Goodbye, Yahoo!
When I first purchased paid hosting in October 2005, I needed a domain name. I needed something snazzy, so I chose tachyondecay.net. Then I needed a domain registrar, so I registered tachyondecay.net with Yahoo!, since I already had a Yahoo! ID. Nearly there years later, all is good. I’ve got two domains registered with Yahoo!, no complaints. Until now….
Recently I learned that Yahoo! had raised the price of domain renewal to $34.95/year. 
Considering that the average is usually around $9.95/year (which is what it used to be), and some places are cheaper, this move could seem baffling. Of course, Melbourne IT, the company through which Yahoo! actually registers these domains, charges $35/year. So there may be something going on behind the scenes there … 
Anyway, regardless of the reason, I am not paying $35 when I can pay $10. So I packed my bags.
I‘m not sure if I actually mentioned this, but recently I registered benbabcock.ca (it just points to this site) from Netfirms. I used Netfirms instead of Yahoo! because the latter can’t register .ca domains, and Netfirms seemed like a good choice. So I took this opportunity to consolidate all my domains at one place and moved them to Netfirms, where they are happily residing together now. 
I don’t have any complaints about Netfirms’ service—I didn’t about Yahoo!’s either, except in price. Netfirms charges $9.95/year—that’s in Canadian dollars too, so it’s slightly more advantageous to me (at least when our dollar is worth less than the US dollar).
Anyway, that’s my interesting domain name experience for the week! If you’re looking into registering some domain names, and you don’t have an extra $35 burning a hole in your pocket, then check out Netfirms. Godaddy is good too, I hear—it’s what most of my friends recommended, and it’s probably where I would have gone had I not already had a domain at Netfirms. Considering that a domain name is your identity on the Internet, choosing the company where you register and administrate that domain name is important indeed.
