Web hosts competing based on who had the prettiest cPanel theme. The number of email accounts were allowed was something that mattered. If you were lucky enough to get SSH access, it was jailed and only really allowed you to move files around easier or edit something with vim/nano.
Oh, I have unintentionally become a GoDaddy customer (a company I have spent ample time hating and shitting on over the years) because I was a legacy Media Temple customer going back to like 2006 and I still just can't be bothered to clear out everything on those sites/domains and they eventually got acquired
Let's encrypt has done great work with certs for free. But they do still cost money. Insane for how long unencrypted traffic was the default. But i could not have done anything, if browsers had soft-enforced https earlier. I simply could not have paid that money.
I still can't get my head around why a .com costs $9.59 (plus registrar margin)
There are 160 million registered .com domain names.
I understand that operating root servers isn't free, but surely they don't cost $1.5 billion per year! Wikipedia's hosting costs are $3 million per year, for comparison.
Only $0.18 goes to ICANN, the non-profit. The rest goes to the Verisign which is a publicly traded for-profit company which ultimately gets that $9.59. I bring this up because it of course _doesn't_ cost that much. Incidentally, Verisign posted $1.56 billion in revenue last year and spent about $1.21 billion on stock buybacks in the same time.
Because it's a natural monopoly. Nobody ever got taken seriously with a .biz address.
(.com is basically price-regulated because of this, FWIW, Verisign can't just raise prices whenever or however it wants. But obviously it's still a pretty sweet deal for them, I'd imagine.)
Of those 160 million, what percentage of them are on the 1-year renewal plans, and how many of them are on multi-year plans. I'm guessing the vast majority are yearly. It would be interesting how many of them never get re-registered after the first year
I agree that it's ridiculous, but absent some sort of regulation, things are not priced based on how much they cost the provider, but based on how much people are willing to pay. Even if they're unhappy about it.
Just in case: you can get a .com for less than that nowadays, sometimes $3 for the first year (then transfer it back and forth for $5–7). Here are some price comparisons: https://tldes.com/com, https://tld-list.com/tld/com
I assume some registrars sell these at a loss and expect to offset that by selling you WordPress Supreme Ultra Enterprise hosting for... $40/yr? No idea how this works.
Oh the good ol days. $10/m for slow PHP shared hosting and $150 for an SSL certificate too.
Web hosts competing based on who had the prettiest cPanel theme. The number of email accounts were allowed was something that mattered. If you were lucky enough to get SSH access, it was jailed and only really allowed you to move files around easier or edit something with vim/nano.
Oh, I have unintentionally become a GoDaddy customer (a company I have spent ample time hating and shitting on over the years) because I was a legacy Media Temple customer going back to like 2006 and I still just can't be bothered to clear out everything on those sites/domains and they eventually got acquired
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Let's encrypt has done great work with certs for free. But they do still cost money. Insane for how long unencrypted traffic was the default. But i could not have done anything, if browsers had soft-enforced https earlier. I simply could not have paid that money.
You and everyone else: unencrypted stopped being the default as a pretty direct consequence of increased accessibility of TLS certificates.
Yeah in late 90s telnet to server was the default. So all those delicious cli were just flowing in the Ethernet traffic in plain text.
You could get free SSL certs before LE. What LE changed was making it possible to fully automate the process.
How do they still cost money?
Or had to get an isdn line just to get an static ip for your clients to ftp the files
I still can't get my head around why a .com costs $9.59 (plus registrar margin)
There are 160 million registered .com domain names.
I understand that operating root servers isn't free, but surely they don't cost $1.5 billion per year! Wikipedia's hosting costs are $3 million per year, for comparison.
Only $0.18 goes to ICANN, the non-profit. The rest goes to the Verisign which is a publicly traded for-profit company which ultimately gets that $9.59. I bring this up because it of course _doesn't_ cost that much. Incidentally, Verisign posted $1.56 billion in revenue last year and spent about $1.21 billion on stock buybacks in the same time.
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Because it's a natural monopoly. Nobody ever got taken seriously with a .biz address.
(.com is basically price-regulated because of this, FWIW, Verisign can't just raise prices whenever or however it wants. But obviously it's still a pretty sweet deal for them, I'd imagine.)
3 replies →
Of those 160 million, what percentage of them are on the 1-year renewal plans, and how many of them are on multi-year plans. I'm guessing the vast majority are yearly. It would be interesting how many of them never get re-registered after the first year
1 reply →
I agree that it's ridiculous, but absent some sort of regulation, things are not priced based on how much they cost the provider, but based on how much people are willing to pay. Even if they're unhappy about it.
1 reply →
Just in case: you can get a .com for less than that nowadays, sometimes $3 for the first year (then transfer it back and forth for $5–7). Here are some price comparisons: https://tldes.com/com, https://tld-list.com/tld/com
I assume some registrars sell these at a loss and expect to offset that by selling you WordPress Supreme Ultra Enterprise hosting for... $40/yr? No idea how this works.