Or... just take your domains elsewhere.
There's a way to dodge Fasthosts' up-to-160% domain renewal hike but you're not gonna like it
Life is about to get a lot more expensive for some customers of Fasthosts with domain renewal price hikes as high as 160 per cent coming into effect late next month – unless of course they buy early. The UK-based web-hosting firm contacted customers – El Reg saw the letter – to warn a "new pricing structure will be applied to …
COMMENTS
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Monday 2nd October 2017 12:11 GMT Cursorkeys
Re: LNC.com
We use LCN as a registrar and host, seems reasonable and the support is decent.
Have a huge bunch of domains on Fasthosts that we were debating keeping as they were set up by marketing, guess we'll transfer any we want to keep to LCN (probably none) and just let the rest lapse.
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Monday 2nd October 2017 10:23 GMT Lee D
Personally, I use Tagadab:
.uk domains at £10.00 + VAT for 2 years
.com for £7.99 + VAT for 1 year
There was a time I used to use a much better niche company (justhename) but they got bought out and ended up being under the PlusNet brand when BT took over. Needless to say, they're just completely gone now. But they had cheap, simple, easy domain management and didn't try to faff with anything else, and they had one really cool feature they called "URL Masking" (which was actually an Apache reverse proxy set up at their end, so that you could forward the domain to, say, cheappwebhosting.com/~username/folderpath/, and it would retrieve all requested files from there and present them as youdomain.com/filename - it was a fabulous way to make your domain very portable (store the same files anyway, change the path), without anyone knowing where it was actually hosted).
If anyone knows a company with a feature like that, give me a shout, or I'm going to have to read up on the Apache docs and do it myself.
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Monday 2nd October 2017 22:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
they had one really cool feature they called "URL Masking" (which was actually an Apache reverse proxy set up at their end, so that you could forward the domain to, say, cheappwebhosting.com/~username/folderpath/, and it would retrieve all requested files from there and present them as youdomain.com/filename - it was a fabulous way to make your domain very portable (store the same files anyway, change the path), without anyone knowing where it was actually hosted).
I don't know if EasyDNS's Mark J is still reading this, but I think they have a domain masking feature somewhere (I think it was at EasyDNS, been a while since I looked at that - I tend to host if a different way). The only problem with that is that you cannot apply SSL security to it (cert wil point to the wrong domain name).
Apropos registrar, I'll remain with EasyDNS. Good, cheap, reliable and sane: works for me :). Busy convincing a friend to ditch GoCrappy who just casually lost the A record of his website. Just like that, gone, reverted to their own hosting - yet nobody had been near the account (at least, that's what they think, I hang up after it took them > 10 min to get that confirmed).
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Monday 2nd October 2017 11:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
you're right. But only in principe. In reality, people are incredibly unwilling to move elsewhere, even when price goes up, sometimes significantly. The reasons are always the same: intertia / laziness, and fear of fuckups in the transfer process (which do happen), plus total lack of customer support when they do. And when the average website owner's IT skills are limited to how to use google and dropbox, they will be paralysed by a thought that something might go wrong. So, they're ripe for lifetime price hikes. I wish it were otherwise, I sincerely wish customers abandoned the predators en masse, unfortunately, homo sapiens just isn't like that :/
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Monday 2nd October 2017 08:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
An issue for some, less for others
Got notification of increase the other day.
While a significant hike as proportion of last years price, the difference in cost to us for operating a domain for a year is less than the income of selling a couple of units of the product it supports - a product that our customers buy in hundreds of units at a time.
Expect my boss will gripe and question whether it's worth moving to different provider. But effort and disruption of moving would easily wipe out any savings.
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Monday 2nd October 2017 09:09 GMT jake
Re: Price gouging.
As I said, gouging. Somewhere, anyway. And the suckers are falling for it. Remember, folks, it matters not what your name is ... what matters is that the search engines know your handle. .com, .uk, .org, .clinic, all of them are worth EXACTLY the same amount. Get the cheapest, duckduckgo will point the masses in your direction regardless of your chosen TLD.
(I haven't had to register a new domain in around two decades.)
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Monday 2nd October 2017 09:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Price gouging.
Not always that easy.
1) If your preferred name is gone you are still going to want to try to brand as close as possible with the domain. So if your company is ACME Clinic then you may find that the best address for you is acme.clinic as the others have gone.
2)Fraud. You start selling online through acmeclinic.com and then some shyster in faraway lands registers acme.clinic and starts stealing customer card details and ruins your reputation.
3)Passing off. Someone with the company name ACME herbal medicines registers acme.clinic and then starts selling through that and become more popular. Traffic that was intended for you mistakenly goes to this herbal site.
These reasons are used to try to extort money from you to buy the raft of new TLDs but the fact is they can be an issue, especially if your company is not extremely well ranked within the search engines to start with because you haven't been operating very long.
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Monday 2nd October 2017 15:08 GMT Lee D
Re: Price gouging.
Defending your trademark does not mean you buy up everything with your trademark on it.
You literally just sue whoever put up that domain with the unauthorised usage of your trademark, and force ICANN/whoever to suspend the domain / remove it when that court case starts / finishes.
It's like saying "to defend the trademark Nike, we need to buy up anything that has the word Nike on it". It's just a nice way to go bankrupt fast.
