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I provide educational material with some sites but I am running them at loss if I need to use the .com TLD with a cos of 10USD per year (not counting the work to do them). I am planning to change the domains to the .info TLD with a cost of 2USD per year with GoDaddy so I could self-sufficiently (hopefully) to provide the material, I have some advertisements there that generate just about 2USD per year to meet the required capital. Can I be sure the INFO domain registration (using GoDaddy) will always be 2USD, and not increase in cost? Are there some cheaper domain registrars? Is it possible to register a domain for 50 years? Any idea whether there are some services that allow cheap educational domain registartion?

The sites are running on Google products (with 0 cost to me except time and coding).

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10 years is the longest period you can register a domain for.

Pricing for any domain, including .info, can change at any time. So you cannot count on the pricing be only $2 indefinitely.

Unless you're an accredited educational institution you are no different then anyone else trying to purchase a domain name. So unless you know someone who is a registrar or large reseller of a registrar you will only find discounts when a registrar decides to have a special promotion.

$2 is about as cheap as a domain comes. Every nice in a while I see a promotion for $1 domains but it isn't often and usually requires paying for another service like web hosting.

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  • "10 years is the longest period you can register a domain for." in gTLDs because this is an ICANN mandated rule. ccTLDs are free to do otherwise.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Apr 4, 2018 at 3:30
  • There exists some free domain names, like in .tk. You have to be aware of the specific terms and conditions of this case.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Apr 4, 2018 at 3:31
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Godaddy's deal on .info is for one year only, next year you'll be back to full price.

If you want to save money, register one generic domain and then use subdomains for your web sites. There's nothing to stop you having a hundred or a thousand subdomain sites for you $10 registration fee.

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  • Yes this is what I am now doing, I am moving my sites under one generic site like invest.mysite.com, puzzles.mysite.com and programming.mysite.com. I have had independent site for everything like invest.com, puzzles.com and programming.com. My registrar, GoDaddy, allows only 100 subdomains. I have now still problems to solve with CNAME records but wroking on it, GoDaddy does not accept my "puzzle" and "ghs.google.com" and "1hour" for CNAME for some reason, it accepts only www but not puzzle.
    – user8926
    Jul 24, 2011 at 14:38
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As far as cons, there's a soft one in that the general population is not as accustomed to TLDs beyond the basics(.ie, .com, .org, .net) as much as we are. That's improving, and depending upon your particular audience might not even apply, but it's something to be aware of. A "weird" web address might be met with some suspicion.

If it doesn't matter, then go ahead and buy the cheapest you can get, but I have to say that I think you're looking at this backwards. Why is it that you're willing to eat the ongoing cost of time maintaining, coding and presumably designing these sites, but not the fixed domain registration cost? My hourly rate for all of those things is much more than ten bucks.

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  • good points, perhaps, I should ask which domain ending give the audience a feeling of "expertise" (I feel that .com ending is poor, I find most related sites under .edu or .org).
    – user8926
    Jul 23, 2011 at 21:27

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