Wake up and smell the rip-offs! If you're still paying more than $10 per year for a domain name, you're getting ripped-off.

Maybe ripped-off is too strong a language. After all, many of the firms charging you over $10 per year do provide you with additional services. Many of these firms do offer domain name registrations, renewals, and transfers as an "additional service." Many web hosts do this as an example. However, I still don't think that justifies them charging you 2 - 10 times what it costs them!

The problem is that many beginners don't realize that they don't have to pay those outrageous fees. They don't realize that they don't have to use their web hosts to register a domain name and they don't have to renew their domain through their old registrar.

Let me give you a little history.....

When I first came online... back in 1996, Network Solutions was the only place to get a domain name. They charged $35 per year and you had to register for 2 years minimum. They practically had a monopoly on the domain name registration business with the government's blessing. They were a typical BIG company that could be nearly impossible to deal with if your records ever got messed up. Boy do I have stories that I could tell you :-)

Present day facts...

Today, anyone can be a domain name registrar or an agent for one. In-fact, I got so fed up with seeing my clients getting ripped-off that I set up my own service. My clients can get a domain name for under $8 per year (much cheaper for some extensions). They can transfer domains, bulk register domains, set up domain forwarding, and even arrange to hide who owns a domain...

Why would you want to hide who owns a domain? Well, whether you realized it or not, your domain registration records are a matter of public record. Anyone can go to whois.com and look up the record for any of your domains. Within that record, is your address, email address and phone number. This means you are an easy target for spammers, stalkers, and tele-marketers! With the domain masking service they see the information for a proxy service, but you really maintain full control over the domain.

That's digressing a little, but I did want you to know that services like that exist. If you want to check out the service I set up for my subscribers and clients, it at: http://TheRealSecrets.com/hosting/ You are welcome to use it too. My pricing is nearly break-even. When I factor in all of my overhead, I actually lose a little. If you're familiar with the law of reciprocity, you'll understand why I do that.

There are many other similar rip-offs that I teach my clients and attendees to my workshops about. It's when you're first starting out that your funds are the tightest. It's also at that time that you know the least and are therefore the easiest to take advantage of. Hopefully this article and others I'm writing will level the playing field. Now you don't need to be an unknowing victim of rip-offs.