Who am i paying yearly for my domain? And how can they increase the price yearly?

[The Torrent]

It still makes no sense to me. If someone can recommend a good article that would be great.

 

But who am i actually paying and what am i paying them for? What made them own the domain in the first place? Can't i own it and not pay yearly?

 

Moreover, how can they change the price? That means prices are based of what they wanna charge not like idk some sort of set amount or something. They are making profit from this - profit from what? What are they doing? i dont get it.

[Middcore]

9 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

That means prices are based of what they wanna charge 

 

Prices for most things are. 

[Nayr438]

6 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

But who am i actually paying and what am i paying them for?

Your paying the Registrar which acts a middle man to the various Domain Registries, which pays for it's Registry entry and anything else that may be attached to it.

 

7 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

What made them own the domain in the first place?

Absolutely nothing, the Registrar doesn't actually own the domain, just a contract for it.

 

8 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

Moreover, how can they change the price? That means prices are based of what they wanna charge not like idk some sort of set amount or something.

That would be correct, but if you don't like the price, transfer it to another Registrar.

 

9 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

Can't i own it and not pay yearly?

No. Domains are handled through contracts only available to Registrars.

[mariushm]

A part of the money you pay for the domain goes to the organization that maintains the global DNS servers and the overall database of domains. 

A part of the money goes to the registrar, which may give you some benefits like free DNS management, to add your A, MX , TXT records etc and they propagate the dns entries to the master DNS servers for you.

 

You can "not pay it yearly" by paying in advance for several years - a lot of registrars allow you to renew the domain for multiple years in advance, like 3-5 years, maybe more.  For example,  Namecheap lets me renew a .net domain for up to 9 years, for $135 - it's $14.98 a year otherwise.

 

[The Torrent]

57 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Your paying the Registrar which acts a middle man to the various Domain Registries, which pays for it's Registry entry and anything else that may be attached to it.

 

Absolutely nothing, the Registrar doesn't actually own the domain, just a contract for it.

 

That would be correct, but if you don't like the price, transfer it to another Registrar.

 

No. Domains are handled through contracts only available to Registrars.

Who handles them? Who owns these contracts the registrars sign and the registrars are paying, and who gave them all the domains?

[mariushm]

16 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

Who handles them? Who owns these contracts the registrars sign and the registrars are paying, and who gave them all the domains?

See IANA : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority

 

See also : https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

 

Basically, various TLDs are managed by various organizations, and these organizations can set renewal conditions as they wish.

 

Some time ago, there was a decision to allow other TLDs besides country codes, so we now have .aero, .rent, .xyz , and other tlds ... companies that maintain these paid big money to have the right to them and they get their money back from registrations.

 

For example, used to be my country had lifetime ownership for domains and you paid something like $50 in today's money and you had a lifetime domain.

But, it turned out too many domains were orphaned and too many would buy domains with names similar to local companies and the organization used these reasons to change to yearly renewal... reality is they were running out of money for paychecks and hardware upgrades and datacenter costs, it was more profitable to switch to yearly renewals.

 

[Nayr438]

9 minutes ago, The Torrent said:

Who handles them? Who owns these contracts the registrars sign and the registrars are paying, and who gave them all the domains?

It would be the Registry for the top level domain if im not mistaking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, The Torrent said:

But who am i actually paying and what am i paying them for? What made them own the domain in the first place? Can't i own it and not pay yearly?

i wondered the same... its like this...

 

- they "own" the internet (somehow... i guess physically  and legally , that part isnt fully clear to me either...) and you pay them to use it and their services such as "domains"

-money

-basically you're free to build your own network then you wouldn't have to pay nobody (other than maintenance cost etc)

-no, they rather milk you yearly = )

 

 

 

 

 

[The Torrent]

6 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

-basically you're free to build your own network then you wouldn't have to pay nobody (other than maintenance cost etc)

How does this work? You pay for the domain name, if you build your url (im not sure how domain names work) but you couldn't make your website google.com, could you?

Or do they like handle the requests which give domains their names, otherwise they would just be ip addresses?

[mariushm]

No, you're free to build up the servers you'd need to do the infrastructure and become your own registrar (like namecheap.com, godaddy.com etc) and then you can pay yourself for the domains you want and a small fee to IANA / whowever owns the TLD .

 

Or you could become the owner of a tld like .action , .aerospace , .peanuts  etc  you just have to pay a few hundred thousands or whatever and your company becomes the maintainer of the domains with the extension you own.

Then you could reserve some domain names with that .tld for your own use, and you can sell other names to whoever is interest. But, you'd also have to pay lawyers and people to maintain the database, settle disputes and so on.. it's not free.

