The Real Cost of Cheap UK Domains in 2026: 8 Registrars Compared

A .co.uk domain for 1p. A .com for free. Headline prices that feel like a gift. And for exactly twelve months, they are. The problem arrives with the second invoice, when that 1p domain renews at £14.39 inc-VAT, or £27.59, or more. By then you've built a website, printed business cards, put the address on your van. Moving feels like too much hassle. So you pay. That's the entire business model.

I've watched this pattern run unchanged since I started 365i in 2001. What has changed is who owns the registrars. The biggest "UK alternative" to GoDaddy, namely 123-Reg, was bought by GoDaddy in 2017 through the Host Europe Group acquisition. Customers switch to "a British option" and end up with the same company in a different wrapper. This article names the eight registrars I checked on 21 April 2026, shows the verified inc-VAT prices, and explains why the cheapest first-year deal almost always becomes the most expensive domain you own.

How the Bait-and-Switch Works

The formula is simple and it works on most people at least once. A registrar advertises a TLD at a loss-leader price. £0.01. FREE. £1.00 with voucher code. You register. You build your website, wire up email, print cards, update the Companies House record. Twelve months later the renewal notice arrives at three, five, or ten times the headline price.

By then, moving the domain means DNS changes, nameserver transfers, and the mild risk of email bouncing for a day. Most people just pay. The registrar has calculated that the first-year loss is a cheap acquisition cost compared to the lifetime renewals they'll book.

There's a second layer on top. Several registrars only unlock their lowest teaser price if you commit to a two or three-year contract upfront. 123-Reg's £0.01 .com, for example, is only available with a three-year registration. You don't see a second-year renewal invoice because you've already paid for three years. But the fourth-year invoice, when it comes, is at the full retail price. It's a renewal shock with a delay fuse.

Six UK Registrars Examined

These are not theoretical scenarios. Every figure in this section was pulled from the registrar's own pricing pages, terms documents, or verified through customer reports on 21 April 2026. All prices are inc-VAT unless stated.

123-Reg

123-Reg runs the loudest teaser on the UK market. A .co.uk at £0.79 with promo, £3.99 without. A .com at £0.01 with the small-print caveat "1st yr only with 3 yr term". The .co.uk renewal jumps to £14.39 inc-VAT. The .com renewal lands at around £22.60 inc-VAT. 123-Reg's Trustpilot score currently sits at 1.5 out of 5 from 443 reviews, with the majority of one-star complaints about renewal pricing and billing disputes. The MoneySavingExpert forum thread "Sneaky behaviour from 123reg" documents one customer whose two-year renewal invoice landed at £26.98 after previous renewals around £8.

GoDaddy UK

GoDaddy advertises .co.uk domains from £0.01 for year one. Renewals then settle at £12.99 per year for .co.uk and approximately £18.99 for .com. GoDaddy made WHOIS privacy free in 2022, which was a real improvement, but the basket flow still pre-ticks email, security, and site-builder upsells that most customers never wanted. The auto-renewal is on by default and sits behind a multi-step cancel flow. The US and UK sites use different currency presentations. The UK GBP conversion works out roughly 10 to 15% higher than a direct dollar conversion of the US price.

Fasthosts

Fasthosts runs vouchers rather than a permanent teaser. The current voucher (GETSPRUNG26) puts a .co.uk at £1.00, with renewals at £12.83 ex-VAT (£15.40 inc). The .com goes from £1.00 to £16.92 ex-VAT (£20.30 inc). Voucher redemption is capped at two per customer, so portfolio registration doesn't scale. The voucher price is also the 20% VAT-excluded figure, which many first-time buyers miss when the checkout adds tax.

Fasthosts has form on renewal shock. In October 2017 they imposed price hikes of up to 160% on some TLDs. In their letter to customers they wrote:

"You can renew your domain registrations for up to ten years in the Fasthost control panel. This will secure your renewal at the current prices if done before the 26 October."

Fasthosts, customer letter quoted in The Register, 2 October 2017

At the time, a .clinic domain rose from £24.99 to £64.99 inc-VAT, a 160% renewal hike announced with three weeks notice. The Acorn Domains forum has active 2024 to 2026 threads documenting further Fasthosts price rises across the portfolio. The pattern is consistent.

IONOS UK (formerly 1&1)

IONOS advertises .co.uk and .com from £1 ex-VAT. Renewals settle at £10 ex-VAT (£12 inc) for .co.uk and £15 ex-VAT (£18 inc) for .com. The Better Business Bureau shows 408 complaints in the last three years, 9% of Trustpilot reviews are one-star, and almost all cluster on billing disputes. IONOS has "transfer lock" enabled by default as a "security feature", which means customers who want to leave must first manually disable the lock, then request the auth code. The lock is the kind of detail that looks reasonable until you realise it adds a day or two of friction to every attempted departure.

IONOS has also announced a 2026 price adjustment. Their own help article explains that renewal prices across the portfolio will rise during the year. So the renewals above are a baseline, not a ceiling.

