Private Whois Changes

by Paul Posted on April 21, 2010

Hi folks. Name.com always strives to offer the lowest price on all our products and up until today we’ve been able to offer Private Whois for free for a long time. These types of posts are never fun, and no one enjoys raising prices, but sometimes it becomes necessary so we can continue to offer these great services.

While some registrars charge as much as eight or nine dollars per domain for this service, our new promotional price, starting today, is only $1.99 per domain annually. This means we are still offering some of the best pricing for this service anywhere. We realize that changes like this can impact our customer’s plans and budgets, so we’ve taken some proactive steps that we feel will help to curb the impact of this new change. Those actions are:

  • All domains that currently have Private Whois already turned on will continue to receive it for free.
  • The new pricing will begin today and will only apply to domains that don’t already have Private Whois enabled and/or new domain registrations.
  • We are running a promotional price of just $1.99/domain per year, which is one of the lowest prices available.
  • We’ve created a promo code called “FREEWHOIS” that will discount the current special pricing of $1.99 to $0.00, making this service free for the first year for orders using this promo code.

Beyond that, we will continue to offer promotions for discounted domains, so keep an eye on this blog and our Twitter and Facebook pages for promo codes.

We hope our customers understand this was a difficult decision for us to make, but that we’ve tried to soften the impact as much as possible. As always if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact our support department or your account representative.

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  • Jason

    After reading all the comments on this blog page … I seriously hope you reconsider repealing this new policy … it will have a worse affect on your business than you can imagine. In case you haven't looked, there are cheaper registrars out there with free whois privacy. If you want to add revenue, try ADDING new services instead of taking away free ones you already provide. If you must charge for privacy services, apply it to new clients only.

  • Chris

    well obviously I'm not happy about the fact that something that was once free is no longer free. I hope that you guys would re-consider making WHOIS free again as it is the main motivator of me (and I'm guessing most of your customers) migrating their domains over.

  • Mark

    Very poor customer care. I can't see how Name.com expects people to trust them after this. I won't be moving any of my domains to them now, thank you!

  • John

    You have got to be kidding me. I specifically spent the last year transfering all my domains from godaddy to name.com.

    Now I have my last few pending transfer to you and I think I should cancel the transfer immediately. This is a move in the wrong direction on your part.

    I am just learning about this for the first time on this website. This is very poor communication from an otherwise upstanding company with great customer service.

    You guys are in the hosting business now. Your hosting is not up to par as you offer no 24/7 support like most hosting companies do.

    You are now are now going to charge for a service that you have had free for years and no small sum it is when you count the numbers. This is not going to go over well.

    THink about it like this. People ACCEPT your company because of what you have to offer. People JOIN youre company because they trust the name Name.com.

    People will no longer ACCEPT your company let alone JOIN your company.

    If I wanted to pay all these extra fees on all my domains, I would have stayed with GoDaddy.com.

    Time to move them all back. You see Godaddy is constantly improving their services and providing more and more. You guys on the other hand never change a thing on your website. So since you got the first part down about charging customers an arm and a leg for anything and everything that was once free for years.

    I am transfering my domains back to godaddy. I have seen a registrar go bankrupt before and I do not want to be part of it. It’s a nightmare getting your assets out.
    FREE PRIVACY WAS NAME.COM’S GREATEST FEATURE WHICH GAVE US THE BENEFIT OF PRIVACY FREE FOR ALL OUR DOMAINS. THIS WAS ESPECIALLY POULAR AMONGST DOMAINERS WHO HAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOMAINS. DOMAINERS THAT EMBRACE COMPANIES SUCH AS NAME.COM ALWAYS BRING MASS APPEAL AND REALLY GIVES THE COMPANY A GOOD REPUTATION. AND ALL TOO OFTEN WHEN THE OVERALL OPINON IS THAT DOMAINERS DESPISE A COMPANY THAT COMPANY IS UNIVERSALLY KNOWN AND ALWAYS A LAST RESORT SUCH IS THE STORY WITH GODADDY.

    YOU GET BIG AND LOSE YOUR HEART AND SENSE OF FAMILY WHICH GOT YOU WHERE YOU ARE IN THE FIRST PLACE. ONCE YOU’VE DEVELOPED A FOLLOWING YOU TAKE A VACUUM TO OUR WALLETS AND CLEAN US DRY.

    The problem is domainers are never good for the plucking.

    When you look at a domain portfolio of 412 domains and then calculate that you are going to have to pay $1.99 per domain to ensure your privacy that’s $819.88/ A YEAR that was once a free feature that was the MAIN Benefit of transferring my domains to your company.

    This was a given freebie from registrars popular amongst domainers.

