Extract from April 2010 customer newsletter:
As our long term customers will know, our domain registration prices have been fixed since we started offering hosting, over 6 years ago. We set the prices as low as possible, as we considered the registrations to be a service to customers rather than a way to generate profit. Since then, a lot has changed. A couple of years ago, ICANN increased the fees charged for a number of the key domain extensions. Many suppliers, including ours, took this oportunity to increase their prices.

Separately, no one can have missed the worldwide financial turmoil in recent times. One of the effects of this has been a dramatic fall in the Pound Sterling exchange rate against the US Dollar over the past couple of years. Since all of the domain registrations are billed to us in US dollars (except the UK registrations supplied by Nominet), this has increased the cost to us.

The result of these two situations is that for a while now, we have been subsidising registrations by selling them for less than they are costing us. With the exchange rate showing no sign of recovery back to previous levels, we can not continue to do this and so we have been forced to do a complete review of all of our domain registration prices.

The majority of our prices have had to be revised upwards in order to cover the increased costs. A few have been reduced in price as we have found cheaper sources for them and a few others have been withdrawn from sale due to supply issues. We are also introducing some new extensions, including .me and .mobi. UK domains provided by Nominet (.co.uk, .org.uk etc) are remaining at the same price, since they are unaffected by exchange rate issues). A similar revision has also been done on SSL certificates, as they also suffer from the exchange rate.

These pricing changes will apply to both new orders and renewals of existing domains from the 1st June 2010. We are giving over a months notice of these changes as we are aware of the effect that they may have and that some resellers who sell our services on may need to adjust their own pricing. We do appologise for any inconvinence caused by these changes and we hope that you can understand the reasons why we have been forced to do this. Our prices for the most common extensions are still remaining lower than many of the large well known domain companies in the UK.

If you have any questions about these changes, please do not hesitate to contact us via the normal methods.