Earlier this month domain registrar Fabulous.com increased their prices for domain registrarion, renewal and transfers. The increase was universal across all TLDs and tiered pricing was introduced.
Taking .com as an example, the price increase for those that own less than 100 domains is $1.69, $7.30 to $8.99. A staggering 23% rise.
For those with large domain portfolios containing more than 5,000 names, the increase is only 3%, $0.19, $7.30 to $7.49. But, that 3% equates to an extra $950 per year in renewal fees!
In return Fabulous has rolled out two new services. One is Whois privacy protection, which has been offered by other registrars for years. The good thing about Fabulous’ privacy protection is that it is “free”, well, free meaning it costs nothing to use. Compared to the ridiculous fee charged by GoDaddy for its domainsbyproxy service, this is impressive. Some other registrars do also offer free whois guard, notably most Directi resellers.
The second new service looks very promising. It’s a security key that produces a different code every time you want to change something within your account, like moving the domain to another account. In essense, it’s adding another gate for a domain theif to get through if he wants to steal your domains.
Whether the price increase is justified depends largely on the individual domainer. If you care about your privacy and are currently paying extortionate rates with GoDaddy, switching to Fabulous looks very attractive. Or if you have high value domains and want to maximise protection against domain theft, the security key and executive lock features are excellent preventative measures to keep your domains safe.
Though we would like domain costs to be less expensive, the new features added by Fabulous are a welcome addition and the increase in price is justifiable.
Read more about the new services on Fabulous.com
