Best domain reseller?

[yggdrasil]

56 minutes ago, easyhosting said:

price for now, as this is a new service offered by them, they will be giving these lose leader prices to gain a domain client base then they will go up as Regisrars have little say on wholesale pricing. 

I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly. CloudFlare is an ICANN registrar for years. They are not reselling from someone else. In fact, they will actually lose money for each domain sold. Why? Because for each payment you need to subtract the merchant fees (visa, mastercard, what ever). This was confirmed by CloudFlare already. Yes, they will lose money for each domain. They don't care because they earn money with other services, + they have 100 million dollars of investors money to burn. They have purposely said they are giving this for free for their customers as an extra benefit and don't expect to earn anything, hence they are giving the domain at the same amount that it costs them. I'm not sure you follow here, but if CloudFlare is losing just 30 cents per domain a year, they can still afford to gain millions of domains a year and still not lose money in the end because they can offset this with other services they sell. More users = more upgrades to other services.

I'm not sure if this is going to be forever, but since CloudFlare is already losing bucket amounts of money for every free account (bandwidth) and they still offer free services for years, I suspect they will do the same with domains. When CloudFlare started providing free services, everyone expected this to be just temporary, they are still providing free accounts and with more services, now also domains at that cost. I will not be surprised if they provide VPS or hosting in the future. Those prices are here to stick and so you will never be able to complete with them because your Reseller has to earn something for each domain, and you have to earn something as well. Lots of people are already planning on moving their domains to them. And besides those prices, they also offer everything else for free, including Whois privacy, while most registrars and domain resellers still charge for this.

I said before that there is 0 money to be made with selling domains, but now its not that there is 0 money, now you need to lose money if you expect someone to buy domains from you. That means losing money for each registered domain, at this point, domains will be free eventually and some company like Google or Microsoft is going to give them almost at 0$ or maybe 1 cent and just eat up the loss in order to gain customers.

The same already happened to SSL certificates since more than one vendor is giving them for free already.

Edited October 9, 2018 by yggdrasil

[easyhosting]

1 hour ago, yggdrasil said:

I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly. CloudFlare is an ICANN registrar for years. They are not reselling from someone else. In fact, they will actually lose money for each domain sold. Why? Because for each payment you need to subtract the merchant fees (visa, mastercard, what ever). This was confirmed by CloudFlare already. Yes, they will lose money for each domain. They don't care because they earn money with other services, + they have 100 million dollars of investors money to burn. They have purposely said they are giving this for free for their customers as an extra benefit and don't expect to earn anything, hence they are giving the domain at the same amount that it costs them. I'm not sure you follow here, but if CloudFlare is losing just 30 cents per domain a year, they can still afford to gain millions of domains a year and still not lose money in the end because they can offset this with other services they sell. More users = more upgrades to other services.

I'm not sure if this is going to be forever, but since CloudFlare is already losing bucket amounts of money for every free account (bandwidth) and they still offer free services for years, I suspect they will do the same with domains. When CloudFlare started providing free services, everyone expected this to be just temporary, they are still providing free accounts and with more services, now also domains at that cost. I will not be surprised if they provide VPS or hosting in the future. Those prices are here to stick and so you will never be able to complete with them because your Reseller has to earn something for each domain, and you have to earn something as well. Lots of people are already planning on moving their domains to them. And besides those prices, they also offer everything else for free, including Whois privacy, while most registrars and domain resellers still charge for this.

I said before that there is 0 money to be made with selling domains, but now its not that there is 0 money, now you need to lose money if you expect someone to buy domains from you. That means losing money for each registered domain, at this point, domains will be free eventually and some company like Google or Microsoft is going to give them almost at 0$ or maybe 1 cent and just eat up the loss in order to gain customers.

The same already happened to SSL certificates since more than one vendor is giving them for free already.

