dns – Richy's Random Ramblings

Google Domains closing – current .com domain name prices

September 24, 2023

I’ve spent a while migrating all of our non-.uk domain names to Google Domains – only for Google to announce that as of September 7th 2023 they are stopping all new domain registrations and moving the public domain registrations over to Squarespace (Google domains managed 9 years before being killed by Google).

We were paying £10/year for .com (and .net and .dev) domain name purchases/renewals with Google – but what are the “current market prices”?

(I was starting to migrate domains over to WordPress (mainly for the free year of renewal), but finding out that they don’t support DNSSEC and that there isn’t an ETA for its implementation means I might have to look elsewhere.)

Domain provider	.com price (one year)	Notes	Thanks to
Cloudflare	£7.47	Price converted from $9.15 USD. Does support DNSEC. Domains must use Cloudflare’s authoritative DNS provider.
WordPress	£10.00	Currently offering free transfer+1 year renewal for domains currently with Google Domains. Does not support DNSSEC.
ResellerClub	£10.44	Price converted from $12.79. Available to resellers only.
Amazon Route 53	£10.63	Price converted from $13.00
ClouDNS	£10.93	Price converted from $13.39 USD. Does support DNSSEC.
Dynadot	£10.99
OpenSRS	£11.23	Price converted from $13.75 USD. Available to resellers only.
Namecheap	£11.40	New customer pricing of £4.87.	Neil Turner via Mastodon
DNSimple	£11.86	Price converted from $14.50 USD. Requires a free subscription. Does support DNSSEC.
Shopify	£12.28	Price converted from $15.00 USD. Might be limited to using Shopify’s platform.
20i	£12.49	Does support DNSSEC. Reseller pricing £10.49 (reseller package costs £47.99/month)
OpenProvider	£12.76	Price converted from $15.58 USD. Members pricing £8.00 (membership costs $49.99/year)
OVHCloud	£12.95	First year registration: £10.19 Does support DNSSEC
Hetzner	£13.55	Price converted from €15.60 EUR.
Hover	£14.73	Price converted from $17.99 USD First year registration £13.10.
EasyDNS	£15.51	Price converted from $19.00 USD.
Squarespace	£16.00	New provider for Google Domains customers. First year registration £9.60
Hostgator	£16.37	Price converted from $19.99 USD First year registration £10.61.
Joker	£16.62
HeartInternet	£16.78	Advertised prices exclude VAT. First year registration £11.98
Mythic Beasts	£17.40	Advertised prices exclude VAT. Does support DNSSEC.	Jonathan Matthews via Mastodon
Bluehost	£18.00	Price converted from $21.99. First year registration £10.91
Ionos	£18.00	First year registration £1.20.	Howard Cheng via Mastodon
Domain.com	£18.00	Price converted from $21.99.
Network Solutions	£20.48	Price converted from $25. I brought my first domain from them in 1998 – NS has been sold 4 times since!
Easily	£20.89	Advertised prices exclude VAT
123-Reg	£20.38	Advertised prices exclude VAT. First year registration £5.99
GoDaddy	£21.56	Advertised prices exclude VAT. First year registration £10.78.
Glauca	£22.65
Namesco	£23.98	Advertised prices exclude VAT. First year registration £11.98
Gandi	£23.99	First year registration £16.54.	Philip John via Mastodon

Disclaimer:

Prices shown in £ GBP/Pound Sterling and are based on publicly available “single year renewal” prices at the date I added them to the table (with any different registration pricing noted).

Where possible, all prices include UK VAT/Tax and have been converted from any other currencies to GBP using Xe.com where the site itself did not provide currency conversion.

I can’t be held responsible for any errors, omissions, out of date information etc etc – I did my best! 😀

Edited 25th September 2023:

Add “Thanks” to people who reminded me of certain registries
Added Ionos, Mythic Beasts, DNSimple, Amazon Route 53, Easily, Hetzner, Network Solutions, Shopfiy, Domain.com, OVHCloud, Glauca, Joker, Hostgator, OpenProvider, Dynadot and Hover.
Added note of DNSSec support and reseller pricing to 20i
Corrected ordering placement of Heartinternet
Clarified Disclaimer.

Bug Report: [WontFix] cPanel Outbound emails to account holders from cpanel@ domain can fail SPF checks

August 2, 2022

Clearing DNS caches

December 11, 2013

[Techy] localdomain settings in Linux Mint using DNSMasq

May 12, 2013

Comments closed

If you are developing websites on Linux Mint, then you might want to set a DNS Wildcard so that anything on localdomain (*.localdomain) resolves to your machine (i.e. test.localdomain , anything.localdomain). So how can you do this?

First of all, you need to install dnsmasq “a lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server”, this can be simply done using:
sudo apt-get install dnsmasq

Now you just need to configure it. Create a file in /etc/dnsmasq.d/ using something like nano, pico, vi, emacs :

sudo nano -w /etc/dnsmasq.d/localdomain.conf

with the following settings:

address=/localdomain/127.0.0.1 listen-address=127.0.0.1

This will tell DNSMasq to setup a wildcard for everything on “localdomain” to point to 127.0.0.1 and to listen for DNS requests on 127.0.0.1. Now just restart DNSmasq:
sudo service dnsmasq restart
and you are nearly done.

You now just need to change your DNS servers in network manager. On the Linux Mint task bar, right click on the network icon and select “Edit connections” and edit the connection you are using. Select “IPv4 Settings”. If you have “Automatic (DHCP)” selected, change it to “Automatic (DHCP Addresses only)”. Then add the DNS server 127.0.0.1 and others of your choosing (such as the Google 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 ones). All should now be working!

Net: Shortest Valid Domain Names

January 22, 2009

Comments closed

For the system I’m building, I’m putting in a check for valid domain names (technically URI/URLs) and one of the checks is for the length of the domain name. So what is the shortest domain name around?

Well, I suspect in the uk it’s the British library at bl.uk [5 characters] and in the .com range I suspect it’s Paypal’s x.com [6 characters], but an article on Valleywag has just altered me to the fact that Google has one of the shortest Chinese domain names g.cn [4 characters] and Ulster Television has u.tv, but even those are beaten by both the Western Samoa top level domain name has a website making ws [2 characters] and the Vatican’s va [2 characters] – making them the shortest domain name I’m aware of.

Why have some of them got full stops at the end of the links ( such as http://ws. and http://va. ): it’s to stop your browser trying to “fix the links” and change them to http://ws.com and http://va.com which are different sites.

The answer to the question of “how short can a domain name be” is currently 2 characters (unless a top level domain is started with less than 2). A full web based URI/URL has a minimum length of 9 (4 for the protocol ‘http’, 3 for the protocol separation ‘://’ and then 2 for the domain/host name). Of course, you could also use the FTP protocol which brings it down to 8 or be pedantic and insist the shortest web orientated URL is http://va.:80/ at 14 characters.

Tag: dns