 

Let's  say you buy a domain name  ex thetorrent.net and you use Namecheap.com to do it.

 

The registrar namecheap.com  reserves "thetorrent" with the organization that holds the .NET registry and pays that organization for the reservation and a small fee to IANA and the remaining amount is their profit for facilitating this to you.

Namecheap also gives you a free DNS service where their DNS servers are available to point your domain name to a specific IP address. So, you can right away add DNS entries to point your "thetorrent.net" domain name to your computer's IP address or to the IP of the dedicated server / VPS you rent in a datacenter.

 

As soon as the DNS entries change, the DNS servers of Namecheap "push" the changes up the chain to the DNS servers of other companies and the root dns servers and within a few minutes the changes propagate, and everyone around the world that wants to access thetorrent.net  receives the IP address and they can connect to the server hosting the website, or the FTP service, or whatever.

 

Without the free DNS servers, you could resort to paid DNS servers or you could set up your  own DNS server but as you're not that "trusted", the changes your DNS server would push would take much more time to propagate to the whole world, and it could take up to 1 day or so until everyone around the world is notified that your new IP address for the domain is 1.2.3.4 or whatever.

 

The registrar may also offer some other things that make that payment worth it, like privacy - when you buy a domain you're supposed to disclose your name and your address, so that if you do something illegal with the domain other companies can send you correspondence or contact you .. registrars offer services that make that anonymous , the information says "namecheap , po box whatever" or their phone number,  and they'll forward anything to your email address ... so you don't end up with people knocking at your door.

 

Maybe 15 years or so ago, when I bought my first domain and had a sort of a blog on the website, I didn't anonymize that info and had my full name and the town I was born in there, and someone from my country took the phone book and called the 6 families in my town with the same family name until he reached me , to ask me a technical question about what I wrote in the blog.

 

Luckily he didn't have bad intentions, but after the call, I made that stuff anonymous.

[Nayr438]

1 hour ago, The Torrent said:

How does this work? You pay for the domain name, if you build your url (im not sure how domain names work) but you couldn't make your website google.com, could you?

Or do they like handle the requests which give domains their names, otherwise they would just be ip addresses?

So we have DNS Zones. You can assign any domain you would like to that zone, including google.com if you so wish, that zone is however only available to people connected to that zone, and if that zone conflicts than it has to be made a priority. To bring it to the outside world, 1 of 2 things need to happen, either people need to add that zone or it needs to be added into another larger zone that is already available to the general public by default. So generally you opt for the second, which could lead down a long trail of other zones, until we reach the root zone. The root zone is the zone that is made available to all users of the world wide web, it's basically just a globally accepted default, though it's not a single instance. In order for that domain to be accepted into the root zone, it has to be accepted by all parties in it's path.

 

So In my instance, I have a BIND Server (Local Zone), that is registered as a nameserver to name.com (name.com zone) where my domains are managed, which obtains the rights to some of my names from Verisign (Verisgn Zone), which has a presence in the root zone.

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, The Torrent said:

How does this work?

@mariushmexplained it way better than i could have, but however, it was a bit of a sarcastic suggestion from me with the intend to highlight the, in my opinion, root "problem", so what i meant is to literally build your own (worldwide) network- which is of course illusionary because it would cost billions, but *then* you would own everything on that network and could own any domain, address,  name etc and wouldn't need to pay anyone for it...! (of course you would be also competing with the "other internet" and needed to find a way to make people use your internet instead... difficult!)

Now back to reality, that means that the internet as we know it is owned by several organizations that regulate,  name services,  addresses,  "domains" etc, and that simply is not free and also needs to be regulated otherwise anyone could use any "domains" like indeed google.com >>> chaos ensues

 

5 hours ago, mariushm said:

Luckily he didn't have bad intentions, but after the call, I made that stuff anonymous.

its also kinda sketchy in general, because you can get a domain for real cheap,  but they will give your "identity" to anyone asking,  you have to pay extra for them to "protect" your identity,  aka email, ip , name,  etc , otherwise i would have already bought a dozen or so of domains,  but with the added protection cost that gets expensive quickly...

 

 

I mean, looking at this, the cheapest *with protection* would be around $15 / year? 

but then you have no email for the domain? (not sure how that works?)

 

so with website/email we're at 50 a year, plus 10 for "hosting"?

 

Sure that's cheap for a company,  but "just for fun" its quite expensive! UwU

 

Edit; oh, but it gets even better if you go free!

 

.

 

why does this cost twice as much? lol (i didn't select any "extras" thats their default) 

 

So its far cheaper to go with the Microsoft email,  at half the cost of "free"?!  Oof.

[Nayr438]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

but then you have no email for the domain? (not sure how that works?)

