Spread over three registrars because I bought them at different times in different moods. One is a live site, two are redirects, the rest are ideas I have not built. The renewal emails now arrive at a rate of about two a month and the prices vary from reasonable to insulting for the same thing. Do you consolidate, and where, given most of these will never have a site on them?
Practical parking note: point the unused ones at nothing rather than at a parking page full of ads. Some registrars monetise parked domains by default and your abandoned idea ends up serving adverts with your name in the address bar. It takes one setting and it is the sort of thing you only notice when someone mentions it to you at a conference.
For parked domains I use an at-cost registrar, meaning one that charges the registry fee plus the ICANN fee with no markup and no separate renewal price. That is the whole point for domains that will never generate anything: the sticker price and the renewal price are the same number, forever, and it goes up only when the registry raises it.
Two caveats. First, the at-cost model usually means you use their nameservers, which is fine for parked names and a consideration for client work. Second, the registry has been raising .com wholesale on a schedule for several years now, so nobody's renewal is truly flat, it is just not marked up on top.
Consolidate your own, never the clients'. Client domains stay in the client's own account with their own billing, because a domain sitting in my account is a liability the day the relationship ends or the day I get hit by a bus. I have delegated access to about a dozen and own none of them, and every handover has been an email rather than a negotiation.
Before you consolidate, cull. I did the same audit with 31 domains and the useful exercise was a spreadsheet with four columns: domain, renewal date, renewal price, and one sentence saying what it is for. Any row where I could not write the sentence got dropped.
Nine went. Nothing bad happened. Two of them I had been renewing for six years for an idea I could no longer remember. The consolidation question matters much less once the list is short enough to hold in your head, and the annual cost fell by more than half before I moved anything.
The one sentence rule is brutal and correct. About eight of mine fail it immediately.
Do the cull at the renewal date rather than all at once, though. You have already paid for the year on most of them, so let them run out rather than deleting them today.
Turn off auto-renew on the ones you are undecided about and put a calendar reminder forty days before expiry. Decide once a year rather than twice a month.
Be careful with that one. I did it, missed the reminder while travelling, and a name I did care about expired. Getting it back was not a renewal, it was a redemption fee, and the quote I was given was around ninety dollars against a renewal of about twelve. Leave auto-renew on for anything you would be upset to lose and use the reminder only to decide about cancelling.
Fair, and better advice than mine. Auto-renew on for anything with a sentence next to it, off only for the ones already sentenced.
@null_pointer_ok · 2w ago
Mechanics of moving them, so you do not schedule it badly. A domain cannot be transferred within sixty days of registration or of a previous transfer, so anything you bought or moved recently has to wait. You need the auth code from the losing registrar and the domain must be unlocked, and transferring adds a year to the expiry rather than losing it. Do them in batches of five, not twenty three in an evening.
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