Why are domain names ending with the following characters so expensive?
Roughly all costing about £50+vat a year.

.eu.com
.gb.net
.gb.com
.mobi
.uk.com

By comparison most .co.uk or .info etc are below £10 a year.

Raising this question simply because am curious.
Thank you.

.mobi because it's new, the price will probably drop after the first year or so...

All the others, because they're not proper domain names, & they're all owned by the same company, who are frankly money-grabbing bar stewards.

Thanks steev.
With most of the more common .com's and .co.uk's taken,i suppose they can almost dictate the prices.
Does seem very unfair price structure tho from the .co.uk's

IMHO they're completely worthless.

1. You are at the mercy of an unregulated company that owns the second level domain (most top level domains have an element of central government involvement). They could decide to charge double next year, and you'd have no route of appeal.

2. If you bought say tesco.uk.com 'cos someone beat you to tesco.com the lawyers would be on your doorstep in the morning (look up the story of Mike Rowe who bought a suitable domain for his software business...)

3. suppose you were Mr T. Esco you might get away with buying tesco.uk.com but most people looking for your website would get it wrong. The vast majority of domains are .com, .co.uk comes second - that's what people expect a domain name to end with, anything else and they won't remember and will get it wrong.

IMHO they're completely worthless.

1. You are at the mercy of an unregulated company that owns the second level domain (most top level domains have an element of central government involvement). They could decide to charge double next year, and you'd have no route of appeal.

2. If you bought say tesco.uk.com 'cos someone beat you to tesco.com the lawyers would be on your doorstep in the morning (look up the story of Mike Rowe who bought a suitable domain for his software business...)

3. suppose you were Mr T. Esco you might get away with buying tesco.uk.com but most people looking for your website would get it wrong. The vast majority of domains are .com, .co.uk comes second - that's what people expect a domain name to end with, anything else and they won't remember and will get it wrong.



thank you for the info.
what would constitute a top level domain,how do you distinguish?
and is there anything you can do the following year when you have to re-new?

Top level domains are international or multi-national region's official domain name extensions, eg .com .net .org .biz .info .mobi .eu.

Then there are country-code top level domains, each country has a country code & their own non-profit organisation that looks after things & decides what'll be available, so for example Spain just has .es, France has .fr, whereas Nominet (who look after the UK) decided they wanted to split them up for companies, charities, government etc, so instead of just .uk we have .co.uk, .org.uk, .ltd.uk, .gov.uk, .sch.uk & a few others.

Then there are the second level domains, where basically someone has bought the top-level domain of, for example, uk.com, then sells you sub-domains of that, so you can have yourname.uk.com for some over-inflated price. Generally they only sell to people who don't know any better, &/or companies who may've missed out of getting the relevant .com & need a web presence.

thank you for the info.
what would constitute a top level domain,how do you distinguish?

yourdomain.com = TLD
Something.yourdomain.com = Subdomain.

Then there are the second level domains, where basically someone has bought the top-level domain of, for example, uk.com, then sells you sub-domains of that, so you can have yourname.uk.com for some over-inflated price. Generally they only sell to people who don't know any better, &/or companies who may've missed out of getting the relevant .com & need a web presence.

As in the case of the .uk.co domains a few years ago (which were controled by a Columbian company/business).