Buying a domain for your new website might take only a fraction of an hour but choosing the right domain provider needs serious consideration.
Along with the initial price, the Godaddy domain renewal price should play an important role for you in selecting whether to go with Godaddy as your domain provider. If you won’t consider the renewal cost of your domain while buying a new domain, you might end up paying an unjustified amount to the provider.
That said, you can always go for a lucrative ‘initial price’ offer if you are creating a test website for a few months. But for your long-term ventures, I’d advise you to consider a website provider offering a reasonable deal on both the initial and the renewal charges of your new domain.
GoDaddy domain renewal price
GoDaddy offers a new domain for your website at an extremely competitive cost. You can grab a .club, .co, or .shop domain at just $0.99, a .world domain at $1.99, and a .com domain can be purchased for $11.99 only. The following screenshot displays the domain prices offered by GoDaddy for some of the major domain extensions:
GoDaddy renewal price
Though GoDaddy is good at offering competitive initial prices for domains, it is the worst when it comes to renewal prices. The domain provider has the strategy of attracting new customers by offering lower costs for the first year of domain registration. Thereby, it increases the domain prices every year while making it difficult for you to transfer your domain to another registrar.
I’m not saying that GoDaddy is not transparent about its pricing. It does give a disclaimer with its introductory prices mentioning that the Godaddy renewal price will vary. Also, you can always check the renewal price of your upcoming domain renewals from within your account by following the process mentioned here:
Steps to check GoDaddy renewal cost
- Log in to your ‘Domain Control Center’ by entering your GoDaddy ‘Username’ and ‘Password’ at this link.
- Click on ‘Edit Columns’ on the right side of your domain list.
- Check the ‘Renewal Price’ box.
- Click ‘OK’ to check the renewal price of your upcoming domain renewals. You can find it in the ‘Renewal Price’ column.
Though GoDaddy warns you that the initial domain price is different from the renewal price, it is not justified to charge such a huge amount for domain management services. Moreover, there is no point in attracting customers with lucrative initial domain costs and charging them a fortune a year later. Here is a screenshot of the cost for a .com domain renewal to GoDaddy:
You might have to pay a similar price for your next domain renewal with GoDaddy or maybe even higher than that.
In my opinion, this business tactic of attracting customers by offering lower initial prices and charging enormously higher renewal prices later is not good at all and far from being ethical. You should rather choose a domain registrar that doesn’t exploit you – neither at the beginning nor later.
Is it worth paying for the GoDaddy domain renewal cost?
No, it is not worth paying for the ever-increasing GoDaddy renewal fees. I don’t find any good reason to continue paying for the unnecessarily high GoDaddy renewal charges. I couldn’t even find any reasonable justification for the continual increment in prices. The GoDaddy executives blame the registry for its overpriced renewals as can be seen in the screenshot below from one of the ‘supposed’ resolutions for high renewal charges, found at its community pages:
But if this would have been the problem, GoDaddy wouldn’t have been the only domain registrar increasing the renewal prices. Many other GoDaddy competitors are offering domains at reasonable prices and charging a reasonable amount for domain renewals as well. Therefore, I don’t see any point in sticking with GoDaddy and paying hefty renewal costs.
Other problems with GoDaddy business tactics
I’ve also noticed some other issues with GoDaddy’s business operations that, in my opinion, are not to the best of their customers’ interests. Here are the additional problems that I came across:
- Each year, the domain registrar makes it more difficult for you to transfer your domain to another registrar by making the process slower and complicated for you.
- GoDaddy doesn’t miss the opportunity to grab an expired domain from the customer who forgets to renew it. It is then sold to the original owner at an extremely high price. If the original domain owner refuses to pay such a huge amount, the domain is sold to another interested buyer.
- Your search activity is constantly scrutinized by GoDaddy and not purchasing the domain name immediately after you find it appropriate might create problems for you in the future. The domain provider seems to quickly sell out those domain names that you find suitable for your use.
- It is normal for the domain provider to suddenly raise the price of an unsold domain name that receives a lot of attention from potential buyers.
- Some registrars follow the practice of locking the domain names that their customers are searching for. It is known as ‘domain squatting’ and forces the customer to register the concerned domain with the same domain provider.
One of GoDaddy’s competitors was caught doing this business malpractice. Since GoDaddy is using so many dirty tricks to exploit its customers, it might be involved in this malpractice as well, though I cannot be sure about this one. - Aggressive cross-selling.
To avoid the above malpractices followed by GoDaddy, it is best to stay away from the domain registrar and choose a reliable domain provider for your website domain needs. You will find many good domain registrars providing much better services at cheaper rates. You need to move your domain to a more ethical and reliable registrar for preventing a further deeper hole into your pocket.
Best alternative for Godaddy in 2024
It is not only the price of a domain that should be considered while purchasing a domain name. The reliability of the domain registrar is even more important for stress-free website maintenance.
