Comment by slg
3 years ago
It is totally reasonable to charge a recurring fee for providing an ongoing service, but to be clear you are not buying a domain that needs registration. You are buying a subdomain of the domains that this company already owns. Some other sites give those away for free because there is no marginal cost per subdomain.
Which in the end is true for domains as well. Someone decides to sell subdomains of X, weather X is com or omg.lol.
Com could be free as well. The only real difference is choice.
Or to put it differently, you say it doesnt need registration. Well, it does. They require it. So what.
I think the main difference is a proper domain from a major registrar grants you ownership rights that you don't get from leased subdomains like OP's (mainly the ability to keep the domain even if the registrar goes out of business; and moving the domain between registrars).
You can move between registrars, but the registrar's not the one that you're leasing the domain from; they're just a reseller.
The entity that you're actually leasing the domain from is the registry operator-- such as Verisign for .com or PIR for .org. And, yes, it's still a lease relationship-- while there are some ICANN-mandated consumer protections around your "purchase" of a domain, if you stop paying your annual renewal (or run out of whatever amount of time you've prepaid), that domain isn't yours any more.
Omg.lol is operating the same way (albeit not under ICANN oversight, as they're not running a gTLD); they've just cut out the middleman and are leasing subdomains directly rather than via third-party registrars.
2 replies →
What do you mean “ownership rights”?
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I run a SaaS product and I do not charge my customers extra for a subdomain of their choice (if it has not been claimed by someone else already.)
> but to be clear you are not buying a domain that needs registration
Ah, good point.
> You are buying a subdomain of the domains that this company already owns.
All domains are like that, though, even TLDs.