Email domain renewal

filmaker23

Hi! I’ve been using GoDaddy for my email address domain (via Microsoft) that I use as a sole trader. It’s up for renewal for what will be my third year. I’m thinking I might be paying over the odds; I paid a mere £4.99 in the first year which is clearly to get you in as a new customer, but this year it is £86 with VAT. That’s just for 12 months. I don’t know what is expensive or reasonable!

Does anyone have any advice about this; would you recommend transferring the domain to a different provider, and are there any tips/tricks to be aware of… I’m thinking if they do new provider/transfer offers, could I just transfer between different providers each time it’s due for renewal, or do they usually protect themselves from that and say that the deals apply to new customers only?


TIA

forgotmyname

Just the domain or hosting as well?

I paid less than that to register a .co.uk domain for 10 years although I had to contact the company because the renewal only
had monthly or yearly options nothing longer.  I use a different company to host my website/emails.

Yes you can transfer it, but be aware of any downtime when switching.

DullGreyGuy

filmaker23 said:

Hi! I’ve been using GoDaddy for my email address domain (via Microsoft) that I use as a sole trader. It’s up for renewal for what will be my third year. I’m thinking I might be paying over the odds; I paid a mere £4.99 in the first year which is clearly to get you in as a new customer, but this year it is £86 with VAT. That’s just for 12 months. I don’t know what is expensive or reasonable!

Does anyone have any advice about this; would you recommend transferring the domain to a different provider, and are there any tips/tricks to be aware of… I’m thinking if they do new provider/transfer offers, could I just transfer between different providers each time it’s due for renewal, or do they usually protect themselves from that and say that the deals apply to new customers only?

It's about right for Microsoft Mail

It used to be easy and cheap to get email hosting but thats really been cut back by many. In principle you can still do it for free by using a variety of services (eg ImprovMX that offer free mail forwarding, Gmail that provide free mailboxes and Brevo as a free sending service but capped to 300 mail recipients a day). 

If you only want 1 mailbox some ultra budget web hosts may be cheaper. GoDaddy, at least via its sister company 123-reg, offers non-microsoft email hosting which is £36 per year

If your not wanting to glue services together than Google it £60/year for Workspace which gives you email plus a couple of other things. Apple also allows custom domains but you need to subscribe to a much bigger package including news, tv etc. 

We used to use another sister company of GoDaddy who included email along side hosting and I had grandfather rates from a company they bought out. It used the non-microsoft solution and it wasnt great, by default it didn't add a lot of the DNS records that help recipients confirm the mail is really from you so found lots of mail we sent went into peoples junk mail. Since switching to MS, not via GoDaddy, we have a much higher response rate to emails. 

victor2

I've transferred a number of web hosting services to Namecheap recently (weird name, but just Google it). All the customers I've been involved with are very satisfied. Support and pricing is really good. They do just email hosting for less than £10 a year and domains are competitively priced too. Worth a look. Active websites and email has beemn moved over with no noticeable interruption.

Chickereeeee

I have found Hostinger very easy to set up, responsive to queries, and good value. I moved across about 6 months ago when my previous provide more than tripled my costs.

AlexCFC

I'm using Spaceship and paying £3.50 a year for a "firstnamesurname" domain and 56p a month for a mailbox to use it

Grumpy_chap

filmaker23 said:

Hi! I’ve been using GoDaddy for my email address domain (via Microsoft) that I use as a sole trader. It’s up for renewal for what will be my third year. I’m thinking I might be paying over the odds; I paid a mere £4.99 in the first year which is clearly to get you in as a new customer, but this year it is £86 with VAT. That’s just for 12 months. I don’t know what is expensive or reasonable!

It depends on the format of domain that you have.
I have two domains and they are both at renewal this week.  One is £95 while the second is £40.  Your £86 falls in that range.

Cornucopia

If you only have one email address, you could use FreeHosting.com, which is free.

It's unclear if you mean hosting or domain registration (renewal).   The costs of the latter vary by domain type and duration of renewal.

deskhelp

GoDaddy's strategy has always been to offer a 99% discount initially, only to charge significantly higher renewal rates to recover the cost. I recommend trying Webhostuk.co.uk instead, as they provide a better option with more stable renewal pricing.

Newcad

Always remember that the TLD you chose for your domain sets the base price that you will pay,

ie a '.com' or '.net' is going to cost you more per year than a '.uk' or '.co.uk' will.

Usually when you register a domain the hosting service will supply a basic webmail service and portal for free, you can then pay for extras like more email storage if that's what you need.
Then if you want to put a website on your domain that will cost you extra, other services associated with that website may/will come with extra charges, and so on.

Of course if it's a business domain/website then all of those costs are business expenses and so tax deductable.
https://www.taxrebateservices.co.uk/cost-of-webhosting-tax-deductible/