Nominet to hike price of UK web domains by 50%

Nickle and dime

Nominet charged me just to update the name on a domain.

I don't like their general control freakery, and if anyone is going to throw you under a bus if there's any sort of domain dispute, it will be nomient.

Cheap is sort of what they had going for them, but I wouldn't consider a .uk domain ever again.

And this is why I dropped my .co.uk names and just use the proper ones (com,net and org).

"the end result will be just a few extra pounds when they renew their web address."

That's fair. After all, somebody has to pay for the increased salaries.

They are the bad guys

Nominet are bad for the UK domain space. Their obsessions are empire building and "compliance", all offset by virtue signalling. All those things cost money, hence the price hike.

In recent years their "improvements" have all served to drive out small "corner shop" domain registrars in favour of the large supermarket type - the type that are better able to handle the silly tick-box bureaucracy of their compliance regime, but provide an impersonal service to their customers.

Despite Nominet's wealth and resources, they still can't attend to the basics and get them right. Two examples: Emails from their automaton are classified as spam by Google as they "violate Google's standards for sending email". And my browser (running Firefox latest on Ubuntu) turns its nose up at at Nominet's "secure" login page at https://secure.nominet.org.uk/. Perhaps that's because Qualys SSL Labs report that they are deploying a dodgy intermediate TLS/SSL certificate with a weak signature that needs upgrading to SHA2. Pathetic - especially when they self-certify themselves as "keeping the UK namespace safe". Yeah, right.

Nominet's "justification" for their price hike is pure comedy gold. Apparently raising your price is how you respond to "an increasingly competitive domain environment". And there was I thinking all the while that you increase your competitiveness by *lowering* your price! My bad - but then what do I know about running a cosy, unregulated monopoly?

Incompetent shambles

I've had UK domains since day one of Nominet. Originally names cost quite a lot, don't recall was it £100 or £200? but it I think it was a one off charge no annual renewal. Ten years later they decided to dispute my ownership of a highly desirable domain name I'd had and been using since day one and for which their whois service showed me as the registrant. I proved ownership and they agreed to continue as long as I paid the ongoing annual renewals.

On another occasion they let a name of several years standing drop with no notice. All my names are on auto-renewal. Overnight the live website went dead, name immediately released straight back onto the open market. Rather than face the hassle of trying to get them to investigate and correct the situation I just re-registered it before a name squatter could grab it.

Then I took it up with Nominet. Their explanation was a discrepancy in the registration details: the business name was shown as XXX trading as YYY. Subsequent to the original registration Nominet had introduced a separate "trading as field" to the database so the data was now incorrect. They had emailed an advice but there was a typo in the email address so they chose to disregard the bounce and not to bother trying the phone or postal address (both of which were correct), and finally, rather than suspend the name they cancelled it completely.

And I just checked with 123reg through whom the name was registered (yes I know, not the best choice...), their interface doesn't offer Nominet's t/a field so the only way to register correctly is to subsequently log into the Nominet control panel and add that information.

I do just wonder if this proposed price increase is a recognition that bare .uk names (without the .co) have failed. That's to say many (most?) of those who have paid up for the variant seem not to be using it (try tesco.uk, hsbc.uk). Maybe the plan is to include the bare .uk in the same fee as co.uk.

No, I expect they're just not satisfied with those meager £60k salaries.

Having had a .uk domain since before Nominet existed...

... I find all this rather sad. Nominet started out as a relatively lightweight and efficient organisation (as these things go) and was initially quite robust at resisting the more freewheeling commercial domain slingers' attempts to turn it into a cash cow. Now it's just another overstuffed quango with an overinflated sense of its own importance.

Why on earth does it have an "R&D" department working on IoT and White Space spectrum and a bunch of other buzzwords du jour? Sadly, the answer seems to be, "because it can". It seems to have lost sight of its role - which is to operate a fairly straightforward database - and gone in search of a grander mission. It's becoming a mini-ICANN.

I wish the whole domain name registration system would clean up it's act. Registering a domain name always feels like going shopping in that bit of town your mother told you not to visit. I get that there's not much profit in registering the names but that doesn't mean you have to try and scam me. The thing I really hate though are the charges for moving a name to a different registrar. Seriously, this is a domain name we are talking about it's all virtual, no paper or humans should be involved.

Annoying domain renewal e-mails

Nominet don't seem to get it that sending someone an e-mail to remind them that their domain is due for renewal is unsolicited electronic marketing. They can't legally send those e-mails without first obtaining consent and consent is only valid if the individual is given the opportunity not to give their consent at the point their information was collected.

Unless they have a legal obligation to remind their customers, Nominet need to obtain consent - tick box on the domain registration form for example, or send the reminder by post. I'm getting fed-up with setting a domain not to be renewed in the control panel provided by my hosting company but still receiving reminder e-mails from my hosting company and then from Nominet.

The number of UK companies that just don't get it is staggering. And don't get me started on the fee paying WHOIS opt-out that 123-Reg are heavily promoting to the detriment of the free WHOIS opt-out; they won't be doing that for long.

Webmaster www.mindmydata.co.uk

Is this really new

Price changes happen most years for registries such as .com .org etc. Nominet have only raised the price once in over 10 years. A .uk is still cheaper at cost than a .com.

Providers within the UK already resell domains for £6.99 / year. I would expect to see the retail price rise for most between £6.99 and £9.99, in line with the core generic domain extensions.

Most business operate with one to three domains (.co.uk (£5).com (£10), now .uk (£5)), with others expanding with new extensions such as .london (£35) or .eu (£10). The cost of a few pounds more for a micro / small business - the majority of those businesses within the UK - will not make an impact.