The price of registering domain names continues to fall. Recently, GoDaddy started offering $3.99 registrations with a catch. In order to qualify for the price, you had to buy a “non-domain” product with the domain (e.g. web hosting). That makes it not such a great deal, unless you intended to purchase another product anyway. I usually register with GoDaddy for $9.20 per year, eNom for about $10/year, or Dotster for $8.95 per year (I have special pricing with Dotster; they usually charge $15).
By all accounts, 1&1’s $5.99 domain name pricing comes with no catches. 1&1 is known for its huge advertising spreads in major magazines like PCMagazine, and for giving away 3 years of hosting at no cost during a promotion last year. They didn’t even require a credit card on file to get the three free years. So I decided to put 1&1’s domain registration to the test and see if there really are “no catches”.
1&1’s “Instant Domain” package includes:
-Domain registration
-5 subdomains
-DNS management consol
-URL forwarding/masking
-An email address with forwarding
That’s more than some of the other inexpensive registrars offer. You can tell that 1&1 is a web hosting company by what their packages include. I decided to register 6 domain names and see if 1&1’s $5.99 offer is really catch-free.
Registering was a bit cumbersome, as 1&1 doesn’t offer a bulk registration form (at least that I could find). I had to enter a domain and click on “check availability”. I then selected the domain to be added to the cart, and had to go back to search for availability of the other domains. This took a bit of time, but for $5.99 I figured it was worth it.
I put all 6 domains in my cart and started the checkout process. I was required to set up an account, which is typical of domain registrars. After creating the account and submitting my order, the confirmation screen informed me that it could take up to an hour for the domains to be registered and to receive my account login capabilities. I decided to test the login immediately by entering my domain name and password, and, alas, I couldn’t login yet. At this point, it was 2 AM so I decided to get some rest and login in the morning.
When I checked my email in the morning, I had a confirmation from 1&1 with login information. After logging in to my account, I was able to quickly see all of my domains on a dashboard. I wanted to change the DNS server of all of them to the same DNS, so I selected all of them and moved my mouse up to the “DNS” box. Unfortunately, it was greyed out. You can only change the DNS for one domain at a time. This is probably because 1&1’s typical customer is less sophisticated than you or me, and 1&1 doesn’t want them to accidentally change the DNS for all of their domains. This was a pain for me, but for saving $3 a domain I thought it was worth it. Changing the DNS one-by-one was not that big of a deal. Oddly, you can’t lock all of your domains at the same time either; you need to do it one-by-one.
If you buy and sell domains, you’re probably interested in how easy it is to transfer domains registered at 1&1. I wish I could tell you, but I couldn’t find this information in 1&1’s FAQs. Most of the FAQs are related to how to host your domain name. But I did find something interesting in the Terms and Conditions when I registered the domain. It said you could transfer the domain to another registrar at any time with no penalty. It didn’t mention a 60 day blackout period on new domains that most registrars mandate.
So far, my experience with 1&1 domain registration has been decent. When you register hundreds of domains, a $3 savings per domain is a big deal.
But this begs the question, how can 1&1 register .com domain names for only $5.99 when they have to pay Verisign $6.00? That’s a gross margin of negative 1 cent, which is a tough business model. The reason is simple: domain registration has become a commodity, and registrars are making most of their money with add-on services (hence GoDaddy’s $3.99 offer). Web hosting has huge margins. Private registrations probably have huge margins, too. 1&1 figures many of its domain customers will sign up for hosting packages as well. If not, 1&1 figures many of the customers will register a domain and not do anything with it at first, which means 1&1 will get a full page ad on that domain until its DNS is changed. This is worth $.01 for the advertising.
Bottom line: 1&1’s $5.99 per year offer doesn’t have any catches.
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