Domain Renewal Fatigue; 5 Days to Go — I’ve Got
Looming price hike means it’s time to renew your domain names.
Over the past few days I’ve renewed thousands of dollars worth of domain names. The price of renewing most domain names will shoot up on October 1 as many of the registries increase prices. That includes VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN), which runs .com and .net. Registrars will pass these price hikes to clients.
Last time ahead of prices increased I renewed domains a couple months out. This time, thanks to aggressive pre-price-hike pricing by Moniker, I’ve by now renewed through May of next year. Moniker is offering $7.29 .com renewals to everyone, which is lower than even the best advertised tier of pricing at the firm.
It just makes sense to renew now rather than in 6 months. Sure, some of my domains will sell and I will have renewed them early for no reason. But that won’t make up more than a couple percent of the domains I’ve renewed.
One thing I am doing differently this year is deciding if I ought to let some of my domains expire. Many of them were expired domains that I bought many years ago and have lost all of their backlink traffic. If they have any PageRank I’ll renew them; if not I’ll check out my stats on them for the last year to make sure they pay for the registration. So far I’ve decided to let regarding 2% of my domains expire.
Regardless of which registrar you use, I recommend taking a hard look at your portfolio and renewing in advance of the price increase.