Names.co.uk

Names.co.uk runs the worst renewal rate of the six on this list. A .co.uk is advertised FREE for the first year. The renewal is £22.99 ex-VAT, which is £27.59 inc-VAT. That's a jump of effectively infinite percent from zero, and it's more than seven times the wholesale Nominet registry fee. The .com goes from £1.99 first year to £38.99 ex-VAT (£46.79 inc) on renewal. Their terms and conditions explicitly state "special introductory offers do not apply to renewals".

Names.co.uk also charges a £10 ex-VAT non-refundable admin fee to transfer in a .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, or .us domain. The fee includes a one-year extension, but it's an extra charge most registrars don't levy.

Easyspace

Easyspace is the quiet exception on the UK list. They don't run a loud teaser. A .co.uk is £10.19 ex-VAT (£12.23 inc) on day one, rising to £13.44 ex-VAT (£16.13 inc) on renewal. Fair enough. The sting comes elsewhere. Easyspace charges £8.00 ex-VAT for WHOIS privacy first year, £10.93 ex-VAT on renewal. They publish a £15 ex-VAT (£18 inc) transfer-out fee, which is unusual. Few other registrars publish transfer-out fees at all. And their terms state that renewal prices rise with CPI, currently 6.5% in 2026. So the price you're quoted today is a floor, not a fixed rate.

The GoDaddy Empire

Here's the piece most UK customers miss. When you shop around for "a UK alternative to GoDaddy", you may not be getting one.

In April 2017, GoDaddy completed a $1.79 billion acquisition of Host Europe Group. HEG owned 123-Reg. So did 1&1 (though 1&1 later rebranded to IONOS and was spun back out). As of 2026, GoDaddy continues to harmonise its UK and international brands onto shared infrastructure. 123-Reg and GoDaddy UK have different websites, different logos, different support numbers. They sit inside the same corporate group.

You can verify the ownership in Companies House filings or in GoDaddy's own investor communications. It's not a secret. It's simply not advertised.

The practical implication: if you transferred away from GoDaddy because you'd had enough of the upsells and auto-renewal surprises, and you landed on 123-Reg because it looked British and friendly, you didn't change companies. You changed logos. The same parent group is taking your money, running the same pricing model, on the same eventual infrastructure harmonisation roadmap.

If real separation from that group matters to you, it's worth checking who owns whom before you sign up.

The Hidden Cost Layer

Renewal pricing is only half the drain. The other half is a set of line items that should be included as standard but get sold separately, or bolted onto the basket at checkout, or waiting for you at the exit.

WHOIS Privacy

Domain registration by default publishes your name, address, and contact details in a public database. For .co.uk, Nominet's registrant privacy rules apply automatically. For .com and most gTLDs, the registrar decides whether to include privacy or charge for it. 123-Reg charges around £4.99 per domain per year. Easyspace charges £8.00 ex-VAT. GoDaddy made it free in 2022 after years of selling it as an add-on. 365i includes it where the TLD supports it. You can check what's currently exposed on any domain using our free WHOIS Lookup tool.

Transfer-Out Fees

Easyspace publishes an £18 inc-VAT transfer-out fee. Most UK registrars don't publish one, but some bury the equivalent in "administrative fees" or "release charges" that only surface when you try to leave. Always check the T&Cs before you commit.

Inbound Admin Fees

Names.co.uk charges £10 ex-VAT (£12 inc) to transfer in certain TLDs. The fee includes a one-year extension, but it's still an extra charge not levied by 123-Reg, GoDaddy, Fasthosts, IONOS, Easyspace, or 365i.

Contract Lock-Ins

123-Reg's £0.01 .com price requires a three-year registration term. £9.99 unlocks at two years. One-year registrations pay the full first-year price. You don't renew until year four, which is clever: it hides the year-two invoice under the flat-rate registration you've already paid for, so the eventual renewal shock arrives when you've forgotten the original price.

Pre-Ticked Basket Upsells

The checkout flow at GoDaddy, Network Solutions, and Names.co.uk routinely pre-ticks SSL, email, privacy upgrades, website builders, and "security protection" packages. You have to manually untick each one to avoid them. Jon Henshaw of Coywolf documented the Network Solutions checkout flow in detail and found it reached, in his phrase:

"Even without a hosting plan, if I had accepted their other offers, at a minimum I would be paying well over $200 a year for a .com domain with services that would be absolutely useless to me."

Jon Henshaw, Coywolf, updated January 2026

A .com at Network Solutions renews at $37.99 before add-ons. With their paid privacy ($24/year) and a single default upsell, that's a $60+ annual cost for a database entry that costs Cloudflare's registrar customers $10.46. Same record at Verisign. Wildly different retail markup.

DNS Management

Basic DNS hosting ought to be included with every domain registration. Some registrars limit you to a handful of record types, then charge for "premium DNS" with more records or faster propagation. Costs range from £2 to £10 per domain per year. You can audit your domain's current DNS for free with our DNS Lookup tool.

Email Forwarding

Forwarding info@yourdomain.co.uk to your Gmail or your business mailbox is a basic feature. Some registrars include one or two forwarders, then charge for extras. Some make you buy an email package entirely.

