Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have.
There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each zone and then for the DNS queries.
The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.
The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).
Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.
To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.
blah blah blah blah fuck you is how your response comes off.
At least now I know to warn my clients away if they mention you.
Uh, good luck with trying to get people to spend time to listen to your elaborate explanation as to why it's not your company's fault it's being shitty.
No one likes long paragraphs of weasel words. Customers want the straight dope. This isn't complicated. It can be explained with fewer words that are far less condescending.
If your business model is so poor that you have to screw your customers over, perhaps you should try car sales. I think you would be good at that. You are not good at this.
We run a combination of managed hardware and virtual hardware. The prices for both have indeed gone up significantly since we launched some of our earliest plans. We don't have the luxury of using a cloud provider like AWS for our Anycast DNS infrastructure, thus we are limited to our choices. Furthermore the cost for network transit has gone up, as has the cost of ancillary services we use to operate our network (such as tooling for alerting, observability, etc).
Oh man... this is not the first time they're doing it. I've been their user and they have deprecated the plan I've signed up for. After a call with the CEO, we have come to an agreement of a custom plan that allowed my to keep one of the features I really needed (vanity name servers) at the time. That was in 2015. In 2017 I had another call with them at after that I decided to move away.
I was a happy customer for years, but felt they were not good on past promises about the pricing. Moved to GCP and slashed my monthly bill to a 1/5 of what I was paying to DNSimple. Still with GCP today (for DNS).
I recently transferred all my domains and cancelled a DNSimple account I’ve had for more than a decade for similar reasons.
A couple years ago they migrated me to a more expensive plan with no notice, I had to catch the price difference on an invoice. I wasn’t happy but it’s a lot of work to transfer domains.
Recently I discovered they introduced a plan that fit my usage and cost 50% less, but (would you believe it) they didn’t bother quietly migrating me to that plan…
Seems a little odd to be surprised when a business that (by the author's own admission in this case) seems to have an established history of customer hostile actions.
I've been with DNSimple for years (personal and business accounts) and am watching closely to see whether I need to think about moving off in the next year or so. I've also started to feel like something is off … price hikes with no added benefits have me wondering if it would really be so bad to manage DNS for ≈ 30 domains at Hover or something.
Cloudflare handles domain registration at no price markup, the UX is solid once you figure out the slightly quirky process, and transfers have gone smoothly.
My issue with the Cloudflare registrar is that if you are using Cloudflare for DNS too, you’ve basically given them control over your domain. Yes, they don’t need the DNS part to redirect your domain to a different address, but you’re putting more eggs in the same basket. If you also use their hosting (pages or workers), you’ve given them full control over the entire project. I prefer to use the latter options, without using their registrar, just in case there is a problem or misunderstanding with a site, I still have the authority over DNS in a different provider and can switch quickly.
EasyDNS might be a few cents more (literally) than the alternatives, but they're a smallish company and have never pulled this nonsense. (Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.)
Porkbun is pretty good, too, but their margin is smaller and domain protection is less of a thing for them.
Google and Cloudflare are very cheap (because it's hard to make money on a dollar profit margin per year) but they're very big companies, so customer service is not quite the same as at a small company.
I tried Porkbun after suggestions here. The symbols in my password caused a 403 error. Porkbun is terrible (although I'm not sure if there's a better other option).
Cloudflare also isn't a general purpose registrar - they won't let you point to external nameservers which makes migration bad.
EasyDNS doesn't support U2F.
Google... the usual risk of getting banned for some youtube upload and losing all your domains.
I switched to DNSimple after several Gandi fiascos. I'm not a reseller, and the fast that they charge a fee made me hope they wouldn't try to skim in other places, but I'd be happy to know of a registrar that checks all the boxes (box 1: u2f, box 2: no glaring technical issues).
> Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.
I might be missing something here, but why do you feel that this particular service is worth highlighting? Genuinely asking because maybe there's something I'm not aware of. I was under the impression that most popular registrars have procedures in place to prevent this kind of things. To transfer a domain, I usually have to unlock it and/or provide some kind of transfer activation code, I get an email, then there's some transfer waiting period.
How do people get their domains stolen these days that would make EasyDNS's customer support particularly stellar in that regard?
Interesting. I know to become a registrar it is something like 70k. Didn’t think that providing an api to register a domain would be a serviceable business.