    I hate to be the first to say it, but NAME.COM will no longer be popular amongst domainers. They were everything to your company. You sponsor Chef Patrick.

    To Paul:
    It’s certainly not something to be proud of as and to share with customers that:
    “We make pricing changes everyday to domain registrations, web hosting plans, SSL certificates, etc. and we generally don’t email our customers about them – but we realize the impact this has had on some of our customers and we realize we could have communicated better about the change.”

    COULDN’T WE HAVE PRIVACY BETA WHERE I DON’T GET AXED FOR A FEW YEARS. I just had to pay the damn government. I guess I will be adding Free Privacy to my list of taxes this next year.

  • ten

    I've got to echo what everyone else has said so far. I chose your company because you offered this for free, and specifically transferred a dozen domain names over from all sorts of registrars. I guess I'll be going somewhere else.

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  • GreenDogDude

    So what you have just proved is that the the next time I go to login, you may have increased the price for new domains, or web hosting, or SSL renewal, or Backorder, etc. without letting me know in advance?

    Yeah right…..

    No communication = No Customers = No business

  • John Hughes

    I will be moving all my remain domains that have not moved to you elsewhere, and as the dozen or so I have moved will move when they are up.

    I had really liked you name.com, I had been recommending you…now I will find another registrar. One who preferably knows how to communicate at the very least with its customers. I was so happy to find this out the hard way.

    Funny how this works, by the way, since you decided to demand $7.99 more a year, you are now, at least in my case, losing $7.99 a year.

    Good Bye name.com,
    Your Former Customer,
    J Hughes.

  • Julien

    Bad decision.

    I was with name.com because of the free private whois.

  • james

    the only reason why i use name.com is for the free privacy. i have about 800+ domains with name.com and continuously register an avg of one per day. i guess im gonna have to find another registrar. anyone know of any good ones?

  • deny

    To be honest the biggest mistake (apart from news via blog) is increasing of price from 0$ to 2$

    If you have increase the price to 1$ then reaction from the people should never be so angry as it is now. I do not own a lot domain and can survive but i can imagine how is this hard to someone who have for example 500 domains!

    It is 1000$ extra for all domains and it is hard to accept.
    Namecheap is not excellent alternative because they give for limited time free WhoisGuard.
    But i agree they are still cheaper because if you buy in bulk then is cheaper then by name.com

    Maybe it will be good idea for the the team behind name.com to give customer option to buy in bulk.
    By namecheap for 5 domains 7.88$
    By name.com for 5 domains 9.95$

    Just my 2 cents.

  • http://www.liewcf.com/ LiewCF

    sigh.. free private whois is the only reason I wanted to move my domains to you..

  • aprilmopisbad

    That's really sucks! i'd like to say goodbye to name.com, i start moving out hundreds of domains from name.com to others. Honestly, you will regret this policy sooo bad after you realized that you've lost thousands of your loyal customers. You made a really bad pricing policy without any proper announcement to your loyal customers, name.com has lost it's value (free private whois) and soon you will see the bankruptcy as an exit way. Shame on you. RIP Name.com

  • James

    I am a name.com customer and I (used to) recommend you guys to my friends.

    The high management imbecile that made this decision should be fired. Obviously this decision was made by someone who is not in touch with 'Joe domain owner'.

    The money you make from selling whois privacy will not be greater than the thousands of dollars you lose when clients leave you because of this decision en masse! You don't fix up this mess asap, I'm goooooone!

    As stated in a previous comment, your free whois privacy was your unique selling proposition, what made you different, what made you my obvious choice of registrar. You take it away, and you're just another “me too” registrar.

    111 angry comments can't be wrong! Goodbye name.com

  • http://jacksonleung.com Jackson

    Name.com, speaking as a person who deals with the domain industry, and as business consultant. I hope your business branch knows what they're doing. You guys essentially took your niche and threw it out the door. You haven't even achieved market momentum yet. After the change you guys will have nothing that distinguishes yourself from your competitors. Not only that, you can expect everyone who has privacy enabled to switch companies causing an immediate and major revenue loss. You might make more in terms of marginal profits, but total profit might be severely impacted to the point where you guys will see a Net Loss instead of a Net Gain.

    Good luck. I'm switching once my whois expires. Btw, GoDaddy's user interface sucks. I went from GoDaddy to Dynadot to Name.com, you guys can try Dynadot, I'm going to look for a registrar that can do 8.99 plus free whois next cycle.

  • john

    I am not happy about this at all. I moved a ton of my domains over here from godaddy and several others because of the free whois. This is going to cost me big time. Guess I will be looking for another registar, and also getting rid of some of my inventory, as it doesn't make any sense anymore. Pathetic. All domains should be private unless you want them public. GREED, there is nothing more I can say. Greed rules the day. I sense name.com is going to be losing lots of business with this greedy move.

