Some of you are not aware but I pay money to a company every year to keep this domain registered in my name. If you’re curious, you can read up on what domain name registars do. Anyways, for almost the entire time that this domain has been active, it’s been registered with GoDaddy. Now renewing the domain used to really cheap. I remember it being less than $10 a year. Over time, that renewal fee has increased. Since my renewal date is coming up at the end of this month, I logged on to see what my renewal fee would be for this year. It would be about $20 this year.
I decided to do some research before renewing. Some registars have different pricing structures and I had a feeling GoDaddy sure wasn’t the cheapest one. By golly, my hunch was right. One of the larger registars would only charge me $13 to transfer my domain to them and also renew for another year, a great deal. This afternoon I started the transfer and completed it in less than an hour. I get the impression that in the earlier days of the Internet, domain transfers could take several days to complete but the process seems very automated now. I’m also happy to report that renewals are $14 a year at this new registrar.
I still host my site at GoDaddy but my hosting package is up for renewal this June. If I decide to renew, it will cost me $100 a year. Interestingly, this new company also offers hosting with double the disk space at about half the price. It looks like I’ll be moving all my products away from GoDaddy in the future.