They have a feature called ALIAS records, which is a non-standard DNS record type similar to CNAME, but it works with the root domain. The people I know using DNSimple were using it because it worked better with Heroku than other DNS providers at the time. They are not the only ones offering ALIAS records now, but it's still a non-standard feature that not every DNS provider has. A feature like this is needed for Heroku, since they do not give you IP addresses for your servers - you have to use CNAME or ALIAS records.
I'm curious why they didn't communicate with DNSimple about the price hike. From the way this blog is written, it sounds like he didn't try to communicate with them at all, but instead chose to just walk away.
We emailed back and forth several times. CEO was on the thread, was aware of my concerns, chose not to do anything. The result of the back-and-forth was the proposal I shared in the post.
I used ovh for ~8 years, but it's getting more and more unstable ( not sure if only the web UI or their structure)
Domain registrations don't get through and must validate manually (no new customer and always paid invoices), especially if you buy friday and you must wait until monday)
Updating DNS records sometimes don't work (random webui errors, sometimes even in french)
I'm wondering what prevented the author from having the sales call and seeing what rates they are willing to offer. Best case they might even be better than the current rates.
Why did the change need to happen if this is a plausible outcome? Why add the risk to an existing customer that by all metrics is already loyal? Wouldn't an email with a % price increase and explanation been more acceptable? Why the drastic change in price?
It's someone trying to squeeze more revenues quickly and by doing so, damaging their brand / reputation.
I'm not trying to defend DNSimple and their decision to not keep the legacy plan around for existing customers. Sure, that's a hostile move that seems the be designed to squeeze more revenue from their existing customer base. I'm just wondering why the author didn't at least try to explore that avenue.
Have you looked at FolioHD? It's geared towards photographers and artistic types that want a really nice portfolio website.
Paying an amount that is just-above-market-rate for a domain and not needing to understand how to configure DNS for someone non-technical seems like an absolutely worth-while reseller case.
If you want to be an artist then control of your intellectual property is probably a topic you care a great deal about.
Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting.
The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you.
Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks.
Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.
From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.
People want the thing whose functioning they are largely ignorant of to just be solved by someone else already, news at eleven.
It is, I feel, the responsibility of those who do know how these things work (e.g. us) to point out which things are important and which are safely dumped onto someone else. In this case, one’s identity on the ’net is very important, and something one should absolutely not put into position to be held for ransom later by being bundled with other services.
Do rent a hosting service, absolutely. (Do not trust it to hold the only copy of your data or metadata or social graph, but that’s usually something photographers understand implicitly, unlike e.g. writers.) Website hosting, DNS hosting, autoupload, social crossposts, whatever, buy all of that stuff as a bundle if you want—your risk threshold for redoing all of that after a hostile acquisition of your hoster is your own. But do not, under any circumstances, let them hold your identity at the same time. On the ’net, that’s your domain registration.
You own the domain. You can take it and they can't withhold it.
The registrar is already doing what this site is doing. I don't have a problem with a site making it easy to setup. It's the site holding a thousand website domains.
What you are asking for is different.
If FolioHD said:
Have a domain in mind that you'd like to use? Type it here and we'll do all the work setting that up.
What they are actually doing is:
We've bought these 900~ domains and we are holding them. Pick one you'd like and we'll set it up.
The business in question isn’t hoarding domains. Customers explicitly request their domain and they register it for them. That’s it. The customers can also transfer their domains out and set DNS entries like they would with any webhost.
The way the article read it seemed as they though they had many domains and customers could bring theirs into that ecosystem.
If the customer left it behind they could send it to the wayside.
If they are merely a broker then I agree, I don't see them as rent-seeking. The article left me with the impression that they had a large number of domains they rent out to customers.
Why is this rent seeking? It seems like a reasonable service for their target audience, an easy way to create online portfolio. Reselling domains to be used with a portfolio is just an additional service which makes perfect sense in this case.
Rent seeking is NOT the same as renting, otherwise we would not need a new word for it. Rent seeking is particularly abusing the ownership position or power to obtain rent, not just rent:
> "Rent seeking: the fact or practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits."
I don't think you understand what foliohd does. They're not squatting on hundreds of domains in advance. This is how it works, based on 1 minute glance of their site:
- you create portfolio, but it's by default served as a subdomain
- then you decide that you really want to use "mchichol.com". You register through them instead of buying it yourself.
That's it. It's customer's domain, not theirs. They also specify that domain is yours if you ever want to move your site elsewhere.
That's not what "rent seeking" means. Imagine you have a bench on your property and people can just rest there. One day you start charging money for it but without offering anything extra, same old bench. That "squeezing for money with no justification" is "rent seeking".
