The ZA Domain Name Authority (ZADNA) has announced that pricing of its Wholesale Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) fees and Legacy System fees will be increased from next year.

This increase was not arrived at in a matter of hours. ZADNA reports that it solicited input from stakeholders through a public consultation process.

Once that was concluded the ZADNA board met on 28th August and the decision to increase fees was made.

“The Authority has taken into consideration all submissions received and proposals thereof. The public interest concerns were centred on affordability, current economic conditions and price comparisons with other country code Top Level Domains,” the non-profit organisation reports.

So how much is this increase? Not much, but when dealing with wholesale “not much” becomes “a lot” very quickly.

From 1st April 2021, the EPP wholesale fee for .co.za, .org.za, .web.za and .net.za will increase by R10. In 2020 this fee is R45 so from April next year expect to pay R55.

The Legacy System fee will also increase by R10 but that happens earlier in the year on 1st January 2021.

Something important to note is ZADNA plans to phase out the Legacy System but when that will happen is an unknown at this time.

That’s a good thing though as not only is the EPP system far better, it’s cheaper as well. The Legacy System fee currently sits at R130 as of time of writing.

While a fee increase was never a certainty, now that it is we will be interested to see whether it has a noticeable effect on the cost to communicate.

Our hope is that it doesn’t, at least not in a negative sense. EPP pricing has remained the same for the last six years, an increase of R10 then is fair, especially when you consider all the moving parts involved in domain registration.

That having been said, we’ll have to wait a year to see if there is an effect following this price increase.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]