The pricing of IE domains is always a topic that seems to excite people. The funny thing is when people take their own marketing too seriously.
A couple of years ago I mentioned a rather silly set of statements made by a certain Irish hosting company.
Why did I mention it?
Well, as I said then and I say now, they don’t exactly have a good track record in terms of pricing.
While the rest of us were doing our best to attract business with pricing etc., they were charging a high rate. In a free market they’re entitled to do so BUT when they started making crazy hypocritical claims about pricing I wasn’t going to stand idly by.
So what the hell is this all about?
So they’re matching someone else’s prices? Why? What is the point? It’s not as if they even have good pricing… €69 for a .ie is about €40 more expensive than the lowest price in the market at present, so it’s hardly innovative pricing …
Surely they’d be better off trying to grow their own business?
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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It would be ever so slightly more impressive if they were beating the price leaders 🙂
Yeah agree to Stephen.
On the other hand a question michele, is it allready possible to claim a .ie for non IE residents/companies ?
Robbert
Yes. Of course it is 🙂
Michele
I don’t think that the Irish market has gotten to the US level of knocking copy type advertisements yet.
Host Ireland tried a similar approach with its advertising in the newspapers and the increase in domain registrations was very small.
I think that buyers want value and reliability in the mid and top end of the market. In the low end of the market, cheapness rules.
However the fatal flaw for operators in the low end of the market is that some other hoster can always come in and undercut them. This has been the case with all low end hosters – they grow rapidly at first but seem to hit a wall at around 3000 domains. At this point, if they haven’t the proper systems in place to deal with customers and billing issues, they start to lose customers. Indeed the churn levels on low end hosters tends to be higher than those with a more diversified client base.
Hosting365 is Ireland’s only super hoster and it covers all the market from entry level to dedicated hosting. This is why I think that matching prices is not enough. The service aspect might convince some to move. But service quality is a high end of the market concern rather than a low end of the market one. Someone running a high traffic business or e-commerce site is going to be a lot more concerned about SLAs than someone with a personal or brochureware site.
In some respects it is a circular logic of the ‘never mind the price look at the quality’ type. In the end it is about marketing and worrying about the competition’s marketing distracting. There seems to be some logic in register.ie’s advertising. After all, it is not like the mess that Eircom made of its domain and hosting marketing.
In the end it is all about marketing and who ever makes the biggest noise gets the most attention – and this seems to be exactly what register.ie has achieved. 🙂
Hosting365’s name is far more prominant on the advertising image than the actual company behind the advert.
I actually had to look twice to figure out that it is register.ie who are behind the advert. H365 should be happy with the free advertising of their consistently competitive pricing! 🙂
> €69 for a .ie is about €40 more expensive than the > lowest price in the market at present, so it’s
> hardly innovative pricing …
So who is the cheapest currently? Does any independent site keep track of this?
Georgie
A couple of companies are offering IE domains in the €30 – €40 bracket, including us.
There have been a few people who have posted price comparison tables in the past, but keeping them up to date would take time 🙂
Regards
Michele
Nice last time i checked i recall there were some things that makes it hard for NL based companies to claim a domain.
Robbert
If they can prove trade with Ireland there’s no problem 🙂
You know where to find me if you have any questions
Michele
Just did that 🙂
There are even one or two selling at cost (around 25-30 euro). As JMCC says above, customers don;t worry too much about the price of a domain in the great scheme of things 🙂