What about renewal?

Can a registrar gouge you when it comes to renewal?  E.g. charge a
cheap £4.99 or whatever for two years and then £49.99 for the next two
years when you come to renew having made the website an integral part
of your (charitable)  activity?

Thanks for helping a newbie - in my turn I'm helping someone even more
clueless than I am and  I don't want them dropped in it in two years
time.

Cheers

me here  writes:

> What about renewal?
>
> Can a registrar gouge you when it comes to renewal?  E.g. charge a
> cheap £4.99 or whatever for two years and then £49.99 for the next two
> years when you come to renew having made the website an integral part
> of your (charitable)  activity?

No, because you'd just renew it with someone else.  There are lots of
companies providing name registration so there is no way anyone can
extort money that way.

The key thing is to own the domain yourself.  Don't let the web
designer buy it for you.  Don't let the hosting company take it out in
their name (do any try to do this?).  There is no harm it having the
hosting company register the domain for you, so long as it is in your
name.  By "your" I mean the entity that matters be that a person or
charity or whatever.

-- 
Ben.

On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:17:52 +0000, me here put finger to keyboard and
typed:

>What about renewal?
>
>Can a registrar gouge you when it comes to renewal?  E.g. charge a
>cheap £4.99 or whatever for two years and then £49.99 for the next two
>years when you come to renew having made the website an integral part
>of your (charitable)  activity?

They can try, but you can move away from them and find another
registrar. However, you may have to pay an administration fee to do
so. If it's a co.uk or org.uk domain then that's not much of a
problem; if it's something else then it may be. What TLD is the domain
in?

£4.99 is below the wholesale price of a domain (well, most domains,
anyway) so that price is either a loss leader or comes with some nasty
small print that will come back to bite you later. As a general rule,
that sort of deal needs to be treated with caution. It's not uncommon
for web hosts to offer, say, a free domain name as long as you
maintain hosting with them (usually with a minimum term so that they
are guaranteed to cover the price of the domain from the hosting
profit), in which case it's not necessarily a bad deal so long as
there are no other hidden terms and the hosting itself is worth it.
Registrars that offer very cheap domains without an associated hosting
contract, however, need to be treated very warily indeed - if they're
not making their profit by selling hosting and simply using the domain
as a loss-leader, then they must be making it from hidden clauses such
as transfer fees and/or major hikes in the renewal price.

Mark
--
Blog: http://mark.goodge.co.uk
Stuff: http://www.good-stuff.co.uk