Email is handled similar to web hosting. It can be done anywhere so long as your DNS zone for that particular domain points to a email server of some sort that has been setup for that domain.

 

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

So its far cheaper to go with the Microsoft email,  at half the cost of "free"?!  Oof.

Probably because your first one comes with a free trial of web hosting where your second one possibly doesn't.

But we have ventured outside of just buying and using a domain name, we are paying for additional services now which can vary wildly in pricing.

[Mark Kaine]

16 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

But we have ventured outside of just buying and using a domain name, we are paying for additional services now which can vary wildly in pricing.

yeah, but i looked into it in the first place to see what it actually costs as a "package".

 

and i think you'd be able to get an email provider much cheaper,  probably for $12/year or so... which still adds up

 

the problem is all these security options,  its hard to tell which you really need... i think the basic privacy protection is a must basically?

 

 

 

Edited January 9, 2022 by Mark Kaine

[Nayr438]

14 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

and i think you'd be able to get an email provider much cheaper,  probably for $12/year or so... which still adds up

 

the problem is all these security options,  its hard to tell which you really need... i think the basic privacy protection is a must basically?

Possibly, there is something out there for just about everybody, it just depends on what you need from your email provider.

I believe we were paying around $10 USD a Month per user up until we started hosting our own instance.

 

As for Privacy, the only one that really matters is WHOIS Privacy, which is the public record listed for a domain.

[mariushm]

I use fastmail.com with a domain I bought ... it was just a matter of setting the MX entry in the DNS settings and the TXT entries with the DomainKeys and other stuff to what Fastmail gave me. Fastmail tells you what to add to your DNS records.

 

It costs 6$ a month (which includes 20% vat, so really 5$ a month) ... not that expensive. I didn't want Google or Microsoft for email, they're probably cheaper but most likely less private, more ads, more annoying etc.

 

I used to have my own email server, rented a dedicated server with a Windows 2012 Server edition (if my memory is correct)  and used the open source hMailServer to set up a mail server.

Gave up at it because I consolidated several websites to other servers and was no longer worth keeping that server active, and honestly it was just too annoying to deal with spam filters and getting my emails rejected by Yahoo because it has to be more special than others.

 

Having mail server on residential / home IPs is basically impossible, lots of ISPs intentionally add the home user IPs in specific databases that tell mail servers "this is a hope IP so it's very likely it's a virus that set up a mail server and spams, reject all mail from this IP"

 

[Mark Kaine]

24 minutes ago, mariushm said:

It costs 6$ a month (which includes 20% vat, so really 5$ a month

so basically you really just pay for services like this and only very little for the domain itself? i mean on bluehost its ~5 for the domain and ~10 for the "privacy" which is probably just the WHOIS list , per year. (or per month?  lol i gotta check) 

 

Really tempted to get my domain(s), as long they're still available,  lol, even if i have no use for it, a personal email thing would be cool though I guess!

 

[Nayr438]

22 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

so basically you really just pay for services like this and only very little for the domain itself? i mean on bluehost its ~5 for the domain and ~10 for the "privacy" which is probably just the WHOIS list , per year. (or per month?  lol i gotta check)

Domain pricing can vary wildly, but once it's purchased you only have to pay the Renewal Fee and WHOIS Privacy Fee on a yearly basis, your fees will depend on the registrar and the tld. Also just because a domain costs $5, doesn't mean it will renew at that price, for bluehost it's $33 a year for a ".com" renewal with whois privacy, https://www.bluehost.com/help/article/renewal-price-faq.

 

For one of my ".net" domains, not through bluehost, it looks like this, which is just the domain and whois privacy. Anything else like email and web hosting, is a separate service.

 

Spoiler

 

[mariushm]

51 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

so basically you really just pay for services like this and only very little for the domain itself? i mean on bluehost its ~5 for the domain and ~10 for the "privacy" which is probably just the WHOIS list , per year. (or per month?  lol i gotta check) 

 

Really tempted to get my domain(s), as long they're still available,  lol, even if i have no use for it, a personal email thing would be cool though I guess!

 

I renew my domains kept at Namecheap at around 12-13$ a year (I use the Honey extension to get 10-20% off the 15$ a year renewal, works almost always) and for the email I use fastmail, because it's more "premium" than Namecheap's email services (it's like shared hosting vs vps for example, namecheap's email is OK, but not on the same level as fastmail)

 

Bluehost's 5 euro is a basically just a discount, they're discounting the domain to get you to pay for one year of hosting... basically you can reword it as 1 month of free hosting or something like that.

