> And what happens if your domain gets popular, are they going to just jack up your rent from $25/yr to $500/yr or more?
As long as your domain is in the standard fee class, aka non-premium, they can't target it for a price increase if it's a gTLD. They have to raise the price of all standard domains at the same time.
Everyone will tell you they can't reclassify a domain from standard to premium, but that's not technically correct. They can change the classification to whatever they want, but they have to charge you standard renewal fees if the domain had a standard classification when you registered it, as long as you haven't let it expire.
I created a website that has some info about domain reclassification.
Great, I have a question for you if you can be bothered.
I recently "bought" a .com domain. It's not a popular English word, it's a small number of letters that match some truncation of my names. No competition, nobody wants it. Anyway, I looked at a handful of registrars and got the cheapest. But then I was a bit concerned. Why are they the cheapest, are they cutting corners somehow? The difference was substancial. GoDaddy was one of the most expensive ones are $23/yr and I bought it from dynadot for something like $6/yr. Why such a huge difference?
It's almost impossible to judge based on the pricing alone. Paying top dollar doesn't guarantee anything extra and low prices don't always mean low quality service.
$6.99 looks like a first year discount at dynadot with renewals at $10.88 USD.
> Why such a huge difference?
A lot of registrants don't know what the wholesale pricing looks like and the difference between $10 or $25 / year for a business isn't a factor. The risk that comes along with transferring to a cheaper registrar isn't worth it to save $15 / year.
The ERRP only covers gTLDs, right? Have you seen any ICANN policies requiring ccTLDs to adopt the same grace periods. As far as I know, ccTLDs can do whatever they want.
Domain expiration is something that's more complicated than most people realize. As an example, I'm not sure if there's a definitive source stating that auto-renew grace is part of the ERRP. In my opinion it's not and the ERRP typically won't trigger for high value domains because they'll be sold or auctioned by the registrar instead.
As far as I know, the ERRP rules describe the policies for the deletion of expired domains, which isn't required, so working off the auto-renew grace status was a good choice here. Most people don't realize that expired domains aren't guaranteed to go through the ERRP lifecycle [1].
> You should be aware that during the auto-renew period, the domain name may be available to third parties for registration, depending on your registrar's terms of service. You may also run the risk of having your domain name auctioned to a third party by your registrar during this period (depending on your terms of service)
The process described here sounds like a pretty reasonable approach to a hard problem. It won't catch everything, but it's a good approach and it's nice to see some effort put into the issue.
As long as your domain is in the standard fee class, aka non-premium, they can't target it for a price increase if it's a gTLD. They have to raise the price of all standard domains at the same time.
Everyone will tell you they can't reclassify a domain from standard to premium, but that's not technically correct. They can change the classification to whatever they want, but they have to charge you standard renewal fees if the domain had a standard classification when you registered it, as long as you haven't let it expire.
I created a website that has some info about domain reclassification.
https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/reclassification/