back to article Never lose that .uk again: Decade-long renewals OK'd

UK businesses will be able to register their .co.uk internet addresses for up to a decade at a time under a new and more flexible policy agreed by registry Nominet. Starting 1 May 2012, official registrars will be able to sell domain names for periods of between one and 10 years. This brings .uk into line with other top-level …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Time to drop the co.?

    Why are we saddled with a pointless subset of our TLD?

    time to be like everyone else and just have our country code as TLD

    www.theregister.uk

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The UK name space has had a bunch of names at the second level from the outset. This goes back to before it used the DNS. You (or anyone else) is welcome to use Nominet's policy-making machinery to get this changed. Good luck.

      You are also very wong to say that everyone else just has their country code as the TLD. Quite a few have adopted the UK ac/co.TLD convention (South Africa, New Zealand) and even more use names like gov/com/org/net/.TLD (Australia, Turkey, Brazil).

    2. heyrick Silver badge

      Drop the .co?

      Err... www.amazon.co.jp ?

  2. Pete Foster

    Unintended consequences

    I think this might cause more domains to lapse and be lost to squatters.

    In business, a lot can happen in 10 years. Like the person responsible for renewals not being around anymore.

    1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

      Yes but

      Nominet does itself send invoices to Domain Owners if the domain is about to expire or be lost, hopefully they won't think its a letter from the domain registry of the world type companies who con people.

      1. Marvin the Martian
        Headmaster

        As before, a lot can happen in 10years.

        I'm struggling to remember which of five addresses I used professionally (and which personally) 10years ago. GMail wasn't around, it was Yahoo and other stuff (as well as several uni ones).

        So if your small business owner [not: technical contact, being his/her nephew] changes email, the chance that (s)he remembers to notify nominet is small. A good year later (s)he still probably still checks his former addy occasionally, so most address changes will not have an effect within a year --- but 10years after, who knows? I guess many emails will fall on deaf ears.

        That's the point that was made, and your reply ignored.

        1. Dave Bell

          There are ways to set up the domain so that email to the domain goes to an account held elsewhere. It's what I do. If i changed my ISP, I'd need to change a few redirects from my personally owned domain name, but I am my own tech support.

          If a business has a domain set up by somebody who doesn't document this stuff, that somebody didn't do a competent job. An annual reminder is possibly a good idea anyway. Mention any new services, if you like. If you're selling domain-name services it's worth keeping in cont#act with your customers--few people deal direct with Nominet.

          Actually, that last point can reasonably prompt hollow laughter. Who are Nominet's customers?

    2. Chris Evans

      A suggestion

      O.k. so how do I set up a reminder for 10 years time to renew my domains?

      The best I've come up with is to put a text file called something like "Renew this domain 2021-11-15" in the root directory of the domains webspace. With the text file giving the details of who it was registered via etc. I do realise that not all domains have web space!

      Maybe a summary of domains and renewal dates could be stored in the root directory of the main domain/s a company uses called "Domains to renew this year"

      e.g.

      2012.1.1 mydomain1.co.uk

      2012.8.19 mydomain2.co.uk

      ...

      The above idea should cope with people leaving, company takeovers, offices burning down, hard disc failures, my electronic diary not reminding me for numerous reasons etc.

  3. jonathanb Silver badge

    The web != the internet

    I have 3 .uk domain names. If you go to the websites for them, you won't find much of interest, but that doesn't mean I don't use them.

    1. Lunatik

      Spot on.

      I get fairly frequent emails saying things like "Hey! I notice you don't use coolurl.com, could I buy it for $50?".

  4. Clyde

    1 yr is retrograde

    What's the point of a 1 year subscription ?

    The 2 year is already cheap enough. What are resellers of these going to charge ? The big ones make only a few pennies on a 2 year sale, they're not going to cut their prices by 50%.

    If you can't afford £6 or £7 for a domain, you shouldn't be bothering about it in the first place.

    Also, I agree : after 10 years a lot of smaller business will have changed their contact details. Maybe a 5 year deal. But I don't see what the problem is with the standard 2 year subscription as it is at present.

  5. Richard Cranium

    Makes the situation worse...

    My proposal is that UK domains should be £10 one-off setup admin fee - but in addition Nominet hold a £100 bond from the owner for each domain, refundable at any time.

    Nominet is then funded on the investment income from all those £100s.

    Name speculators will be more selective about what to hoard.

    £100 shouldn't be enough to discourage small biz. I don't recall the reg fee I paid at the point Nominet was set up - £100 or £200, and that was to buy the name not "lease it". (Rather annoyingly 10 years later Nominet tried to reclaim it saying they had no record of our ownership so we weren't entitled to use the highly sought after name - until we proved them wrong (like a 10 year old letter from Nominet relating to the domain name and signed by Willy Black) - and agreed to start paying biannual renewal fees) .

    Businesses or individuals no longer needing a name would be more inclined to reliquish it to get their bond refunded.

    New businesses looking for a suitable name would once more stand a chance of getting something meaningful rather than finding loads of suitable ones all held by speculators with unrealistic valuations. Or else be driven into the hands of a less desirable TLD.

    The only losers from this approach would be domain name speculators and domain name renewal scammers.

    Renewal after 10 years will lead to more accidentally lapsed domain names. Business ownership, phone numbers, email and physical addresses could all have been changed.

    Whereas a lapse of registration of the primary domain name like yourcompanyname.co.uk would be spotted immediately, secondary names (like your-company-name.co.uk and your-main-product.co.uk) pointing at the same underlying internet properties (web/email) may well go unnoticed. But even when the lapsed registration becomes evident, will anyone know how to get it back? Business has been bought, moved to new premises, maybe even changed name, changed employees, can they even prove they are entitled to renew?

    Finally I predict that the domain name scammers will be in action any day now. You will get an official looking mailshot announcing "Your UK domain name can now be renewed for 10 years", the scammers will offer to provide this service for you. You pay, they collect as much as they can then abscond without paying nominet.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like