Hosting prices remain the same. This is not our increase, we do not earn anything from domain sales, which you can see by comparing our prices with other registrars.
Update after Feb. 14. it seems that the pressure of the internet community has borne fruit and that the price increase will not happen, at least not in the near future.
How much is the increase?
At the moment, it is not known exactly, but it is known that the new prices will enter into force on February 14, 2020.
Why is the price increasing?
The price of the .com domain increased because ICANN entered into an agreement with the private company Versign, which controls the .COM domain, and gave it the ability to regulate the price of the .COM domain as well.
What a blow this is to .COM domains here are some statistics.
Currently, there are 359.8 million of the total domains, of which 144 million are .COM domains, which is a total of 40% of all domains on the Internet. This move by ICANN is a huge blow to the entire Internet globally. This has happened before with the .INFO and .ORG domains.
Apart from this, will there be a future increase or just now?
As ICANN signed the contract enables Versign as follows:
Versign will be allowed to increase prices for .COM domain registrars by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. After that, there is a two-year price freeze and then it can increase prices from 2026 to 2029, followed by another two-year price freeze. Which means that this cycle of price increases can go on for the next 10 years which means that Versign can increase the price in the next 10 years for the 70% from the current price. Of course, this does not mean that these increases will be like that, but nothing prevents them from really increasing that much.
What can be done about this?
You can grab and renew a .COM domain for another year at this price before February 14th.
Nothing else really. Big registrars like godaddy, namecheap put their protests against this but they can't really do anything and this officially comes into force.
What you can do is to transfer the domain to another one if you have just started working because it has the least impact on SEO, and there are also redirects and safe ways to change the domain without a big impact on SEO and positioning.
If you need advice on domain transfer or anything else, you can always contact us on LiveChat.
