$15.88 per .com is pretty steep, damn. Dynadot shows $10.99 per renewal.
How legitimate is the Namecheap claim about "its out of our control" part? I have a number of domains with Namecheap, enough to be an annoyance to transfer them all but that number seems excessively high.
Out of maybe total 10-15 domains I own now, most are .com .net .in .us & a single .one. Com renewal at dynadot is 9, at Namecheap it is 13. transfers are same, around 9.
Net renewal is again $11/15 at Dyna/Namecheap. Transfers are same, $11.
.in renewals are $7/$12, transfers same $7.
I mostly prefers renewals because of inertia of moving nameservers and or other DNS records. I sometime transfer between namecheap and Dynadot. Most of my purchases are multi year.
*All prices rounded roughly to nearest dollar.
+1 for having same experience at Google, living in Google verse 24/7, but google.domains is expensive.
> Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means
$12.98 for a .com domain renewal is a 65% upcharge over the $7.85 wholesale rate. That is considerably more expensive than many of Namecheap's competitors.
I wouldn't call it a trap: they don't claim renewals are taken at a loss (and I wouldn't expect them to).
They charge $10.16/year to renew a .com (including the ICANN fee). Pretty reasonable to me, plus they let you specify your own nameserver for the domain.
I've been very happy with NameCheap: I was originally on GoDaddy (I was young and stupid), moved to 1&1 (still young, still stupid), and I've been with NameCheap ever since (~4 years).
I have mixed feelings about this, the increase by ICANN is outrageous, but at the same time NameCheap are positioning themselves as heros here, and I've been burnt multiple times by the byzantine way their renewal system tries to fool you into paying for the wrong thing (put 'registration period as 10 years? suuure, we won't tell you you're paying for 10 years of privacy guard over 1 year of domain registration though')
It's $5 over a year. If that's a meaningful amount of money you probably have no business owning domain names.
Namecheap has always been good for me in terms of service and reliability. I only own a few domains but if $15/year was unaffordable I think I'd just let them expire.
I buy all of my domains from Namecheap. I'm not 100% how TLDs work or who owns them or whatever... but just to be safe, I bought another 8 years of my .dev email address. Fortunately, the renewal rate was something like $17/yr. Jusr posting this in case anyone else is concerned about renewal prices on Namecheap; they appear to be stable, and you can still buy .dev domains from them.
They price their offering a tad on the expensive side. From a cursory search, easydns prices some domains at between 2x and 3x the prices offered by the likes of namecheap.
I've had namecheap do some "shenanigans" where a domain will be listed for once price when searching and suddenly jumps up significantly when you try to register it.
$10.69/year for .com without a coupon. It's a fair price for working with a good company that's stood up for its customers in court, whereas a certain top-selling budget registrar frequently does the opposite.
They're a little pricey for just DNS, which makes me wonder how much they charge for domain registration. It'd be nice if they gave pricing on their web site.
For those curious about prices, I just transferred 42 domains (mostly .com's but a few .org's, .net's, and .mobi's) to NameCheap for $367 with discount code.
And if you have any domains that still have a few years left in their registration, that is supposed to transfer with the domains.
> make sure you are happy with their full price for renewals - because you will NEVER get a discount for renewing
This comment is flat wrong.
I have a couple hundred domains with NameCheap. I always get a discount on renewal.
No, you can't just Google "Namecheap Coupon %thismonth%" but you can hop on chat, ask politely, and be given one. It's not the same full discount, but it's a discount nonetheless, and takes but a few seconds.
The problem with expecting to pay the same for renewals as the initial term is that the annual rates are raised to the registrars, so their costs go up year to year, leaving pennies per domain at the rates you pay Namecheap and eventually putting them in the red if the rate to you didn't rise.
Those '120 domains' they're talking about aren't newly registered. Most people have been renewing them with godaddy every year for $12 a pop ($15 for .org).
How legitimate is the Namecheap claim about "its out of our control" part? I have a number of domains with Namecheap, enough to be an annoyance to transfer them all but that number seems excessively high.
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