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i e-mailed domains.ph about a couple of questions that’s been nagging me for the longest time.

subject: cost of .ph domains
how come the .ph domains still as a price tag of us$ 35.00/year? it hasn’t gone down (at least to the end users) ever since desini started it in the 90s.

and how come you charge in us$ and not in philippine pesos for a philippine domain?

please e-mail as soon as possible.

and guess what? i have not gotten any response since i sent it last monday, 06 march 2006. and i have this gut feel that they won’t be answering anytime soon.

but i think my questions are valid though. the .com, .net, .org and some other domains have lowered their annual fees to around us$10.00 years ago and some are even lower. the .ph domains still cost us$35.00.

and since domains.ph have not answered my mail i can only provide a layman’s guesses as to why their fees have not changed.

• no competition. one of the reasons why the fees for the .com, .net and .org domains went down from their previous price of us$35.00 is competition. network solutions was not the only one handing out those domains anymore and the prices went down. as far as i know, domains.ph does not have any competition. they’re the only one issuing .ph domains so the fees remain high. go figure. maybe five more local registrars should do the trick. pldt or globe or any of the bigger internet service providers may want to (or should) get into it.
• maintenance costs. those domains has to be housed in a server or two (plus mirrors and backups) that’s accessible to the internet 24×7 all year round year after year. which means computer hardware and software, electricity, internet connection and manpower has to be paid to keep everything going. makes sense.
• they want to get rich? let’s do some numbers. let’s assume 1,000 philippine companies each want to get a philippine domain at us$35.00 a pop. that translates to us$35,000.00 a year or php 1.75 million at a conservative exchange rate of 50 pesos per us$. now i don’t think there’s just a thousand companies in the philippines who wants a .ph domain and i’m sure there’s a handful of foreign companies out there that would like a philippine domain for their local subsidiaries. so us$35,000.00 a year is really a conservative estimate. but then again, that’s just me thinking aloud.

it may not be a big thing for a medium-size company to come up with us$35.00 (php 1,750.00) yearly but i’m thinking of the average juan who has a struggling small business. and these days, every little savings count. so what does these smaller companies do? they go for the cheaper .com, .net or even .org domains. bringing the fees down can help and, i would suspect, increase the number of local registrations as well. i certainly would register at least one.

and i do think i should pay in philippine currency for a philippine domain. why do i have to pay in us dollars? aren’t we suppose to try and save on those things? what’s up with that?if you make it easier for people to pay you there is always a bigger chance that they will.if anyone has any thoughts on this stuff then comment away.

entry posted on Saturday, 11 March 2006 and filed under firewall, internet, stuff. you can follow any responses through the rss 2.0 feed. comments are closed, but you can trackback from your own site.