DOES Anyone knew any website where I can register .ph domain in a cheaper price and only for 1yr period?.. I am an IRC geek and i wanna use it as VHOST. Thanks

As a software company, MS has every right to move to a FOSS model if it wants to, anytime, rather than their existing proprietary one. The comparison is quite vague.

My understanding is that most of the readers here are Adsense/SEO people? If so, I’ll try to address my thoughts appropriately.

First of all, DotPH pricing at $35/year is the retail price. The wholesale price is a lot cheaper, and goes as low as $15/year, depending on your volume of registrations. This has been the case as far back as 2000, when very few ccTLDs were selling below the $35 level. The Registrar prices are located here:
http://www.domains.ph/PartnerApply.asp

As you can see, the discounts begin once you have at least 12 domains to register.

So it might make sense for some of you to join forces, and buy in bulk – so you can enjoy larger discounts – or work with one of our existing Registrars. We have over 150 Registrars – practically every ISP in the Philippines and Webhosting company is a Registrar. (Now whether they wish to pass on the discounts to you – that is entirely another matter).

If your need is to get lots of domains so that you can point them to your main website (so as to increase its Google rank), then perhaps we can discuss creating some price that favors the SEO community. If some of you recall, we actually gave a way 18+ character domains several years ago – for free. This way you can get domains with your desired keywords, then direct people to your main money site. Or you can monetize them with SEDO, DomainSponsor, or some similar domain monetizing company. We’ve also toyed with the option of lowering price for net.ph & org.ph – but we’d like to get more feedback first.

But if you are domainers and want to buy domains, hold, and sell them later, you might want to look at mail-only domains. These only cost $5/year and can be later updated to full functionality (once you pay $35/year). So this means you can speculate (if you wish) and grab all the domains that you think will be of value in the future. They you can sell them later at a profit.

I am currently at the ICANN conference in Portugal, and Tim Schumacher of SEDO tells me that the average resale price these days for domains is about 20k. That’s a pretty impressive amount. Naturally, ccTLD domains don’t sell that high – but once more and more Philippine businesses get online, you should find the aftermarket price for PH domains going up.

If you have ideas, please feel free to post comments on my blog at jed.i.ph (it is unmoderated). Or if you prefer, you can call/email us directly. (The contact details are here:

http://www.domains.ph/ContactUs.asp
.

This way, we can respond more quickly to your concerns.

There’s indeed no guarantee that a flock of filipinos will go shopping spree and take cctld if the price will be reduced. It’s a weakling alibi. As i understand, a “business”, is run by a system. You can’t just lower the price and hoping for the business to pick up solely on that strategy. There’s marketing, support, sales efforts and gazillion ways to improve the bottom line. This no rocket science. Godaddy didn’t just lower the price, they extended their services too.

I think the dotph business owner is just too lazy. The laziness to the expense of majority.

Case Study: Telecommunications in the Philippines.
Still remember that it will cost you P15k-25K for a single PLDT line? I’m pretty sure that we wouldnt be a text capital of the world if there’s only a single telco provider.

Beyond the fact that originally the .com was the first established domain, many of the ccTLDs were very restrictive. It was complicated and expensive for anyone to establish such a domain. Eg Canada – before the reform and CIRA, you had to file some paperwork with a university. Not only that, but you had to have a trademark on that exact term. The only way for me to buy ‘travel.ca’ was to have a trademark on ‘travel.ca’ Instead of bothering with that hassle, most people just opted for the .com. This was of course before we considered all the paperwork of getting the domain. At the same time, cost was a factor still. Why would I pay $100+ for a .ca domain when I could pay just $10-15 and snag a .com?

The one exception to this was Germany, who were very open with the .de. And what happened there? .DE is *FAR* more popular than .COM in Germany. In fact, after .com registrations, the most popular extension is .DE

But as companies have started to localize the internet, and as ccTLD prices have fallen (eg .ca are now $10 and while still a hassle, no where near as it was before), the adoption rate for ccTLDs is only going up. The two best indicators:

- Multinational promotions. While companies like Toyota and Hotels.com used to push their .com, in Canada they now push .ca. Hotels.ca especially runs non-stop on radio. It is of their interest to establish the .ca (or whatever .ccTLD) as it helps hone in on a single audience. Insetad of having to think – “Hrmm … is this visitor to toyota.com from the US or the UK or Russia or Japan” they simply know with the ccTLD

- General trends/education. As people become more and more educated about the internet, more and more poeple are using their specific ccTLDs. This is verified by lots of data.

Lastly, in regards to tradename.ca – I actually know the person who owns domains like travel.ca, sex.ca, realestate.ca, etc etc. If you visit the site, it is nothing but ads. But they not only get traffic, the traffic they are getting is increasing every month. Concrete proof that ccTLD acceptance is increasing

Hell, I’m sure one of the larger .com.ph holders reads this blog (but maybe not my comments) – ask him for verification

Good points. My on the map phrase was ill chosen, I should have said put .ph on the map … that was the subject of the conversation after all, but I regret my lack of precision. I wasn’t talking about who owned web sites I was talking about their TLD and where they could obtain one.

Yes, delici whatever makes a “cute” use of the .US domain. However, as you can see, it’s cute, not to try to identify the web site as US … just like the television-related sites around the world that are .TV. In deli whatever’s case, indeed, I don’t know what their business model is, I don’t use them simply because of the stupid ‘cuteness’ and the non-standard domain. They remain the isolated example that basically proves the rule.

