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DomainTools doubles prices, relaunches site

Kevin Murphy, February 16, 2011, 14:40:01 (UTC), Domain Registrars

Whois specialist DomainTools has revamped its web site and raised the price of its services.
The price increase is quite substantial. The cheapest paid-for tier appears to be the $30-a-month Standard Membership, a 100% increase on the old $15 basic package.
Existing members have been grandfathered in at their current rates. DomainTools said that it’s the first price increase in five years.
It does appear that subscribers may get more bang for their buck under the new tiers. At least, my subscription appears to be buying me more services than it was before the relaunch.
But that may be because I was never entirely clear what I was paying for. The confusing old “unit”-based pricing has gone, and the new site is a lot clearer about what you get for the money.
Many of the other changes appear to be cosmetic. The site does look a bit slicker than before, while retaining its familiar look-and-feel.
The company also appears to have sorted out its dispute with Go Daddy, which recently started blocking Whois aggregators including DomainTools.
A few test look-ups I did for domains registered at Go Daddy returned full Whois results, not the stubs it was delivering following the block.
Given that registrars are allowed to charge $10,000 a year for access to bulk Whois records, I’m tempted to draw a connection between the Go Daddy situation and the price increase, but I have no hard information to support that conclusion.
UPDATE: I’ve heard from DomainTools that the Go Daddy situation has not yet been resolved.
DomainTools subscribers currently see full Whois records when they search for domains registered at Go Daddy. In order to throttle the vast majority of the traffic the site sends to Go Daddy’s servers, non-subscribers are still receiving incomplete data.
The dispute is evidently more complex than a simple $10k shakedown.

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Comments (2)

  1. Ingurus.com says:

    The price was steep with not much add-ons. Need to see what extras they would offer going forward in 2011.

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