It's not like that. They buy mcnichol.com on your behalf, when you request it. They're not registering it in advance and then blackmailing you to rent it through them. Domain is yours, you can move it elsewhere (they explicitly mention that).
It's same as any other domain registrar, except that have small markup (couple of dolars per year) but they provide additional service, i.e. customer doesn't have to deal with DNS.
Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have.
There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each zone and then for the DNS queries.
The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.
The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).
Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.
To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.
blah blah blah blah fuck you is how your response comes off.
At least now I know to warn my clients away if they mention you.
Uh, good luck with trying to get people to spend time to listen to your elaborate explanation as to why it's not your company's fault it's being shitty.
No one likes long paragraphs of weasel words. Customers want the straight dope. This isn't complicated. It can be explained with fewer words that are far less condescending.
If your business model is so poor that you have to screw your customers over, perhaps you should try car sales. I think you would be good at that. You are not good at this.
> rising prices of infrastructure
What does this refer to? (It sounds like servers, and those are certainly not getting more expensive.)
We run a combination of managed hardware and virtual hardware. The prices for both have indeed gone up significantly since we launched some of our earliest plans. We don't have the luxury of using a cloud provider like AWS for our Anycast DNS infrastructure, thus we are limited to our choices. Furthermore the cost for network transit has gone up, as has the cost of ancillary services we use to operate our network (such as tooling for alerting, observability, etc).
Oh man... this is not the first time they're doing it. I've been their user and they have deprecated the plan I've signed up for. After a call with the CEO, we have come to an agreement of a custom plan that allowed my to keep one of the features I really needed (vanity name servers) at the time. That was in 2015. In 2017 I had another call with them at after that I decided to move away.
I was a happy customer for years, but felt they were not good on past promises about the pricing. Moved to GCP and slashed my monthly bill to a 1/5 of what I was paying to DNSimple. Still with GCP today (for DNS).
I recently transferred all my domains and cancelled a DNSimple account I’ve had for more than a decade for similar reasons.
A couple years ago they migrated me to a more expensive plan with no notice, I had to catch the price difference on an invoice. I wasn’t happy but it’s a lot of work to transfer domains.
Recently I discovered they introduced a plan that fit my usage and cost 50% less, but (would you believe it) they didn’t bother quietly migrating me to that plan…
These guys can’t be trusted.
Some "unit elasticity" going on maybe?
Seems a little odd to be surprised when a business that (by the author's own admission in this case) seems to have an established history of customer hostile actions.
I've been with DNSimple for years (personal and business accounts) and am watching closely to see whether I need to think about moving off in the next year or so. I've also started to feel like something is off … price hikes with no added benefits have me wondering if it would really be so bad to manage DNS for ≈ 30 domains at Hover or something.
Cloudflare handles domain registration at no price markup, the UX is solid once you figure out the slightly quirky process, and transfers have gone smoothly.
Porkbun [1] is also good (I have no affiliation with them; just a happy customer).
[1] https://porkbun.com/.
Cloudflare is already too powerful. Using their domain registration only plays into solidifying their market domination.
My issue with the Cloudflare registrar is that if you are using Cloudflare for DNS too, you’ve basically given them control over your domain. Yes, they don’t need the DNS part to redirect your domain to a different address, but you’re putting more eggs in the same basket. If you also use their hosting (pages or workers), you’ve given them full control over the entire project. I prefer to use the latter options, without using their registrar, just in case there is a problem or misunderstanding with a site, I still have the authority over DNS in a different provider and can switch quickly.
EasyDNS might be a few cents more (literally) than the alternatives, but they're a smallish company and have never pulled this nonsense. (Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.)
Porkbun is pretty good, too, but their margin is smaller and domain protection is less of a thing for them.
Google and Cloudflare are very cheap (because it's hard to make money on a dollar profit margin per year) but they're very big companies, so customer service is not quite the same as at a small company.
I tried Porkbun after suggestions here. The symbols in my password caused a 403 error. Porkbun is terrible (although I'm not sure if there's a better other option).
Cloudflare also isn't a general purpose registrar - they won't let you point to external nameservers which makes migration bad.
EasyDNS doesn't support U2F.
Google... the usual risk of getting banned for some youtube upload and losing all your domains.
I switched to DNSimple after several Gandi fiascos. I'm not a reseller, and the fast that they charge a fee made me hope they wouldn't try to skim in other places, but I'd be happy to know of a registrar that checks all the boxes (box 1: u2f, box 2: no glaring technical issues).
> Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.
I might be missing something here, but why do you feel that this particular service is worth highlighting? Genuinely asking because maybe there's something I'm not aware of. I was under the impression that most popular registrars have procedures in place to prevent this kind of things. To transfer a domain, I usually have to unlock it and/or provide some kind of transfer activation code, I get an email, then there's some transfer waiting period.
How do people get their domains stolen these days that would make EasyDNS's customer support particularly stellar in that regard?
My 2024 pet peeve is people exposing their illiteracy to me by using "nx" (n = a number) as a verb...
"to 2x" = "to double"
"to 5x" = "to quintuple".
Just noticed his blog's tagline... I think terrible grammar is poor UX too. =]
Interesting. I know to become a registrar it is something like 70k. Didn’t think that providing an api to register a domain would be a serviceable business.
Now it does.
Is there any feature there that is unique enough you can't use AWS or GCP? I use GCP for all my DNS needs and it's very very cheap.
They have a feature called ALIAS records, which is a non-standard DNS record type similar to CNAME, but it works with the root domain. The people I know using DNSimple were using it because it worked better with Heroku than other DNS providers at the time. They are not the only ones offering ALIAS records now, but it's still a non-standard feature that not every DNS provider has. A feature like this is needed for Heroku, since they do not give you IP addresses for your servers - you have to use CNAME or ALIAS records.
GCP has ALIAS records in preview as of somewhat recently: https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs/records-overview#alias-rec...
I'm curious why they didn't communicate with DNSimple about the price hike. From the way this blog is written, it sounds like he didn't try to communicate with them at all, but instead chose to just walk away.
We emailed back and forth several times. CEO was on the thread, was aware of my concerns, chose not to do anything. The result of the back-and-forth was the proposal I shared in the post.
I like using OVH for domains and its quite simple to manage / order domains with their API.
I used ovh for ~8 years, but it's getting more and more unstable ( not sure if only the web UI or their structure) Domain registrations don't get through and must validate manually (no new customer and always paid invoices), especially if you buy friday and you must wait until monday)
Updating DNS records sometimes don't work (random webui errors, sometimes even in french)
I'm wondering what prevented the author from having the sales call and seeing what rates they are willing to offer. Best case they might even be better than the current rates.
If someone says your prices will go up by a factor of five, there's very little if no chance you'll negotiate to anywhere close to the current price.
Also, when someone is barely satisfied with the current offerings, something like this would be the impetus needed to do something new.
I'm allergic to sales calls. =] Plus, when has jumping on a "quick call with sales"[1] ever resulted in paying less money?
[1] posthog.com/sales
Why did the change need to happen if this is a plausible outcome? Why add the risk to an existing customer that by all metrics is already loyal? Wouldn't an email with a % price increase and explanation been more acceptable? Why the drastic change in price?
It's someone trying to squeeze more revenues quickly and by doing so, damaging their brand / reputation.
I'm not trying to defend DNSimple and their decision to not keep the legacy plan around for existing customers. Sure, that's a hostile move that seems the be designed to squeeze more revenue from their existing customer base. I'm just wondering why the author didn't at least try to explore that avenue.
It seems like more work to write a rant and post it to hackernews than to just take a quick phone call.
Not if you are afraid of calling people.
Was not aware this still existed in 2024
been there left the boat.
[flagged]
Have you looked at FolioHD? It's geared towards photographers and artistic types that want a really nice portfolio website.
Paying an amount that is just-above-market-rate for a domain and not needing to understand how to configure DNS for someone non-technical seems like an absolutely worth-while reseller case.
If you want to be an artist then control of your intellectual property is probably a topic you care a great deal about.
Your domain and how people reach you is probably the first lever. If you are giving that up happily, I assume renting without the option to own or leasing a car is a sensible business model to you and you are just experimenting without any real intention of starting.
The effort and time in becoming an artist outweighs by at least two or three orders of magnitude the time it would take to read an article and setup a domain. Namecheap, GoDaddy, all these registrar's do it for you.
Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks. Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.
While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.
From my *personal* experience, the target audience, to a large degree, doesn't care at all about owning domains, websites or servers. They want something that just works and the less they have to deal with technology, the better. In that sense, a reasonable and ethical service where you own nothing is much better than one that preys on you and you still own nothing.
People want the thing whose functioning they are largely ignorant of to just be solved by someone else already, news at eleven.
