More Negative GoDaddy Domain Registration Changes

Published by Torry Crass on

Once again it was time for me to renew domains so I went back to my trusty post, [2014 GoDaddy Registrar Discounts Fail], I made a while ago containing the only renewal coupons I could find at the time only to discover that those have now, also, been disabled.

The Cost

Currently, your only option to gain good renewal pricing for GoDaddy is to join their Domain Club at the cost of $90 a year or pay $14.99 per .com renewal.  I was renewing .com domains for around $10 (plus other fees) on the usable coupon and that was a $1.50 increase per domain over what I was budgeting.  With club membership you get .com domains for a very reasonable $8.29.

The Math

However, after doing the math on this in comparing Namecheaps promotion which provides $8.49 .com transfers, I would have to renew a whopping 22 domains to realize any savings from GoDaddys club discount.  At 22 domains, I save $0.31.  Before I essentially get one domain free through their discounting mechanism I have to register a full 51 domains!

Other Notes

.nets have a little better pricing and .orgs have a little worse.  I will also state that GoDaddy does claim that it has sale prices on .coms even on the discounts putting the pricing down to around $8.19 for .coms but no sale pricing listed for .net and .org.  They do offer discounts on joining their club for multi-year membership and probably do have a discount coupon for joining the club.

Conclusion

In any case, this seems like a major attempt, whether purposeful or inadvertent, by GoDaddy to push small business and single domain customers away from their domain registrations and related services.  Maybe they've spent too much money on high cost advertising instead of focusing on keeping their products in line with other alternate registrars?

As alternatives, Namecheap offers a good transfer option that I've been steadily taking advantage of using promo code switch2nc.

Even more interesting is that Google is expected to begin offering web services such as domain registrations sometime soon (they're in beta testing with invite only registrations right now).  I'm not generally a fan of centralizing into Google but given where GoDaddy is pushing the registration market, I think Google has an outstanding opportunity to capitalize on GoDaddys continued business decisions that push clients to look for other alternatives.

Happy registrar hunting everyone!

 


0 Comments

Leave a Reply