zlacker

This happened to me on Hover. The fishy part is if you say you won’t pay it and bargain it magically goes down to 50-90 usd. That makes me think they have control over the price and take a hit just to secure the lower amount.

I would not trust any of the registrars, not even Hover.

>>rumori+(OP)
The 180 fee is a godaddy fee not a government fee. Other companies may charge a premium but many do not.

>>ipaddr+h7
As far as I can tell from Googling, the €150 fee is something Verisign charges GoDaddy for domain redemption -- €150 is the rate for .com names, other TLD's have different rates.

So no, it doesn't appear to be a GoDaddy fee at all. It appears they could charge a premium on top of that, but they don't appear to be doing so in this case (assuming it's a .com).

(But correct that's it's not a government fee either.)

>>rumori+(OP)
Redemption fees are set by the registry, not the registrar. Of course the registrars apply their standard markup but I don't know of a registrar that will add an unreasonable markup to the already prohibitive restore prices.

> That makes me think they have control over the price

Well yeah, registrar is a business, of course you have some say on the price you sell your domains... But there's a base price that is set by the registry behind the registrars

As an example, the .com is sold by Verisign (the registry) around 9 USD for the create/renew, but around 50 USD for the restore, depending on the negotiated price between the registrar and Verisign. So basically no registrar will allow you to restore a domain in redemption period for less than 50 USD.