Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

Do you use Yahoo for your domain name registration? If so, this is an important note for you and for anyone else that utilizes Yahoo for this service. Over the past couple of weeks, Yahoo has very quietly announced that they will be increasing the cost of their domain name renewal from $12.95 to $34.95 per year. Their rate increase takes effect July 1, 2008.

What does this mean for you?

If you have Yahoo web hosting and only register one domain name through Yahoo
At this point, if you have a web-hosting package through Yahoo and only have one domain name then you should be okay for now. Yahoo provides you with one free domain name that is registered through them when used in conjunction with their web hosting packages. As a result, your cost should not increase at this point. I do highly recommend that you keep a close watch on the cost, though. Their prices have really changed over this past year for a few of their services and the web hosting fees might increase as well in the near future.

(a) If you have Yahoo web hosting and multiple names registered through them or (b) you only have a domain name registered (/parked) through Yahoo, but no web hosting
You need to be concerned. At some point over the next year, your domain name will need to be renewed. That is when you will be charged the new price of $34.95. Many people may not even realize it until after their check card has been charged. This is because Yahoo is on an auto-renewal system, which means that you do not receive a bill and may not even know they are increasing the price.

My advice to you is to consider moving your domain name from Yahoo to another registrar. There are a lot of reputable domain name registrars that are still charging $12.00 or less for this service. If you are going to transfer registration to another company, make sure you do it sometime between now and a few months before your domain is set to expire. If you wait until you have less than a month before your domain name needs to be renewed, it can be automatically locked, which will cause more hassle to move it.

If you need any help or suggestions feel free to contact us. And, if anyone has any thoughts concerning this large price hike and what you think is the appropriate response, I would love to hear them.

Here is the email Yahoo is sending to customers.