That said, where there is fair usage (e.g. "nikesucks.com") then they'd rather pay the $50 to own it themselves than let someone else humiliate them in court by winning rights to such a name (which they often do). But then, surely, that person would just buy "nikeREALLYsucks.com" if they couldn't get the first one anyway?
It's all pointless and achieves nothing but some people have domain-name fever and throw their money at naming authorities, while everyone else just thinks up a name that nobody else is using or makes do.
I remember when novatech.com used to be a military equipment supplier. The number of times I landed on there by mistake when trying to get to novatech.co.uk was unbelievable. And then Google came along and it's quicker to Google "novatech". It seems that, in the intervening years, they obviously paid someone money for the .com too, though.
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Monday 2nd October 2017 15:37 GMT wolfetone
Re: Price gouging.
"You literally just sue whoever put up that domain with the unauthorised usage of your trademark, and force ICANN/whoever to suspend the domain / remove it when that court case starts / finishes."
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Monday 2nd October 2017 13:10 GMT Captain Scarlet
Re: 123reg getting greedy
Probably because most people just leave auto-renew on (Oh wait so do I, but I use Enom because I am to lazy to go elsewhere.).
I expect they are trying to get a cash injection with people renewing for longer as I don't remember Nominet or Verisign being that high (CentralNic however were mind boggling).
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Monday 2nd October 2017 15:57 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: 123reg getting greedy
Nominet put their wholesale price up at the end of last year. Which explains the all the UK domain price-rises - or at least some percentage of them.
Then while you're at it, why not bung something on all the prices? The .clinic one could be whatever crap registrar bought that from ICANN in the hopes of .riches - but has ended up with .tumbleweed, and so is desperately trying to recoup their .losses...
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Monday 2nd October 2017 15:39 GMT Mike 16
Re: Fasthosts.. meh.
Pestering for card details years after you left? Sounds like GoDaddy's behavior toward me. I wonder who copied who. As for "Just Move", I have never used Fasthosts, but experience with other registrars and hosting companies leads me to expect you should block out some time on your calendar and be prepared to be reminded of the Petshop sketch (The admin server is currently pining for the fjords...)
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Monday 2nd October 2017 14:03 GMT MrKrotos
Another vote for namecheap.com
I was using 123-reg for a while, got sick of their system not working right and the fact they lost a domain for a friend during a transfer in to 123!
The price hikes are just adding to the reasons to stay clear of these.
"My .co.uk doubled earlier this year" owned by the same company as Fasthosts!
123-reg, webfusion, godaddy, Heart Internet, Domain Factory, Host Europe, Paragon Group, Server4You, Serverloft, World Hosting Days and NamesCon are all the same company now, see: http://www.heg.com/#ourbusiness
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Tuesday 3rd October 2017 06:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
They're all at it!
Godaddy suddenly started charging me 20% TAX on all new products and renewals a couple of weeks ago, its the last straw. They said the UK government demanded it. I moved 602 domains to Namecheap who don't charge 20% TAX despite also being based in the US. I'm going to move all my Fasthosts domains to Namecheap too.
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Tuesday 3rd October 2017 07:27 GMT knottedhandkerchief
Moved all from fasthosts to lcn.com (mostly .co.uk) - very smooth and easy, and very nice user interface, bodes well. Chat was answered immediately. Free transfer of .co.uk and kept the remaining term, and exactly half the price of fasthosts after their rise, and discount price breaks. Shame about the lack of free privacy, though for individuals, not needed for .co.uk
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Tuesday 3rd October 2017 10:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Another few hundred moving from 123REG to LCN
I'm moving mine. A little care is necessary with some so aiming at about 10/day but finding the LCN UI easier to use than 123reg. I've persevered long enough with 123 despite several cockups especially in respect of charges.
123reg make it hard to find and navigate to the outbound transfers page so if you've got multiple names to shift set a browser bookmark or you'll have to follow the same tortuous route each time.
My current difficulty is that 123reg seem to like charging for domains set to not renew and moved elsewhere. I can't prove that some domains I'm certain I set to not renew seem to get changed back. Maybe they have database crashes and roll back to a prior version?
I'm currently trying to cancel the Direct Debit at the Bank to make it harder for them to charge.
Clearly the biggest benefit of moving is to those with loads of domains but even if you've just got one, for co.uk the process is trivially simple and not much harder for .com. I can see no benefit in paying double even for a single name.
Yes I inherited a couple of names at Fasthosts, those will move today.
As regards domain privacy, personally I'm not worried about disclosing street address. The email address will attract spams and scams so I use a Gmail reserved for domain name registration (I set a filter to highlight and forward relevant ones to my normal account but diarise a regular check too just in case) a phone number (free Sipgate) that goes to voicemail (never gets any).
BTW Nominet never use postal or phone contact but rely solely on email as a client of mine found when they'd not updated their email. They lost their domain by failing to respond to a trivial technical query from Nominet. Rather than suspend the name Nominet cancelled and immediately released it to the open market with no other warning or period or suspension. Luckily I spotted the issue and re-purchased. Who would ever have thought Nominet could screw up...
I'd better clarify the nominet query: My customer had registered his name as like "freds enterprises trading as Fredco" rather than "freds enterprises" then use a separate field for "Trading as Fredco". OK strictly "wrong" but sufficiently misleading to justify cancelling the registration?
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