Domain name prices come down

Australian web and application hosting company, WebCentral has reduced its domain name pricing.

The company has reduced its retail .com.au and .net.au domain name pricing by 52 percent, from $135 to $65 for two years, and .com domain names by 24 percent, from $33 to $25 per year. This offer is in conjunction with the launch of its latest web hosting range for SMEs.

WebCentral’s resellers would also be able to benefit from the domain name re-pricing and new shared hosting product range by receiving preferential pricing structures.

WebCentral CEO Andrew Spicer said: “Our resellers will only benefit from the reduced domain name prices. Their sales pitches to customers will be able to reflect our view that generally hosting is the major contributor to a business rather than the domain name.

"Also with the new product set we have increased the amount of storage and data and this will help resellers bring in new customers."

Spicer said the company dropped prices to reflect global trends in domain name pricing.

“Businesses of all sizes are increasingly using domain names in innovative ways to increase traffic to their web sites through techniques such as registering multiple domains, registering product names as domains and by running campaign micro sites. There’s a lot of competition amongst companies that offer domain name registration. We are taking the only step we can to reflect this trend,” he said.

The company will also offer a free .com.au or .net.au domain name to the first 500 new customers that sign up for shared hosting, this incentive will encourage more small and medium businesses to take advantage of the web as a marketing channel to their customers.

“I think there’s a lot of confusion amongst SMEs. Some of them are very small and buy a service which is specifically designed for the consumer market.

"These businesses end up paying for it by not getting the services they need."