A large travel and shipping company whom I use often is Filipino-American owned with significant employees/investments in both the Philippines and the US. They call themselves travelph.com not travel.ph or travel.us … the principals of the company certainly have the Pesos/Dollars not to worry about the .ph registration fees, but nobody (on a world-wide basis) goes to _most_ .ph or .us or.ca or .za, etc.sites for business … they go to .com’s to spend their money … and money drives business not cuteness or nationalism.

One of my business partners is Canadian based. They started with a .ca site and a mirror site with a .com TLD. They tell me the old .ca domain redirects only 20 or 30 visitors a week to the main .com site. The issue isn’t if they’re Canadian or some other nationality, their issue is people type in the trade name and hit return and “bang” they are on the .com site … no one, even Canadians think of looking for “tradename.ca”

Anyway, good discussion/thoughts coming out on this one.

im not really clear about this, i believe even without the .ph there are already .com .net Filipino website.

“Can anyone even name a viable .US business? I can’t think of one off the top of my head.”

http://del.icio.us i believe is a good example but im not really sure if they’re making money with there business model.

“And for something personal? Nope, no point … even for a hobby why would I make it hard for folks to find me?”

For personal use I would jump in if only they reduce the amount let say $10-12/year but with $35? that’s 3 years worth compare to my daddy’s registrar.

Also my take on this is .com .us .ph won’t be a big deal later on considering the advancements of search engines, people/customers would come to you if you have relevant or interesting contents/products shows up in the search results.

Good or bad, to the outside world at least, the Disinis put the Philippines on the Internet. It’s quite easy to cry ‘monopoly’ and ‘excess profits’ today, but where is anyone ready to attempt to compete?

My second thought is, of what use is a country code domain anyway? As someone already pointed out .us domains are cheap … and why are they cheap? Who wants them? I wouldn’t use a .US for a business if you paid me to.

Can anyone even name a viable .US business? I can’t think of one off the top of my head.

And for something personal? Nope, no point … even for a hobby why would I make it hard for folks to find me?

Why would a .ph be better than a .com? if .ph’s were suddenly as cheap or cheaper than .com
s, how many Philippine businesses would switch? A lot fewer than many would imagine is my guess.

Someone does, but there *are* cheaper options.

And the capita comparison was only put in there because it can set a ceiling, but not a floor

On the other hand – how much DOES dotPH make? If they were slash prices by 50%, how do we know they would go out of buisness? How many of their employees are for the core functions (DNS and registration) and how many are for other projects (eg i.ph). So many questions, not a single answer.

AsiaRegistry.com sells PH domains at $99 per year. Marcaria.com sells PH domains at $65/year. Why such a huge markup?

@ elmer
The CNO (.com, .net and .org) namespace is different from the ccTLD (i.e. PH) namespace by the mere fact that their volumes are way apart.

.com has 58 million active domains
.net has 8.4 million active domains
.org has 5.3 million active doamins

.PH is a mere 150k active (guesstimate)

In reference, GoDaddy has 3.5 million domains currently active. Had there been 3.5 million active PH domains, I’m sure its easy to convince Joel Disini to peg the price to $10. His managers told me so, but you can’t quote me on that! *hehe*

I read somewhere that that in order for a Domain Registrar to break even, it has to be able to sell 100k CNO domains. And that’s just breaking even with the capitalization at current market prices which is ~$10.

So, why don’t we apply that little info with the PH namespace? That means $1 million a year to break even.

Say, dotPH has 150k domains active at $35/year ($70/2 years). That’s $5.25 million year.

What if we lower the price to $10 as well? That gives them just $1.5 million revenue per year, a 71% drop in annual revenue.

What if by lowering the prices, they were able to double the sales (supply & demand) — that’s $3 million (300k x $10) — still a drop of 43% in annual revenue.

If these figures are close to reality, then we can say that dotPH will still be profitable even at $10. But who in their right mind would want to settle for lower revenues?

But and this is a big BUT, what if we break the monopoly? Say 3 Registrars, each with 50k domains in their helm. They compete in the market forcing the domains to go down to CNO levels of $8 to $9. That’s $9 x 50k or $450,000 — not enough to break even and the company goes bankrupt.

What’s the best case scenario? We get 3 competing Registrars lowering prices and with the power of supply and demand jacks up registration of PH domains doubling its volume. We get 3 Registrars each with 100k domains each. They’re just break even and that’s not good for the company/business. A very huge risk and who would want to enter that business if that’s the forecast?

Again, in parallel to this, just look at the Telecoms industry. We have Globe, Smart and Sun Cellular. We have unlimited text messaging before, then it was cut off to 1 SMS per Php1.00 load, then it was reduced to 1 SMS per Php3.00 load — all in the name of free market and competition. So, breaking the monopoly doesn’t also guarantee cheaper price.

You cannot compare domain names with web hosting. Why is local hosting expensive? Because there’s competition and as you have said, US hosting plans are cheaper. But you cannot say the same thing with domain names because each country is unique. Can I buy a PH domain from Dreamhost?

There may be no assurance that “all” SMEs and individuals will buy a PH domain but who knows? (Of course I know that uncertainty and risk is bad for business. Those that are not trying hard anyway).

Hmm, yes FOSS may not have been able to pressure MS to lower their licensing fees, but the former gave the option of not having MS at all.

So what daddy’s telling us here is you can sell cheap domain names but you also have to offer value added services because that’s where the money is.

The question remains — will people ask for a redelegation IF the prices were cut down? What if there was a redelegation but the prices remained the same — will everyone still be satisfied?