The Real Cost of a Domain Name: Registration vs Renewal (UK 2026)

When you buy a domain name, the price on the button is rarely the price you end up living with. The headline figure — sometimes 1p or £1 for the first year — is an introductory teaser. What actually matters is the renewal price: the amount you pay every year afterwards, for as long as you own the name. Gravity Host doesn't play the teaser game. We're not the cheapest registrar on the internet, and we're nowhere near the most expensive — we sit in the fair middle with one promise the bargain-basement and the big brands both struggle to make: the price stays the same every year. This guide shows the real numbers (June 2026) so you can judge for yourself.

How domain pricing actually works

Every domain extension has a wholesale price set by the registry that runs it — Nominet for .uk and .co.uk, Verisign for .com, and so on. Registrars pay that wholesale price and add a margin. That's normal and fair. The difference is in how honestly it's presented. A very low first-year price gets you to sign up; the real money is then made on renewals, when you're far less likely to move. Once your website, email and business cards all point at a domain, switching feels risky — so a quiet annual renewal of £15, £18 or £22 is easy to wave through.

What a domain really costs (June 2026)

Here's what a UK customer actually pays at a range of registrars — the real all-in price, first year and renewal, for the two extensions most British businesses use. Gravity Host's prices are all-inclusive; the others are their standard rates, with overseas prices converted from US dollars.

Registrar	.co.uk — first year	.co.uk — renewal/yr	.com — first year	.com — renewal/yr
Gravity Host	£10	£10	£15	£15
Krystal	£9.59	£9.59	£14.39	£14.39
Namecheap	~£7.10	~£9.50	~£14.20	~£17.50
IONOS	£1.20	£12.00	£1.20	£18.00
123-reg	£4.79	£15.59	1p*	£22.79
Names.co.uk	£0	£27.59	£2.39	£46.79
GoDaddy	£0.01	£15.59	£0.01	£22.79

Standard published rates as of June 2026; 123-reg and Names.co.uk re-checked on their own websites in September 2026, shown as the all-in price you would actually pay. *123-reg's 1p .com requires a three-year purchase, so you pay £45.59 up front. Names.co.uk's first-year offers "do not apply to renewals", and its renewal prices sit on a separate renewals page; overseas prices converted from US dollars and will move with exchange rates. Cloudflare (not shown) sells .com at cost — around £8 — but does not register .co.uk. Figures change over time — always check the renewal price, not the first-year price, before you buy.

Where Gravity Host sits: fair and consistent

Look down the renewal columns rather than the first-year ones, because renewal is what you pay almost every year. A few honest observations:

• On a .com, our £15 renewal is cheaper than Namecheap, IONOS, GoDaddy, 123-reg and Names.co.uk — the big mainstream names all renew higher, three of them over £22 and one at nearly £47.
• On a .co.uk, our £10 is mid-table — a little above the very cheapest, and several pounds below GoDaddy and 123-reg, and well under half of Names.co.uk's £27.59.
• A couple of providers sit just under us — fellow UK host Krystal, which prices flat like we do, and Cloudflare's at-cost .com — while the teaser registrars renew far higher. We're never the dearest, and never the teaser-then-shock option.

That's the point. You can always find someone a pound cheaper on a given extension, and you can always find someone far dearer. Gravity Host aims for a fair, consistent price that stays competitive year after year — not a headline that lures you in and then climbs.

The renewal trap, in plain numbers

Because you keep a business domain for years, the fair comparison is the total over time: the first year plus four renewals, using the prices in the table above. Here is every registrar in that table, cheapest first on a .com:

Registrar	.com over 5 years	.co.uk over 5 years
Krystal	~£72	~£48
IONOS	~£73	~£49
Gravity Host	£75	£50
Namecheap	~£84	~£45
GoDaddy	~£91	~£62
123-reg	~£91	~£67
Names.co.uk	~£190	~£110

The headline price barely matters: GoDaddy's and 123-reg's 1p .com both end up around £91, and Names.co.uk's free first year ends up the dearest of the lot — roughly £115 more than us over five years on a .com, and £60 more on a .co.uk. A few providers do land a little below us, and we'd rather say so: Krystal prices flat like we do, IONOS comes out a couple of pounds under on these figures, Namecheap is a few pounds cheaper on a .co.uk, and Cloudflare sells .com at cost. We're a few pounds either side of the fairest names in the table, and a long way from the dearest.