  • http://www.kelvinism.com Kelvin Nicholson

    I actually migrated all my domains from GoDaddy because name.com had free privacy, although it was a tad more expensive to register domains. The person who made this decision really needs to be asked if they surveyed current customers, and how many would leave if such a policy was implemented.

  • Peter Harkins

    For anyone else who is dismayed at the doubling in price, I've surveyed prices at other registrars and have comments open for more alternatives: http://push.cx/2010/domain-registration-survey

  • http://www.brentter.com brentter

    This is a HUGE dissapointment. The fact that you guys had a very streamlined/clean interface combined with free privatewhois that didn't expire whenever you needed to renew domains were the MAJOR two selling points for name.com! It set you above namecheap, godaddy, etc.. When you're dealing with a whole lot of domains on a daily basis you want to be able to go from homepage->feature as quickly as possible without all the js scripts, images that have to load, etc… Even with your new redesign of the domain listing it's still cleaner than any of the other registrars. But now this?!? You're taking away the key factor to why i've been a very vocal supporter of name.com for as long as you've been in business! Just search on twitter/facebook/google if you don't believe me. What you'll find is conversation after conversation, mainly with strangers, trying to convince them to switch to name.com. It's not like I was seeking these people out either, it was all becuase they hold the same resentment that most folks do about the crap that 99% of domain registrars have on their websites/services. It was easy. You guys were the perfect answer to all their woes. Now you're just adding new features to the company. First blog hosting, what next… vps and dedicated servers? SEO optimization? Nascar sponsorships? This is just going to be eventually passed down to us in the form of higher rates to pay for the features or equally worse – a shitty UI that's overcrowded with stuff unrelated to what your original service is (domains).
    Just my two cents…. but I think this is a bad move…. and it looks like i'm not alone by a long shot.
    -brent

  • http://www.dlgen.com WallnerX

    1and1 has .COM domains for FREE! for the first year only, hurry before it ends! They also have free Private WHOIS!

  • Alfred

    It is really bad move imo. It is no point for me to recommend name.com any more. Will move out all domain soon.

    Good bye name.com

  • 20 Domains WIth You

    Please explain this statement directly and clearly: “All domains that currently have Private Whois already turned on will continue to receive it for free.”

    “Continue to receive” would seem to imply that if you currently have domains, and you currently have private whois for free, that those domains will continue to have private whois for free ad infinitum. Is this true or not?

    If this is not true, you need to clarify this to say “continue to receive… until your domain renewal is up.”

    • deny

      Yes they need to change statement because this is not true:
      “”All domains that currently have Private Whois already turned on will continue to receive it for free.”

      I have renewed 3 domains a 5 days a have not received Private Whois for free.

  • Karl

    Dear Sir/Madam,

    I have been purchasing domains for quite some time via your company and was really disappointed to see when logging into my account today that you have decided to change your WhoIs Privacy policy without any warning and have now began to charge for this service.

    Having many domains held within your system your new policy is obviously going to be very costly for me so I will of course have to now seriously consider moving all of my domains to one of the many companies that offer this vital service for free (and also stop purchasing any further domains via your company).

    I have in the past referred many friends and colleagues to your website and services which I thought up until this point were top notch, so do feel really disappointed by what you have done especially since WhoIs Privacy is paramount with identity theft on the increase, and something which should certainly not have to be paid for.

    Hopefully you will take this email seriously as I am sure by taking this route you will not increase your companies long term revenue as you may think, as many of your long standing customers will go elsewhere – and you will gain less new business because of this cause of action.

    Hello,

    I'd like to thank you for taking the time to contact us. As you have noted, we have recently made the very hard decision to start charging for private whois. We understand that change is tough, especially when a cost is involved, so we have tried to make this transition as easy as possible.

    For the near future you are invited to use the our promotional code 'FREEWHOIS' when you renew your WHOIS privacy service. You can use this code to renew the service at anytime, and as many times as you wish. Your domain privacy service does not have to be tied to the domain's renewal date.

    As you have mentioned in your email, our tools, our support, and our prices have been recognized as being some of the best in this highly competitive business. While it was a hard decision to make, we feel that our new pricing for this service is very reasonable and competitive with what other registrars are charging. By offering the FREEWHOIS promotional code we have done our best to make the impact of this change as minimal as possible to our customers.

    Regards,
    Sky
    Name.com

    As you can all see from the response there is no apology for changing their terms of service without any warning and they have not commented on the very real fact that we are all going to take our business elswhere !! What a great shame I really did think these guys were good… oh well… a couple of hours work will sure beat the $1000+ I would need to spend on the privatewhois by keeping my domains here !!!

