VeriSign plans domain price hike

Only four months after renewing its hold on the rights for .com and .net domains, VeriSign said that it will be raising registration fees starting in October of this year.

The company cited growing security costs and a new project to increase the capacity of domain name system servers as the main reasons for the $0.42 increase in .com wholesale prices to $6.42 and the $0.35 increase for .net domains to $3.85. The new pricing will primarily affect registrars, but they might pass on the additional costs to consumers and businesses registrering new domains.

A December extention of a 1999 deal with ICANN granted VeriSign control of the .com domain through 2012. The company sells the rights to registrars and hosting companies, who then rent the domains to consumers. The fees cover maintenance costs for each domain. The deal gives VeriSign the right to raise hosting costs 7 per cent in four of the next six years.

VeriSign said that the increases were required because the internet is becoming more crowded and dangerous. The company claims that since 1999, the traffic load on its systems has increased by a factor 30 to 30 billion.

In order to handle the traffic boom, Verisign plans to launch "Project Titan " that will increase the capacity of its DNS servers tenfold over the next three years.

Security concerns were the other reason VeriSign decided to raise domain prices. The company cites a 700 per cent rise in attacks since 2000, along with predicted rises of 50 per cent in each of the next two years as requiring investments in security systems.

The .com and .net price hikes will take effect on October 15.