What it costs to leave

A domain is only really yours if you can move it. Most registrars don't charge to transfer a name away, but not all. Here's what each one says on its own website (checked September 2026):

Registrar	Fee to transfer away
Gravity Host	£0 — we never charge you to leave
Krystal	£0 — "no transfer fees from Krystal"
IONOS	£0 — listed as free, but moving the domain doesn't end your IONOS contract, so billing can carry on until you cancel it
Namecheap	£0 — no fee from Namecheap
GoDaddy	No fee mentioned on its transfer-away help page
123-reg	No fee mentioned on its transfer-away help pages
Names.co.uk	£12 for both .uk and .com — stated on its own help page

Thinking of moving? We've written step-by-step guides from each provider's own help pages: GoDaddy · 123-reg · Names.co.uk · IONOS · Namecheap · Krystal.

For a .uk name there's no registry charge when your registrar releases it: Nominet, which runs .uk, only charges (£12) if you move the name yourself through its own service. So a .uk release fee is the registrar's own charge, not one passed on. Separately, most registrars block moving a .com for 60 days after it's registered or transferred — that's an industry rule, not a fee.

Customers notice these things. In a February 2026 Reddit thread about Names.co.uk's free .co.uk, several people pointed out the £12 fee to leave and the renewal price that follows the free year — both of which Names.co.uk's own pages confirm. Back in 2019, The Register and a Reddit sysadmin thread reported customers of 123-reg and Names.co.uk receiving renewal notices for .uk names they hadn't ordered; 123-reg told The Register some customers had been sent wrong information and that anyone charged would be refunded. It's a good reminder to read your renewal emails carefully, wherever your domains live.

Our promise: the same price next year

Gravity Host does the opposite of the teaser model. Our renewal price is the same as our registration price — £10 a year for a .co.uk, £15 for a .com, £18 for .org or .net, £13 for .eu — and it stays there. We only ever raise a domain price if the registry itself raises the wholesale cost to us; when Nominet or Verisign adjusts their fees we pass that through and no more. There's no "first-year only" asterisk, no automatic annual increase, and no loyalty penalty for staying put. For a business that values predictable costs, that certainty is worth more than a one-off penny deal.

"But isn't somewhere cheaper?"

On some extensions, yes — and we'd rather be straight about it. Krystal, another UK host, prices a little under us on the same honest flat model. Namecheap's .co.uk renewal sits just below ours (though its .com works out dearer once converted). And Cloudflare sells .com domains at cost — around £8, with no markup and no renewal hike. If the lowest possible number on one extension is all that matters, those are worth knowing about.

Each comes with trade-offs to weigh. Cloudflare only registers a narrow set of extensions — it does not sell new .co.uk domains at all — and makes you use its own nameservers, so you can't keep your DNS where you like it. Namecheap is a large overseas company where support is a ticket queue, not a UK phone call. With Gravity Host your domain sits alongside your hosting and email in one British account, with privacy built in on .uk and .eu names and optional WHOIS privacy for £5 a year on .com, .net, .org and more, easy DNS management, and real UK support. For most small businesses, a fair flat price with everything in one place beats chasing the last pound across separate providers.

How to avoid the renewal trap (anywhere you buy)

• Ignore the first-year price. Find the renewal price before you commit — it's the number you'll pay almost every year.
• Check for automatic increases. Phrases like "renews at the then-current rate" mean the price can rise whenever the registrar chooses.
• Watch for extras at checkout. A headline that looks suspiciously low sometimes has charges added at the final step — always look at the total before you pay.
• Keep control of your domain. Make sure you can manage DNS and transfer the name out freely — your domain should never be held hostage to a hosting plan.

Simple, stable, and all in one place

A domain is the foundation of your online identity, and it should cost a fair, predictable amount year after year — not a penny today and a shock tomorrow. That's how Gravity Host prices them: not the cheapest, not the dearest, just consistent — sitting neatly alongside UK NVMe hosting, free SSL, daily backups and business email. Register a new name or transfer one in, and the price you see today is the price you'll still be paying next year.