Last month, I finally took the time to move all my web domains to a new registrar, saving me alotof money in the process. If you’ve accumulated some web domains over the years, it might be time to shop around for a better deal.
It’s easy to forget about domain renewals, but the costs can definitely add up, especially on registrars that are raising prices or costing you additional fees. Here’s how I migrated my pile of domains to save a lot of money.
Hovering up My Money
I used Google Domains for years to buy and manage my web domains, but I moved all of them toHovera few years ago, around the timeGoogle Domains started winding down. Hover did everything I wanted: it supported nearly every top-level domain (TLD), the control panel was simple to understand, and I could set up email forwarding with custom addresses. I had occasional issues setting up DNS records or new name servers, but that usually the fault of poor documentation for whatever I was trying to configure, not the fault of Hover itself.
I did notice steep pricing on some of Hover’s optional services, though. For example, a simple mail forwarding rule was $5 per year, for each address on each domain. Thecustom email addresseswith fully functional email servers started at $30/year for 10GB of storage, all the way up to $40/year for 1TB of cloud storage. That can add up quick if you need several addresses.
I had five forward rules set up across my domains, without any email inboxes, which was $25 per yearjust for email forwards. One of those I had completely forgotten about, but still. I could have spent that money on two months of YouTube Premium, or a new game, or something else more fun than emails.
Eventually, I realized the pricing for the domains themselves were a bit high compared to the competition. For example, mypersonal sitehas a.io TLD, which is one of the more expensive options—it was originally meant for the British Indian Ocean Territory, but its connection to “I/O” for computing has increased demand over the years. A .io domain costs $62.99/year at Hover, but only $57.98/year at Namecheap, $59.99/year at Name.com, $45/year at Cloudflare, and $46.65/year at Porkbun.
I also have a few .app domains, like myLink Cleaner web app. Those are much less expensive, at only $22.99/year from Hover. However, other registrars can still have better deals. It’s the same price at Name.com, $17.98/year at Namecheap, $14.18/year at Cloudflare, and $14.91/year at Porkbun. Pricing is also scattered for a simple .com domain registration. That’s $18.99/year at Hover, $14.98/year at Namecheap, $10.44/year at Cloudflare, and $11.06/year at Porkbun.
It’s worth noting that I was only looking at the simple domain registration prices and email forwarding. I’m not hosting web servers, email addresses, or anything else through the same companies as domain registration. Most of my sites are hosted byGitHub Pages, and I have another one on a Linux VPS from DigitalOcean. I’m also looking at the regular yearly renewal costs, not the deals each registration company gives you for the first year you have the domain.
Getting a Better Deal
Hover is not unique in its expensive registration fees, and in fact, GoDaddy was almost always the most expensive option for all the TLDs I checked. GoDaddy is charging $77.99/year for .io domains, $21.99/year for a .com website, $27.99/year for .app domains, and $24.99/year for a .net domain. My personal website with a .io domain would cost $15 more at GoDaddy than Hover, and a whopping$31 morethan Porkbun. That must be where the money for thoseSuper Bowl adsis coming from.
I decided to tryPorkbun, since it’s one of the most affordable options and I had heard positive reviews about it. The process for moving my eight domains from Hover to Porkbun was certainly tedious, but not awful. I had to remove the transfer lock from all my domains, add them toPorkbun’s transfer tool(which has a helpful bulk entry form), and then wait a while for Hover to send confirmation emails.
While I was waiting, I copied all my DNS settings for each domain to Porkbun’s dashboard, since I was using Hover as the nameservers for most of my websites. Once I accepted all the domain transfers on Hover’s end, I just had to set up my email and domain forwards again, and that was it.
Porkbun has been great for me so far with my eight domains. It has built-in nameservers powered by Cloudflare, WHOIS privacy protection for all participating domains (for as long as WHOIS sticks around), and lots of options for forwarding domains and subdomains. Porkbun has up to 20free email forwardsper domain, andhosted emailstarting at $2/month per email. The dashboard isn’t as well-designed as Hover’s website, but it just needs to work for the rare times I’m changing domain settings, and I haven’t had any functional issues yet.
I was paying a grand total of $240.10 per year to Hover for my eight domains and five forwarded emails. After switching to Porkbun, those will only cost me $146.68 per year to keep running. That’s still a lot of money, and Iprobablydon’t need that many domains, but now I’m paying almost $100 less for essentially the same service. you may’t get much better than that.
Check Your Domains
If you have some web domains that you have left on automatic renewal for the past few years, now might be a good time to check out the competition. I’ve only personally usedHoverandPorkbun, but you can also look atCloudflare,Namecheap,Bluehost, and others. Again, GoDaddy seemed to be the most expensive option for pretty much everything.
Keep in mind some registrars have different pricing for new domains and transfers, and most of them have a cheaper rate that only applies for the first year. Some registrars also don’t have certain TLDs, so if you don’t find one that supports all your domains, you’ll have to split your registration across different services. That might not matter to everyone, but I definitely prefer to have everything in one combined dashboard.
You might only save a few dollars each year on one or two domains, but the more domains you own (or want to buy), the more savings you could be missing. This goes for a lot of services—car insurance, streaming services, and so on—but domains are easier to forget about.
