these partners listed as ICANN-accredited registrars.) Typically, these smaller registrars sell domain name rentals for far lower prices than their parent registrar, which may explain why you may never have heard of eNom, but you likely have heard of some of its more visible channel partners. It also explains why eNom's renewal pricing is much higher than its partners', as eNom seeks to avoid undermining its partner channel. Alternatively, GoDaddy sells domain names directly to consumers and does not support a partner channel, which helps explain why its renewal rates are lower than other top registrars' renewal rates. 3. Comparing registrars. Other than price, there is no known technical advantage to buying (or renting) your domain name from one registrar compared with another. However, some registrars bundle additional benefits or services that you may want to consider. For example, Cosmotown and l&l offer free WHOIS privacy (an option for hiding your identity and contact information from the public) while Namecheap and GoDaddy charge $2.88 and $9.99 annually, respectively, for this additional service. I will add that while I have no documented supporting data for the following statement, I suspect that my domain names registered at the Earthlink registrar (which caters more to business customers) have consistently ranked higher than my domain names registered to GoDaddy (which caters both to businesses and personal customers) in Google searches. Since Google keeps its search ranking algorithm a secret, there is no way of knowing for sure if the registrar or hosting agent is factored into the equation, but for many years I duplicated my accounting software website using two domain names held and hosted by separate registrars, and I often noted that the domain name held and hosted by EarthLink consistently ranked higher than the identical site held and hosted by GoDaddy 4. Free renewals with web hosting. Some web-hosting companies provide free domain name renewal as part of their hosting plans. A partial list of such companies includes Arvixe (arvixe.com), Tiger Technologies (tigertech. …
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