This is the best price I've seen. My impression is that Verisign gets $6/year per domain from other registrars, which is why about the lowest you see other registrars go, even in bulk, is $6.50/year. Maybe my info is wrong or outdated, but I'm guessing that EV1Servers.net is eating a small loss, and hopes to make it up on hosting, other services, and future renewals.
As someone with quite a few domains, three issues caught my eye: (1) they don't allow multi-year registrations, (2) they don't provide any support for bulk transfers/registrations, and (3) they will announce next year's renewal rate in the future. (From the FAQ: "What is the renewal price next year? The renewal rate for domains will be announced soon. The renewal rate will be very competitive to the current wholesale market on domains when rates are published.")
These three things are consistent with the $5/year price being a "loss leader" to gain new accounts; e.g. they wouldn't want someone transferring 100k domains to them, or renewing them for 10 years, or they'd be out a lot of money. Still, it might be worth it for a big domain holder to transfer their domains one at a time. Even if it took a couple minutes per domain, if you save $1 per domain, you could pay people $15 an hour to handle the transfers and still come out ahead. However, it sounds like they're going to crank the renewal rates next year, and if they crank it above other registrars, they could make it very time-consuming to transfer a domain out to another registrar. Several registrars seem to count on sheer inconvenience to keep their big accounts from bulk-transferring elsewhere.
|