I came across an interesting article in Fortune on domain flippers, which definately put a glamorous spin on domain trading.

It started last September, when he paid $620 for the Internet domain name qsd.com and, two weeks later, sold it for $12,000 to a fellow domain trader, or “domainer.”

I wish it were always that easy! Another article on domainers from about a month ago from Entrepreneur.com is a little more balanced in terms risk vs. reward.

While it’s inexpensive to enter the domain business, you’ve got a steep
learning curve and immeasurable competition. You also have a perpetually
shifting market to follow.

Now that sounds more like it!

I was catching up on some blog reading when I came across a SEDO blog about Choosing the Right Registrar. The author of the post notes that, in his opinion, the biggest factor in choosing a registrar is price - though there are also a number of other factors to consider such as hidden fees and ease of use of the customer account.

I had been planning on adding some additional features to this domain registration price comparison site - such as whether or not private registration is included in the domain registration fee - but things kept on coming up and I hadn’t got around to it (after all this site is predominantly a hobby and I have to make a living). Reading this blog post, however, reminded me of these additions and I have started to work on them (so stay tuned).

Finally, the SEDO blog post mentioned an important factor in choosing a registrar was how easy is it to change ownership/transfer a domain. For a domainer, this factor is probably the most important - outweighing registration fee. I think in the future I will put up a Poll and let people vote on which registrar they feel is best in this regard.

The New York Times has an interesting article on “Domain Flipping” - describing the practice of domainers who find underdeveloped web sites, purchase them, fix them up and boost traffic and them sell them at a large profit.


The article suggests that while the media may report on the million dollar buyouts of websites such as Wired News and Celebrity Baby Blog most domain flippers aim lower — perhaps making only hundreds or thousands of dollars on a flip.


To read the full article click here.

Something I should have caught last month:
Starting July 1st, Yahoo is increasing their domain renewal fee from $9.95 to $34.95 - OUCH!

New Domain registration prices will remain at $9.95 in order to entice new users to sign up. I think that if enough people complain about this 3.5X price increase, Yahoo will have to reconsider this decision.


Meanwhile, I am changing Yahoo’s $9.95 first year only price to be indicated as a ’sale’ price with a regular price of $34.95. Perhaps at some point when I have more time I will rewrite the code so that a first year only price can be better indicated.

Now that .ME open registration has been in full gear for a few days we can take a quick look at who has the best deal. Keep in mind that a .ME domain requires a two-year registration period.


From our .ME page we can see that GoDaddy and Moniker have the best prices at around $40 for 2 years followed closely by namecheap.com at about $44 for two years. Keep in mind that GoDaddy charges 8.99/yr for private registration while Namecheap has a promotion for a free year of private registration (regularly $2.88 yr). So it looks like Namecheap is the way to go for now.


We will be updating our .ME page regularily so take a look whenever you want to find out about the best .ME deal


Drop us an email to let us know about some of the .ME domains your getting.

The first-come first-served registration for the Web’s newest Top-Level Domain Name Extension (TLD) starts tommorow (July 17th).

The “land-rush” period, a 20-day period that was the first opportunity for the public to apply for .ME domains, concluded June 26th. The period between the 26th of June and July 17th was being used to award domains where multiple applications for the same domain were received. The Land-rush period and Sunrise period have seen over 30,000 .ME applications.

A two year minimum is required for .ME domains during the initial open registration period.

For more information click here

Verisign, the global registry operator for .com and .net issues a quarterly report on the current state of the domain name industry. Here is some interesting info from the latest report.

• There are over 162 million domain name registrations accross all Top Level Domains (TLDs) - a 26% year-over-year increase
• 62 million domains are of the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) variety - a 33% year-over-year increase
• The largest TLDs in terms of base size are .com, .de, .cn, .net, .uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu and .biz
• The ccTLD growth was fueled in particular by .pl (Poland), .cn (China), .es (Spain), .ru (Russian Federation) and .fr (France) - each of which experienced double digit growth quarter over quarter.
• Year-over-year .cn’s growth was a whopping 199%
• New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of 2.6 million per month in Q1 2008
• India’s internet user population, at more than 41 million, grew by 25% last year.
• At the end of Q1 2008 there were about 410,000 .in domain name registrations