[ilurk]

So I found this article [1] about domain name transfer. Which clarified one doubt that I had. As I was under the impression that you were hopelessly stuck at paying rent for life middleman (to a reseller or in this case a registrar).

This raises another question. Is it worth starting you own registrar? Or it is fee prohibitive?

[1] http://lifehacker.com/5794507/how-to-jump-ship-from-godaddy-...

[joedavison]

Registrars need to pay a yearly fee to ICANN (in the $xx,xxx range if I recall correctly) and significant startup fees as well.

This qualifies you to pay 'wholesale' prices for domain names. Wholesale prices are set by the registry. (e.g. Verisign sets the wholesale price for .com, Afilias for .org, etc.)

It is worth doing if you register a very large number of domain names, like 100,000+. Some large corporations have their own registrar, Google for example. (More recently Google has also entered the registry business, with their new TLDs.)