I’ve mentioned the price of .ie domains several times in the past……
Earlier today we were given the official prices for 2007 from the IEDR.
What struck me as rather amusing is that it will now be cheaper to register .ie domains directly with the IEDR than through some of their more prominent resellers. The IEDR will be dropping their retail rate to €69, so unless some of our competitors follow suit they will be more expensive than the IEDR!!
Sidenote – we’ll probably be running a special on .ie domains in the New Year.. so watch this space
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
Do you think this will affect retail prices?
I see Digiweb are pricing at €29.99 for .ie registrations. Should we expect to see lower pricing or just a compression of the pricing band?
29.99 for a .ie isn’t bad at all. I think its about time the IEDR dropped their prices, been too high for too long.
Richard – We’ve always been competitive with our pricing without being unreasonable. Digiweb’s current pricing is cost, which is pointless in my view.
Ken – The IEDR have been dropping prices for years. It’s the resellers who haven’t been passing on the saving all the time
So no change in wholesale prices? I’ve always been at a loss to know why they were retailing .ie’s themselves anyhow.
Richard
I didn’t mention wholesales prices 🙂
A lot of ccTLDs sell direct
Michele
Is there any specific reason why the retail rate has been (and still is) so high compared to other popular TLDs?
Conor
It’s a very small ccTLD and the registration process is very manual compared to a lot of the others.
Michele
Well Digiweb’s pricing looks like a classic attempt to try marketshare or more precisely to get back into the hosting business. It has been concentrating on its ISP activities for the last few years. The growth of hosters like Hosting365, Blacknight, Novara, Irish Domains have left it far behind in the domain stakes.
IEDR’s share of the market based on direct registrations has always been high and indeed it does allow it to compete with some of the larger Irish hosters in the .ie stakes. While the price reduction may have an effect on reducing IEDR’s direct marketshare, the historical aspect still remains unresolved.
And I think that the 30K .eu domains registered in the .eu landrush scared IEDR because .eu was also a geographically targeted TLD. But then again, IEDR knows very little about life outside of .ie ccTLD. A number of high profile cybersquatters and cyberwarehousers were using Irish front companies to register .eu so the real Irish owned .eu figure is much lower. The trade price of .eu will fall to 5 Euros in January. Luckily for IEDR. the .eu is an utterly discredited domain now and is not a serious competitor to .ie as is .com gTLD.
It might be interesting to see which Irish hosters pass on the savings.
Well if the same accounts department are responsible for hosting as DSL over at Digiweb then they haven’t got a chance.
It always astounds me how poor the customer support is in the telcos. Often so poor that I sometimes wonder if they are actually trying to be crap??