When registering a domain it’s typically easy to find domain registrars with good deals, perhaps just $1 to get any domain name you want. That’s a trick to reel you in in the hopes that you will keep that domain for many years without switching registrar. The renewal fees and any additional offerings such as hosting and email is where most domain registrars earn the most money. Today, however, I want to simply take a look at renewal fees and how much extra we spend on renewals. If you are a company or someone like me with 100+ domains these renewal fees can get very expensive. Here I will show how much you can actually save on renewal fees by switching domain registrars and how I went about figuring this out.

The first thing I did was create a large list of all my domains along with their extensions, mostly .com, .io and .xyz in my case. I also added a column with the registrar for each domain. To make the cost calculation easy I made a column listing the domain extensions along with the cost of a yearly renewal for each registrar. I have most of my domains with NameSilo, NameCheap, Name.com and Gandi. I have given the first three registrars good reviews in the past as you can see on this and this article. The last registrar, Gandi, was used because the other registrars did not allow punycode domains that contain Swedish characters like “åäö”.

I also want to give a few other registrars a consideration and threw in IWantMyName, Dreamhost and Hover from my previous articles. I am also throwing in a few top domain registrars based on the total number of domains registered. Therefore I will also compare GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Enom and Google Domains which are a few of the largest registrars generally available to an English speaking audience. Now that I had my potential registrars I made a quick calculation in Excel.

Comparing Domain Registrars Renewal Costs

I have marked Google Domains in red as .xyz was not available to register. For Google Domains I used the cheapest .xyz cost of $9,29 for comparison. The domain registrars are listed in the left column along with their .com, .xyz and .io renewal costs. The total yearly costs is based on the current number of domains I own which is 51 .xyz, 37 .com and 14 .io domains. I simply multiply this number with the listed renewal costs and add them all up to get the total yearly cost. In the final column I use the lowest yearly cost of $1291,52 as a base to compare with all other registrars yearly cost.

In the end, Namesilo comes out as the best option to keep my domains longterm. Namecheap, Gandi, Dreamhost and Google Domains come in fairly close behind but we are still talking a few hundred dollars. Switching to Namesilo will save me at least $300 per year compared to other domain registrars. Transferring domains has also gotten quicker and easier for most registrars. When I started buying domain names it would usually take days. Transferring domains today takes minutes. Transferring domains in bulk takes me less than an hour to complete.

I found TLD-list to be a really good resource when comparing domain costs. All prices I looked up seemed to match what was listed on their page.

I hope you found this guide useful. I would love to hear any thoughts or feedback in the comments below. As always you can also reach me on Twitter.