It is, I feel, the responsibility of those who do know how these things work (e.g. us) to point out which things are important and which are safely dumped onto someone else. In this case, one’s identity on the ’net is very important, and something one should absolutely not put into position to be held for ransom later by being bundled with other services.
Do rent a hosting service, absolutely. (Do not trust it to hold the only copy of your data or metadata or social graph, but that’s usually something photographers understand implicitly, unlike e.g. writers.) Website hosting, DNS hosting, autoupload, social crossposts, whatever, buy all of that stuff as a bundle if you want—your risk threshold for redoing all of that after a hostile acquisition of your hoster is your own. But do not, under any circumstances, let them hold your identity at the same time. On the ’net, that’s your domain registration.
At least I know there's one person that gets it.
I've never ran into such brigading on HN before. I really thought I said something non-confrontational at first.
Wait till they get hit with their first domain renewal sniping attack. Then it's spiderman-pointy-finger meme all day when explaining who hurt who.
Domain registrar's don't prey on you.
You own the domain. You can take it and they can't withhold it.
The registrar is already doing what this site is doing. I don't have a problem with a site making it easy to setup. It's the site holding a thousand website domains.
What you are asking for is different.
If FolioHD said:
Have a domain in mind that you'd like to use? Type it here and we'll do all the work setting that up.
What they are actually doing is:
We've bought these 900~ domains and we are holding them. Pick one you'd like and we'll set it up.
Have you looked at Photobucket? Flickr? Facebook? Apple? Google/Android? S3? Dropbox?
The business in question isn’t hoarding domains. Customers explicitly request their domain and they register it for them. That’s it. The customers can also transfer their domains out and set DNS entries like they would with any webhost.
They’re not reselling or licensing out domains.
The way the article read it seemed as they though they had many domains and customers could bring theirs into that ecosystem.
If the customer left it behind they could send it to the wayside.
If they are merely a broker then I agree, I don't see them as rent-seeking. The article left me with the impression that they had a large number of domains they rent out to customers.
Why is this rent seeking? It seems like a reasonable service for their target audience, an easy way to create online portfolio. Reselling domains to be used with a portfolio is just an additional service which makes perfect sense in this case.
Imagine having 900 houses and renting them out to a community of like minded folks.
Whether it is at cost or slightly above, it is "rent seeking" in the sense they own, you borrow.
While it isn't rented, they are squatting on it.
Rent seeking is NOT the same as renting, otherwise we would not need a new word for it. Rent seeking is particularly abusing the ownership position or power to obtain rent, not just rent:
> "Rent seeking: the fact or practice of manipulating public policy or economic conditions as a strategy for increasing profits."
Owning 900 domains hoping for them to be rented is "rent-seeking"
A simple test:
Would all of FolioHD's domains being rented benefit their business or not?
They are subsidizing the cost of buying those 900 domains into their overall pricing as a line item.
Now the registrar is trying to push out squatters. Sounds like the housing and renting markets. Insert surprise Pikachu face.
I don't think you understand what foliohd does. They're not squatting on hundreds of domains in advance. This is how it works, based on 1 minute glance of their site:
- you create portfolio, but it's by default served as a subdomain
- then you decide that you really want to use "mchichol.com". You register through them instead of buying it yourself.
That's it. It's customer's domain, not theirs. They also specify that domain is yours if you ever want to move your site elsewhere.
I suspect they're confusing domain speculators with domain registration resellers.
That's not what "rent seeking" means. Imagine you have a bench on your property and people can just rest there. One day you start charging money for it but without offering anything extra, same old bench. That "squeezing for money with no justification" is "rent seeking".
You clearly do not understand.
They buy 900 domains. They hold 900 domains.
Anyone who wants that domain cannot use it but must rent through them (whom they rent through someone else)
This is textbook rent seeking behavior.
It's not like that. They buy mcnichol.com on your behalf, when you request it. They're not registering it in advance and then blackmailing you to rent it through them. Domain is yours, you can move it elsewhere (they explicitly mention that).
It's same as any other domain registrar, except that have small markup (couple of dolars per year) but they provide additional service, i.e. customer doesn't have to deal with DNS.
They buy the domain their customer _wants_ them to buy. That customer is free to transfer it out if they want to. What are you going on about?
[flagged]
Hey Cory, small world! Nice to see this pop up on HN! We've never talked, but we're related :)
Glad to have a family-member in this crazy tech world. Rising costs, worsening products, sorry to hear of your predicament.