However, even if I’ve never been that interested in currency markets I’ve always been very conscious of currency rates’ impact on our business.
While we may be hosting our servers in Ireland not all of the vendors we deal with on a day to day basis are in the Euro zone.
Domain names are a prime example.
We deal in Euro with Eurid, IEDR and some of the EU based registrars, however we have to deal in Sterling with Nominet. For .com and other gTLD domains we’re dealing in US dollars.
Now I could go off into a wonderful tangent about global economic forces and bore you to tears (if I haven’t done so already!), but let’s cut to the chase.
The rate of the US dollar against the Euro has been in our favour for quite some time, but that obviously couldn’t last forever (what does?).
We’ve always been quite cautious with our pricing of .com domains, so that we wouldn’t end up being forced to raise our prices too much unless Verisign et al were allowed a massive price hike also (they’re not allowed this by ICANN, so it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon).
As of today we are setting the pricing on .com registrations, transfers and renewals at €5.95. We had been advertising them on our site at €5.99 and for some bizarre reason we were actually selling them at a slightly lower price.
Our pricing covers the latest registry increases, so we shouldn’t have to raise them again for some time (if the Euro falls dramatically we will have to make adjustments obviously)