We sell domain names but they aren’t a part of our core business and we don’t make any meaningful money from them, we provide them as a courtesy to our clients as many of them prefer to have their web services all managed by someone they trust. We are essentially domain provider agnostic. Occasionally people will ask us to transfer their existing domains to us and often they need a bit of help doing this which is fine.
We’re doing that today for a client who is using names.co.uk. Not only are they nearly twice as expensive as pretty much everybody else (£13.99 for a .uk. compared to our £11.99, and we don’t claim to be the cheapest), they also charge £10 + VAT if you wish to change your IPS tag. Changing the IPS tag is the first step in transferring your.uk domain to another registrar, and everybody else* [*that we know of] provides that service free of charge. This should be a simple automated process you can manage yourself.
In the case of Namesco, although you still have to do the same work – finding out the tag, entering it into a box and clicking go – they then apparently have to manually change the tag themselves and you then have to pay them £12 for the service. Plus they claim it can take 2 days (it’s usually virtually instant). Namesco are one of the biggest domain registrars in the UK and frankly there’s no excuse for these rip-off charges or substandard service.
If you plan on having your domain name for more than a year you’ll get your money back by transferring away from Namesco to a cheaper provider on the domain cost alone but you’ll have to take the initial hit. (Of course we recommend not going with them in the first place. Choose anyone else!)
