Recently, I was debating purchasing a new domain name that had a premium price tag on GoDaddy for $399. This was one of the new top level domains that came out, and it was apparently flagged as being a potentially popular domain name, hence the higher price tag. This was a brand new domain name that nobody had owned before, so I wasn't buying it at this price from some squatter. I've been purchasing all of my domains from GoDaddy to keep everything in one place, but also because in the past, the other competitors all pretty much offered the same prices anyhow. They may look cheaper up front, but they either nail you with extra high renewal fees, or they bring it right back up to the same costs as their competitors once you hit the checkout and they tack on a bunch of extra/hidden fees. I tried looking everywhere for some sort of GoDaddy coupon code that would bring the price down, but they were not offering anything special on this new TLD. So for the hell of it, I tried checking out what some of the competitors were charging for the same domain name. Much to my surprise they all wanted anywhere from $100-$150 *less* than GoDaddy! Name.com had the lowest price, asking only $250 for the domain name instead of $399. I also did some due diligence on them, and the company has solid reviews, so I went forward with the purchase. I honestly don't know for sure what caused such a huge price discrepancy with GoDaddy. Sure it's an inconvenience having to juggle multiple registrars, but I'm not going to pass up on saving $150 just to stay with them. Their loss. I do know that there have been a few incidents GoDaddy in recent months where they listed the wrong price on their site for some of these new domains. A couple of times this past summer I tried to buy some of these new TLD's and just as I was checking out the order would not finish processing. After some phone calls with them, it turned out the domains, which were listed for about $39, actually cost $129 and $199 respectively. They claim that they received the wrong prices from the main domain registrars - and then later updated them with the new prices. So perhaps they had the wrong price listed here too, but I didn't feel like bothering with them over the phone to find out, and just purchased it elsewhere. Definitely make sure you price compare for these more expensive domain names, before shelling out hundreds or thousands for them.