Free SSL like lets encrypt are basically trial SSL renewed every 90 days, but back to the lose leader domains as most people using Cloudflare use their free service they make no money, so if they continue making a lose then they will soon close down as even investors will want to see a return on their investments and if they dont they will just pull their investment

[yggdrasil]

1 hour ago, easyhosting said:

Free SSL like lets encrypt are basically trial SSL renewed every 90 days, but back to the lose leader domains as most people using Cloudflare use their free service they make no money, so if they continue making a lose then they will soon close down as even investors will want to see a return on their investments and if they dont they will just pull their investment

Its not a trial if its unlimited time. You can keep renewing Lets Encrypt forever which is what most people do. Including me. And since its all automated I don't care. Every 60 days I get a new SSL, all in the background.

As for CloudFlare losing money. The amount they can lose is tiny.

If CloudFlare just lost 30 cents per domain, with 3 million domains a year, that is only $900,000 a year or less than one million dollars. They earn that in probably a month of revenue right now and or even with investors money they could run that for 100 years. They don't lose money at the end of the month, even if they sell 10 million domains a year because they still earn money from their enterprise services. Close down? Google gives everything for free, so does Facebook. They surely are not closing down. How many hosting companies shut down because of Facebook? Most people don't launch a website anymore when they can just launch a free Facebook page. Even with all the privacy and data breaches, Facebook just keeps growing more and more.

Edited October 9, 2018 by yggdrasil

[bear]

46 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

Google gives everything for free, so does Facebook.

Google gains data they can use to advertise and sell to others, so not in fact free. Facebook, same thing. 
As for CF and this domain deal, I spoke to someone recently about this, and they said it made them very uncomfortable how connected they were to other very unrelated things he does in CF, to the point where it feels as invasive and "all encompassing" as both of the above companies. Food for thought. 

[yggdrasil]

8 hours ago, bear said:

Google gains data they can use to advertise and sell to others, so not in fact free. Facebook, same thing. 
As for CF and this domain deal, I spoke to someone recently about this, and they said it made them very uncomfortable how connected they were to other very unrelated things he does in CF, to the point where it feels as invasive and "all encompassing" as both of the above companies. Food for thought. 

I completely agree, its not free with Google or Facebook, you are the product, since data seems to be the new oil. Sadly consumers don't understand this and are even ok....

I just said free to him as we are discussing domain pricing. In fact, Cloudflare is probably doing this for similar reasons. Cloudflare also acquired 1.1.1.1, which costs them a lot of money as well. Just like with their free protection accounts. It also costs them tons of money as those free users still use computing resources and bandwidth. In fact, while the services seem to be free and they cost money to Cloudflare, Cloudflare is exactly the same as Google or Facebook, at least they copy that market approach model, embrace then destroy. They use all that free data for their own benefit, so its not really free right? Your data is used to improve their services, even if they will deny that, there is plenty of evidence of this. Cloudflare was a registrar already for years, again just like Google before they offered domain registrations to the public. Those companies become registrars even if they don't sell domains because it provides them with valuable insight data. (domain databases...)

I suspect the reasons for Cloudflare to offer domains has nothing to do with altruistic reasons. Its about gathering usage data on how domains are used or the information on those domain holders. In the end all data mining can improve their paid services. Now, personally I think Cloudflare will face many other challenges with this. Will they provide support with domains? Hardly. Even replying to one email would make them lose money as staff costs per minute is more than the profits for a domain. That is what happens when you charge nothing and the fact is that people still expect customer care and support even for free stuff. Most of their users will not understand  domains are offered at mark up costs. They will think Cloudflare is still charging them money so its their job to support them. This is just a completely screwed business model if you ask me. The only reason those companies can do it is because they have investors money to burn. It also hurts the market as small competitors go out of business, this is what creates monopolies which hurt consumers in the end. Its completely against any sort of profitable business and I think this will damage their reputation in a horrible way once complaints and bad reviews start to appear. This is just lousy management if you ask me. For example, are they really willing to lose a potential enterprise customer because someone is pissed because he got not replies over a problem on his domains? That is the real deal. People take decisions based on every tiny emotional things, including the service they get. Providing domains is opening your company to a worm market, the lower people pay the more they demand. Not to mention they are going to start alienating their hosting partners with this as well.

But the result in a short time, its going to hurt domain resellers.