On price hike on existing registrations — Uniregistry backtracks

Firm will grandfather existing registrations in many fresh TLDs.

Fresh top level domain name registry Uniregistry is backtracking on its plans to significantly increase prices on existing registrations this September.

Last month, the firm disclosed price increases of up to 30x current prices. This caused quite an uproar and put Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling on the defensive. GoDaddy stopped enabling registrations and transfers-in of Uniregistry names as a result.

The firm will still increase pricing in September, but now the firm states it will grandfather existing registrations in nine of its domain names that are having the biggest price hikes: .audio, .blackfriday, .diet, .flowers, .guitars, .hiphop, property, .hosting and .jeugos.

In a message to registrars today, the firm explained that its initial feedback from registrars prior to the price hike was that grandfathering existing registrations at lower prices was technically difficult. I’ve heard the same thing.

Nonetheless, this is exactly what Donuts did when it increased prices on some of its domains.

Uniregistry will now do the same thing for many of its domain names. This document (pdf) shows the upcoming pricing, counting legacy pricing in the far right column.

Uniregistry is also reducing the amount of price increase for .Christmas and .Sexy domain names. In September these will increase to $30 and $25 respectively, instead of $50 and $0.

As part of the price increase in September, Uniregistry will move many of its premium domain names to the base price, which will be $100 in many of the TLDs. The higher base prices will allow the registry to essentially release all domain names at standard prices.