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After price hike, now Tucows drops support for Uniregistry TLDs

Kevin Murphy, May 26, 2017, 08:54:51 (UTC), Domain Registrars

Tucows is to drop OpenSRS support for nine Uniregistry gTLDs after the registry announced severe price increases.
The registrar told OpenSRS resellers that it will no longer support .audio, .juegos, .diet, .hiphop, .flowers, .guitars, .hosting, .property and .blackfriday from September 8, the date the increases kick in.
It’s the second major registrar, after GoDaddy, to drop support for Uniregistry TLDs in the wake of the pricing news.
“The decision to discontinue support for these select TLDs was made to protect you and your customers from unknowingly overpaying in a price range well beyond $100 per year,” OpenSRS told its resellers.
It will continue to support seven other Uniregistry gTLDs, including .click and .link, which are seeing more modest price increases and will remain at $50 and under.
While Tucows is a top 10 registrar in most affected TLDs, its domains under management across the nine appears to be under 3,000.
These domains will expire at their scheduled expiry date and OpenSRS will not allow their renewal after the September 8 cut-off. Customers will be able to renew at current prices for one to 10 years, however.
Tucows encouraged its roughly 40,000 resellers to offer to migrate their customers to other TLDs.
Uniregistry revealed its price increases in March, saying moving to a premium-pricing model was necessary to make the gTLDs profitable given the lack of volume.
Pricing for .juegos and .hosting is to go up from under $20 retail to $300. The other seven affected gTLDs will increase from the $10 to $25 range to $100 per year.
After GoDaddy pulled support for Uniregistry TLDs, the registry modified its plan to enable all existing registrations to renew at current prices.
That clearly was not enough for Tucows, which has sent a pretty clear message that it’s not prepared to be the public face of such significant price hikes.


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Comments (4)

  1. OpticalOwl says:

    Smart decision by Tucows.

  2. Acro says:

    Or is it that Tucows is too lazy to implement the necessary code to offer the grandfathering in the first place?
    At least it wasn’t as bad as what GoDaddy did: http://domaingang.com/domain-news/september-already-in-arizona-godaddy-pricing-of-uniregistry-gtlds-gone-up/

  3. equalizer says:

    Quickly…
    Frank unpaid arse-kissers to his defense (no to mention to SPAM)…
    Godaddy, Tucows, who is next?

  4. SimonC says:

    Let’s talk about Tucows price rises they are forcing on to their resellers for the high volume domains. Company in trouble?

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