Buying or renewing domain names soon?

If you are planning to purchase new domains or renew your current .COM or .NET domains, do it within the next two days. A price increase is coming which is going to make an impact on the economy of smalltime bulk domain buyers and renewers. Is it something to be worried about?

On July 1, 2010, the price on .COM and .NET domain names will increase by 7% and 10% respectively according to VeriSign®, the registry operator of .COM and .NET. Register your new domains and/or renew your current ones before that date, and you will save anything from Pennies to larger amounts. Owners of micro niche blog /website networks especially will notice the impact of the increase.

As you may have noticed from my post thumbnail, my preferred domain registrar is NameCheap. I use GoDaddy too, but would not hesitate to recommend NameCheap simply because they offer the most complete solution for me. They provide WhoIs Guard protection and an SSL sertificate for the first year for each new domain registered with them, at no extra cost.

A few words on micro niche domains and the new prices

The price increase is hardly an issue for those with less than 10-30 domains. Micro niche blog and site builders on the other hand, will no doubt feel the sting. On that note: with the changes introduced with the infamous MayDay-update, with which Google confirmed they hate dislike micro niche blogs with keyword-optimized content to entice visitors into clicking AdSense or other affiliate links, I’m sure there already are thousands of niche domains available in the market today, seeing how many micro niche sites have been de-indexed lately.

According to this response in the NameCheap support forum, effective on July 1, 2010 the new price on .COM and .NET domains will be $9.98 plus an $0.18 ICANN fee. In other words not a big deal for us small timers, but if you are the next niche network King and you have everything planned out but haven’t completed the domain bulk purchase yet, now is the time.

Also take note that, discount coupon codes for NameCheap domain names are only valid when either purchasing a new domain, or if you have at least 40 domain names registered with NameCheap, you can use the discount code when renewing your domains. I have noticed some customers with less than 40 domain names who asked nicely for an exception from those terms, and the NameCheap staff seem to respond positively quite often to those requests. But on general basis you should have at least 20-30 domains with them if you are going to try your luck.

Don’t forget about the thousands of laser-targeted niche domains that will become available in the market in the next couple of months, many of which already have a significant number of back-links pointing to them. Not that it has not been like that for several years, but the MayDay update killed off thousands of niche sites and I have already seen many great domain names going cheap in places like NamePros.

Happy site building and domain hunting!