Registry fees:
We register or renew your domain name(s) with a domain name registrar, including paying any applicable fees and taxes to them. This makes up the largest proportion of the fee.
Technical management:
The remainder of our fee covers our time needed to manage your domain name. This includes controlling your Domain Name Server’s (DNS) technical settings, including A/CNAME/TXT records, and MX records for your email delivery. On occasions, we may also need to update the IP addresses or other technical details associated with your domain name. Our time for any changes required to run your website on our Primary Image web servers is included in your domain name payment.
Please note any domain name changes requested by you, e.g. to link your domain name to third-party services, are not covered in our fixed fee and these requests will be billable on our normal rates.
Registry notices:
Throughout the year, we also deal with any data confirmation notices, on your behalf, which are sent periodically from Nominet or the domain registry. If these are not responded to within a certain deadline, your domain name may be suspended, taking your website and email accounts offline.
We have unfortunately seen this happen to people who manage their own domain names, where their website has been taken offline for several days. This could happen, for instance, when domain names have been registered to somebody in a company and they have since left, so important emails have not been seen.
Proactive renewal:
In most cases, we automatically renew your domain name ahead of its renewal date and pay the registry fees. This means there’s no risk of the registry suspending your domain name because of no-payment.
Unfortunately, we have seen people who manage their own domain names experience problems. For instance, they may not have seen the renewal emails from their domain name registrar, or their saved payment details have expired. This means their website and emails get suspended, which can be highly embarrassing for most businesses.
With our approach, we take proactive steps to contact you.
Admin time:
Finally, the domain name fee includes our admin time for processing your invoice, as well as answering any questions you have.
Our current domain name fees are shown on our Pricing page.