 

I also use Namecheap's shared web hosting for a couple domains, used  to be something similar to Stellar Plus which is nearly 3$ a month but prices were different, paid around $10 for the first year, then renews at around $35 a year  : https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/shared/

 

It's OK, but had much better - for example around 8-10 years ago I used ICDSoft's shared hosting for around 2 years and they were great, expensive but premium - paid something like 4-5$ a month for shared hosting with ONE domain + 3-5 subdomains and 20 GB of disk space but the servers were very fast, not overloaded (they had around 100-150 accounts per server) and in a premium bandwidth datacenter. Had super low latency across the ocean with them.

Nowadays, I can no longer vouch for them as it's been too long, and they've diversified too much. 

 

 

ps. Namecheap's cheapest email hosting plan is 11$ for the first year, then 15$ a year renewal,  one mailbox , 5 GB for mails, 2 GB for attachments ... super cheap : https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/

Goes up to 27$ for first year, 40$ renewal for 3 mailboxes, 30GB for mails, 15 GB for attachments ..

[Mark Kaine]

26 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Domain pricing can vary wildly, but once it's purchased you only have to pay the Renewal Fee and WHOIS Privacy Fee on a yearly basis, your fees will depend on the registrar and the tld. Also just because a domain costs $5, doesn't mean it will renew at that price, for bluehost it's $33 a year for a ".com" renewal with whois privacy,

i see, i see... well this isnt as straightforward as i thought...

 

also it seems to depend on the actual name you choose. 

 

So first option,  more common word but already taken (lollipop) so with a variation like

lollipopxxx.online €33 euros or so...

 

Second option, less common word, not taken (im not gonna say ; ) )

 

xxx.online ~€4 

 

 

thats quite the difference! (and yes both is with an "affiliate discount")  

 

 

19 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Bluehost's 5 euro is a basically just a discount, they're discounting the domain to get you to pay for one year of hosting... basically you can reword it as 1 month of free hosting or something like that.

yeap! its still tempting... (and the hosting is "only" 10 / month after that)

 

So what if i want to switch after a year (before first year is over) can i keep the domain? Or would that be too expensive / not possible or something? 

[Nayr438]

7 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

also it seems to depend on the actual name you choose. 

thats quite the difference! (and yes both is with an "affiliate discount")  

yea. This is a domain in my watch list which I used to own a quite a few years ago. I let it go and a reseller picked it up, I am hoping one day the price will fall back down to something I am willing to spend, though I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Spoiler

 

[mariushm]

11 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

So what if i want to switch after a year (before first year is over) can i keep the domain? Or would that be too expensive / not possible or something? 

You'd have to tell them to "unlock" it for transfer , and then you go to another registrar and pay for the 1st year at them and the domain transfers to that registrar.

You would have to be careful as there may be conditions in what you signed saying you can not request the unlock / can not transfer in the last 15-30 days, you must request well in advance, or stuff like that ... there were situations where people were forced to pay 5-10x the normal renewal price at other hosting companies so that they would not lose the domain.

 

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

yea. This is a domain in my watch list

haha... oh boy!

 

happened to me too, i know for sure it was available a year ago (.com domain even) ... now it cost $6000 so definitely bluehost gave them the idea, there's no other way! lol 

 

well also they want my phone number,  i don't think thats gonna happen... so yeah additional to financial cost you also have to endure spam calls (according to the internet)... i mean i actually have a phone number,  which works perfectly fine,  except you cant call, lol!  i might use that one... 

 

and godaddy wants you to make an account... what happened to good old "guest checkout" ??

 

namecheap so far seems the best they also have some good info, also for op interesting, i guess!

 

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/what-is-a-tld-definition/

 

 

edit: ok i have registration, ssl, stellar (renews monthly) , free email trial for under 10 bucks on namecheap,  should i do it ? @mariushm (they aren't getting my actually call me phone number however...)

 

and i will use dns/ddos protection from cloudflare if needed..

 

edit2: it is done

 

...they're telling me to set up dns for my email... not sure how, i set up my (1st) mail adress though,  gonna see if/how it works later.

[Mark Kaine]

So this is way cheaper than i thought,  my "domain" cost €1.88 (altogether it was 10, but with stuff like website builder and "ssl" which you probably dont really need) from namecheap,  bluehost woulda cost more than double for the domain alone! 

 

what do you pay and what was the initial price @The Torrentif you don't mind me asking? 

 

Im also wondering why they don't just go 

on renewal 

 

[Elijah Kamski]

On 1/10/2022 at 6:25 AM, Nayr438 said:

yea. This is a domain in my watch list which I used to own a quite a few years ago. I let it go and a reseller picked it up, I am hoping one day the price will fall back down to something I am willing to spend, though I don't see it happening anytime soon.

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yeah that freaking sucks man, I really hate those people

hence why i'm very much conscious about the next step I take with domains, as once it's registered, people will know and try to get it also.