    • Do the math

      Karl, are you really sure you want to move your domains away from name.com? I just moved a domain to name.com to benefit from the current FREEWHOIS promo. Read and understand what name.com stated in their reply above:

      “You can use this code to renew the service at anytime, and as many times as you wish. Your domain privacy service does not have to be tied to the domain's renewal date.”

      The domain I transferred expires in 2013 while its private whois at name.com expires many years later. Use the FREEWHOIS promo and get what no other registrar can guarantee you: free private whois years in advance! :-)

  • http://english-domain.com John Armonk

    Ya we can understand

  • jom

    I just found that if I can only apply one coupon a time, which if I use whois coupon then I cannot use price discount coupon, to pull down the renewal fees to $8.20. Please consider to create a coupon for free whois + 8.20 renewal pricing. There is not much reason to continue to use name.com if without free whois and discount pricing consider there are many registrars offer .com renewal pricing at only $7.17, with ICANN fees included.

  • TVChatten

    This is hurtful and I was about to register a domain with you guys today and JUST found out about this new whois privacy thing. If something had to go up in price I'd rather it be $1 or $2 more for the .com and all than for the free whois privacy to be gone. I always accepted the fact that name was a bit higher than godaddy (previous domain registrar) but to me it was worth it b/c of the free whois privacy. My question is why do new registrars now have to pay $1.99? Is this for charity? Is the company going bankrupt? I mean what's the issue?

  • jom

    I just found that if I can only apply one coupon a time, which if I use whois coupon then I cannot use price discount coupon, to pull down the renewal fees to $8.20. Please consider to create a coupon for free whois + 8.20 renewal pricing. There is not much reason to continue to use name.com if without free whois and discount pricing consider there are many registrars offer .com renewal pricing at only $7.17, with ICANN fees included.

  • TVChatten

    This is hurtful and I was about to register a domain with you guys today and JUST found out about this new whois privacy thing. If something had to go up in price I'd rather it be $1 or $2 more for the .com and all than for the free whois privacy to be gone. I always accepted the fact that name was a bit higher than godaddy (previous domain registrar) but to me it was worth it b/c of the free whois privacy. My question is why do new registrars now have to pay $1.99? Is this for charity? Is the company going bankrupt? I mean what's the issue?

  • Kane

    Hi,

    I renewed my domains a couple of days ago and didn't use the promo code. Can you please extend my whois expiry date?

    Thx.

    • namedotcom

      Hi Kane,

      You can still do this by logging in to your account, clicking on the domain(s) you want to add this service to, and then checking the box to renew Whois Privacy. You can add as many as you want to your cart and then check out for free using the FREEWHOIS promo code. Hope that helps!

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  • Iwill

    WOW Looks like I am going to move my name…$18. for whois protection bye bye name.com

    • namedotcom

      Dear Disqus,

      Thank you for contacting Name.com Support.

      Case #00319757: “[theofficialnamecomblog] Re: Private Whois Changes” has been created and a customer service representative will respond to you shortly.

      Thank you,

      Name.com Support

      +1.720-249-2374 from 8:00AM – 6:00PM MST, Monday – Friday.

      ref:00D8csHM.500CDYL52:ref

  • Departing Customer

    The “FREEWHOIS” code doesn't work anymore. Today I registered my first domain elsewhere.

    • namedotcom

      Dear Disqus,

      Thank you for contacting Name.com Support.

      Case #00340301: “[theofficialnamecomblog] Re: Private Whois Changes” has been created and a customer service representative will respond to you shortly.

      Thank you,

      Name.com Support

      +1.720-249-2374 from 8:00AM – 6:00PM MST, Monday – Friday.

      ref:00D8csHM.500CDZun1:ref

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  • Elvencom

    I’ve been shopping for a new registrar and had just decided on name.com when I found out that free whois privacy was no longer being offered. If you MUST charge for whois privacy, couldn’t you at least offer special pricing for bulk domain registrations?

    • Ashley

      Hey, if you use the promo code ‘FREEWHOIS’ you can get it for free :)

  • Daniel

    Since the private whois is $3,99?

    • Ashley

      Hey Daniel, Who.is is usually $7.99 but we offer it at $3.99 – if you use the promo code ‘FREEWHOIS’ however, then you can get the service for free!

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=546507510 Nini Magart

    This is not true. I have registered my two domains in 2008 or 2009 with free private who is, and when I renewed them in October and December 2010 you charged 7,99   private who is per domain!

    • Anonymous

      Hey Nini, you can use the promo code, ‘FREEWHOIS’ to receive free private who is. 

  • http://www.dailytut.com Robin

    Freewhois saves me huge everytime i book a domain name. Thanks for that. :) I love Name.com always.

    Robin

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