Domains: October 2008 Archives

Nominet does not charge registrars anything to retag a domain name (ie. release the domain to another registrar / provider) .

I've mentioned this previously, but I wasn't expecting to hear about this kind of money grabbing from companies operating out of Ireland.

Unfortunately the acquisition of Register365 by Names.co.uk (part of the Dada group) means that anyone who is unfortunate enough to have co.uk domains with register365 is going to be held to ransom.

Names.co.uk have a public price list, although it's buried in the "legal" section of their site for some odd reason.

There's no mention of these prices or practices on the Register365 site, so I was very surprised when I was sent an email by one of their clients with a screen shot showing evidence of this:
If you don't want to click on the image to see it.. the price being charged for something that takes only seconds and doesn't cost anything is £10 + VAT or €12.49 +VAT!!!
Madness!
If you want to move your domains to another Nominet tag holder you shouldn't have your domain held to ransom!

Nominet can retag domains for registrants. How much do they charge?
£11.75 including VAT, and that is regardless of the number of domains.

So if you wanted to move 1 *.uk domain to a new registrar or 1000 the only fee that Nominet would levy a registrant directly (via the online service system which would get it all done in a matter of seconds anyway ...) is £11.75 including VAT (less than €15 including VAT)

Disclosure: Yes. I do run a Nominet registrar and no we don't charge for retagging co.uk domains as we don't get charged by Nominet.

Update: Wanted to verify with Nominet if there was a limit on the number of domains that could be retagged via the online service for the £11.75 fee and was informed that there was NO limit, as long as they were all merged onto the one online account.

John McCormac has been collecting and processing statistics on domain registrations and hosting for as long as I can remember. He is probably best known for Hackwatch and WhoisIreland, which produces monthly reports for the Irish hosting and domain industry.

John's latest project has been in development for several months and offers an alternative to some of the existing domain statistics sites already on the market.

What makes it different is that HosterStats cares about ccTLD data.

Sites like WebHosting.info and DomainTools all but ignore ccTLD data and give a rather skewed perspective of non-US based providers.

With Hosterstats you can easily check the DNS history on any .com/.net/org/info/mobi/eu/asia/co.uk or .ie domain name.

While the site isn't the prettiest at present it is incredibly functional and nice and fast to load, so you get the information that you want quickly and easily.

It will be interesting to see what John plans on adding in terms of features in the coming weeks and months.