from Hacker News

My domain registrar (DNSimple) tried to 5x the cost of my reseller plan

by corywatilo on 12/3/24, 4:01 PM with 54 comments

• by selectnull on 12/3/24, 4:42 PM

  Oh man... this is not the first time they're doing it. I've been their user and they have deprecated the plan I've signed up for. After a call with the CEO, we have come to an agreement of a custom plan that allowed my to keep one of the features I really needed (vanity name servers) at the time. That was in 2015. In 2017 I had another call with them at after that I decided to move away.

  I was a happy customer for years, but felt they were not good on past promises about the pricing. Moved to GCP and slashed my monthly bill to a 1/5 of what I was paying to DNSimple. Still with GCP today (for DNS).

• by aeden on 12/3/24, 6:52 PM

  Founder and CEO of DNSimple here. I'd like to clarify a couple of things about our business that may shed some light on why we've ended certain legacy plans when we have.

  There are two key parts to our business: domain registration management and authoritative DNS. These two parts have very different price models in the industry. For domains, you pay a fee for each year they are registered. For DNS, you pay for each zone and then for the DNS queries.

  The price changes around domain registrations have not been coming from us, rather registry operators have been raising many of their wholesale prices repeatedly in recent years. The operator for .COM even showed up in the news recently when Senator Warren called for an investigation into Versign for the price changes around that TLD. We’ve either kept domain prices stable for as long as we could, or even reduced them, as long as we were able to retain some small margin.

  The price changes around operational DNS stems from the rising prices of infrastructure as well as changes by our vendors for various services related to DNS operations. Last year we overhauled our pricing to try to remain competitive in the DNS operational space by reducing minimum requirements (you can register domains with us and use another DNS provider which is something you could not do with our previous pricing model) and by aligning to actual costs (we were not charging for queries for a long time, but we are being charged for queries for things like DDoS defense and edge caching, so we had to update our prices to reflect these changes).

  Operating a business means you have to keep at least 3 groups happy: the customers, the team, and the owners. Many times I have to make a decision that will make someone unhappy, and it sucks, but I do it to ensure we can continue operating and keep providing service to those that see value in what we offer. This is one of those cases. From the operational DNS perspective, our Basic Reseller plan has been operating at a loss for the last few years, so it had to ultimately go.

  To Cory and any other customer who feels we did not communicate well on the changes: I’m sorry. I assure you we have tried over and over through emails and one-on-one conversations to explain why these changes were necessary. I, and the entire DNSimple team, have always been very open with any customer that is frustrated with changes we’ve made, and we will continue to do so. If you ever want to talk to me about DNSimple, my inbox is always open.

• by bww on 12/3/24, 6:14 PM

  I recently transferred all my domains and cancelled a DNSimple account I’ve had for more than a decade for similar reasons.

  A couple years ago they migrated me to a more expensive plan with no notice, I had to catch the price difference on an invoice. I wasn’t happy but it’s a lot of work to transfer domains.

  Recently I discovered they introduced a plan that fit my usage and cost 50% less, but (would you believe it) they didn’t bother quietly migrating me to that plan…

  These guys can’t be trusted.

• by settsu on 12/3/24, 5:15 PM

  Some "unit elasticity" going on maybe?

  Seems a little odd to be surprised when a business that (by the author's own admission in this case) seems to have an established history of customer hostile actions.

• by velcrovan on 12/3/24, 4:34 PM

  I've been with DNSimple for years (personal and business accounts) and am watching closely to see whether I need to think about moving off in the next year or so. I've also started to feel like something is off … price hikes with no added benefits have me wondering if it would really be so bad to manage DNS for ≈ 30 domains at Hover or something.

• by superq on 12/3/24, 4:59 PM

  EasyDNS might be a few cents more (literally) than the alternatives, but they're a smallish company and have never pulled this nonsense. (Also their customer support assist in preventing domain hijacks and recovering, which is pretty important if your domain is valuable.)

  Porkbun is pretty good, too, but their margin is smaller and domain protection is less of a thing for them.

  Google and Cloudflare are very cheap (because it's hard to make money on a dollar profit margin per year) but they're very big companies, so customer service is not quite the same as at a small company.

• by EagleStance on 12/3/24, 8:12 PM

  I'm curious why they didn't communicate with DNSimple about the price hike. From the way this blog is written, it sounds like he didn't try to communicate with them at all, but instead chose to just walk away.

• by rootsudo on 12/3/24, 6:48 PM

  Interesting. I know to become a registrar it is something like 70k. Didn’t think that providing an api to register a domain would be a serviceable business.

  Now it does.

• by physhster on 12/3/24, 4:43 PM

  Is there any feature there that is unique enough you can't use AWS or GCP? I use GCP for all my DNS needs and it's very very cheap.

• by tomschwiha on 12/3/24, 4:22 PM

  I like using OVH for domains and its quite simple to manage / order domains with their API.

• by netsharc on 12/3/24, 10:32 PM

  My 2024 pet peeve is people exposing their illiteracy to me by using "nx" (n = a number) as a verb...

  "to 2x" = "to double"

  "to 5x" = "to quintuple".

  Just noticed his blog's tagline... I think terrible grammar is poor UX too. =]

• by jabiko on 12/3/24, 4:29 PM

  I'm wondering what prevented the author from having the sales call and seeing what rates they are willing to offer. Best case they might even be better than the current rates.

• by sgammon on 12/3/24, 5:30 PM

  Was not aware this still existed in 2024

• by justplay on 12/3/24, 4:58 PM

  been there left the boat.

• by tobinfekkes on 12/3/24, 4:52 PM

  Hey Cory, small world! Nice to see this pop up on HN! We've never talked, but we're related :)

  Glad to have a family-member in this crazy tech world. Rising costs, worsening products, sorry to hear of your predicament.