With GoDaddy enticing the potential customers with huge discounts and leaving them with no choice but to pay huge sums later, it is no longer a reliable domain provider. If you haven’t yet given in to GoDaddy’s ‘not so lucrative’ offer, I would suggest you to sign up with Namesilo.
It is a quality domain provider serving the needs of website owners since 2009. It is a cheaper and arguably better registrar as it gives the true worth of money to its customers. Instead of following the cheap tactics of attracting prospective customers and ditching them later, Namesilo is upfront and transparent about its pricing structure.
You can grab a new domain name at Namesilo for just $8.99 and you won’t have to deal with the ever-increasing renewal charges, unlike GoDaddy that attracts you with the lucrative price of $0.99 for the first year of domain registration and shocks you with the ‘not so lucrative’ renewal price of $30 after a year. Instead of suddenly paying 30 times more than what you originally paid for your domain, it is best to choose a domain registrar that is consistent with its prices and won’t dig deeper and deeper into your pockets every year.
Along with the reliability, Namesilo also provides you with some freebies like free lifetime built-in Whois privacy protection, no ICANN fee, no transaction fee, no increased renewal rates, and no hidden charges unlike many of its competitors. Here is a little comparison table to help you understand the advantages of signing up with Namesilo instead of GoDaddy:
| Features | NAMESILO | GODADDY |
| Lifetime free Whois Privacy | Available | Not available |
| ICANN or transaction fees | Not to be paid | To be paid |
| 2-factor authentication | Available | Available |
| Advanced account security | Available | Not available |
| Elite website encryption | Available | Not available |
| Email encryption | Available | Available |
| Own domain registrar platform | Available | Available |
| 30-day grace period for renewing expired domains | Available | Not available |
| Sub-account domain management | Available | Available |
| Availability of hosting | Not available | Available |
| Free API | Available | Not available |
| Customizable parking pages | Available | Not available |
| Customer service chat | Available | Not available |
| POP email addresses | Not available | Available |
| Multiple target email forwarding | Available | Not available |
Here is how Namesilo compares with GoDaddy and other domain providers concerning its pricing:
If you have already signed up with GoDaddy and do not want to pay the unreasonably high renewal charges, you can also consider transferring your domain to Namesilo and benefit from a special offer of a free 1-year extension for your existing domain.
The whole transfer process will finish in less than 30 minutes in some cases while in others, it might take 5 to 7 days. Since Namesilo will handle all the file transfers for automatically transferring your domain, you can expect to pay a minimal one-time transfer fee to the domain provider.
To be eligible for a domain transfer, ensure that your domain isn’t expiring within 7 days of initiating the transfer process. You can also check out the full transfer checklist before considering transferring your domain from GoDaddy to Namesilo here:
https://www.namesilo.com/support/v2/articles/ordering/domain-transfer-checklist
A useful tip for those sticking with GoDaddy
Though I recommend against sticking with GoDaddy to stop further exploitation since the registrar no longer cares for its customers’ interests. But if for any reason, you wouldn’t like to quit GoDaddy, I’d recommend you to try this useful tip to save some bucks on your next renewal:
Using GoDaddy domain and hosting services
Similar to the way GoDaddy customers are facing issues with its domain management services, its hosting services are no good either because of its unreliability. If you are using GoDaddy web hosting services along with its domain management services, you will soon find out the increasing renewal charges.
Apart from the skyrocketing web hosting renewal rates, a lot of GoDaddy customers have started complaining about its slow hosting speed these days. It, therefore, seems no point in sticking with the host and paying huge sums for the diminishing quality of hosting services. In my opinion, you shall migrate your website to another hosting provider offering a better quality of services and competitive rates.
My top recommendation for receiving excellent hosting services is Bluehost. It offers better performance, pricing, and support for all your website needs so that you don’t have to deal with slow speeds or rising renewal prices ever.
Bluehost is all about quality services at cheap rates. You can grab a year of hosting for just under $60, including a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt and a 30-day free trial of Microsoft 365 Mailbox.
My Final Thoughts on GoDaddy Renewal Cost
Since GoDaddy doesn’t care much about your hard-earned money and tends to increase its renewal costs every year, it is best to leave the domain provider for good. You won’t find any improvement in GoDaddy hosting services either with the rising renewal rates.
On the contrary, your website performance might decline with its speed getting slower. So, I highly recommend you to transfer your domain name to Namesilo for receiving valuable freebies. Also, transferring your hosting services to Bluehost will help you improve the performance of your website with its exceptional hosting services.
Additionally, you can also benefit from Bluehost’s special offer. It provides you with free new domain registration or domain transfer for the first year if you are a first time customer of the website.
Take charge of your domain back from GoDaddy to avoid further frustration. Get your online game up without draining your finances by taking the right decision for your website.
I’d also like you to share your experiences with GoDaddy’s services and know whether you have faced similar issues as discussed above.
Do you still recommend Namesilo as a replacement for GoDaddy (current info on this article is 2 years old).
Yes, Kim. We still do recommend NameSilo, till this day they’re still the best alternative in terms of pricing.
So, you can go ahead and proceed with NameSilo 🙂