Auto-Renewal Traps

Auto-renewal is sensible in principle; nobody wants to lose a domain by accident. But several registrars turn it on by default at renewal prices higher than manual renewal, and a few charge a "convenience fee" for the privilege of not letting your domain lapse. IONOS reviewers routinely advise disabling auto-renewal immediately on first login.

Three-Year Cost Comparison

Here's a single .co.uk domain over three years at each registrar. All figures are inc-VAT. Where privacy is sold separately, it's shown on the Year 1 row and added into the total.

*IONOS has a 2026 price adjustment already announced; figures shown are pre-adjustment baseline.

Read that table honestly. Over three years, for a single .co.uk with no add-ons, GoDaddy UK (£25.99) and IONOS (£25.20) technically beat 365i (£29.97) by around £4. That gap assumes you successfully decline every pre-ticked upsell, don't get auto-upgraded to a paid privacy tier, manage the renewal dates yourself, and don't accidentally trigger a multi-year lock-in. For a business owner who values their time, the £4 saving is often not worth the vigilance. For a portfolio of domains, the maths swings sharply the other way.

Names.co.uk and Easyspace are straight-up more expensive than 365i on the 3-year total even before you factor in their extras.

The Five-Year Portfolio Math

Most UK businesses hold five to ten domains. The .co.uk, the .com, a .uk for brevity, one or two typo variants, maybe a .org for a charity arm. If you're still deciding between .uk and .co.uk, we've written a full comparison of the two extensions.

Over five years at steady-state (Year 2 onwards pricing), the annual cost of five .co.uk domains at each registrar works out like this:

The five-year math is where the picture becomes unambiguous. For a five-domain portfolio, 365i at £249.75 is £50 cheaper over five years than IONOS (£300), £75 cheaper than GoDaddy (£324.75), £260 cheaper than 123-Reg (£509.50), and £440 cheaper than Names.co.uk (£689.75). And that's before you account for IONOS's already-announced 2026 price rise, Easyspace's CPI-linked creep, or the odds that someone in a five-domain portfolio misses an upsell decline.

What Transparent Pricing Looks Like

At 365i, the price you see is the price you pay, this year and every year after. No introductory discounts. No renewal surprises. No contract tie-ins.

• .co.uk and .uk: £9.99 per year, every year
• .com: £15.49 per year, every year
• .org: £14.99 per year, every year
• .net: £15.99 per year, every year

Every domain includes DNS management, email forwarding, WHOIS privacy where the TLD supports it, and UK support from the same team you spoke to last time. No add-on charges. No premium tiers. No "domain protection" package that should have been included for free.

Our pricing isn't the cheapest first-year deal on the market. It was never going to be. We've priced the domain at what it actually costs us to register, renew, and support over its lifetime. You pay that, once a year, and nothing else.

Transferring Without the Headache

If you're currently locked into inflated renewals, transferring is easier than most people expect. For .co.uk and .uk, the transfer takes around ten minutes once you've changed the IPS tag. For .com, .net, and .org, it takes 5 to 7 days and requires an authorisation code (often called an EPP code) from your current registrar. At 365i, every international transfer includes one year added to your existing registration, so you're not losing any time you've already paid for.

The steps: unlock your domain at your current registrar, request the authorisation code, start the transfer with us, approve the confirmation email. DNS records carry across automatically, so your website and email stay live throughout. If you'd rather not manage it yourself, our free migrations service handles the whole transfer for you, including DNS setup.

If you're running WordPress hosting with us, the DNS propagation happens automatically on the hosting side. No manual configuration needed on your part.

When Cheap Domains Cost Even More

There's a scenario worse than overpaying for renewals: losing a domain entirely. Some registrars have clunky auto-renewal systems. Others send renewal reminders to email addresses you stopped using three years ago. A domain that lapses enters a grace period, then a redemption period with inflated recovery fees (typically £50 to £100 plus VAT), and then gets released to the public. If someone else registers it, recovering it through dispute resolution costs £750 to £5,000 with no guarantee of success.

For a business that's invested years in SEO, losing a domain doesn't just lose the web address. It loses the backlinks, the brand recognition, the AI search citations. You can check any domain's expiry date and registrar in seconds with our free WHOIS Lookup tool. Before you register anything new, we'd also suggest a proper availability check that includes trademark search and domain history, not just whether the name shows as free.

Making the Switch

If you think you're paying more than you should, here's the audit I'd run:

1. List every domain you own. Check every registrar account, not just the one you remember. The second-lost-password one counts too.
2. Note the renewal date and the last renewal price for each domain. Compare with what you originally paid.
3. Add up the extras: privacy, premium DNS, email forwarding, SSL, "protection" packages. Anything that isn't the base registration fee.
4. Check who owns your registrar. If you left GoDaddy for 123-Reg, you didn't actually leave GoDaddy.
5. Get a transfer quote from a fixed-price registrar. Factor in the free year that most transfers include.
6. Transfer before your next renewal, not after. Don't pay another inflated year out of habit.

The process usually saves UK businesses between £40 and £150 per year depending on portfolio size. Over five years, that's real money you could put into hosting, security, or marketing instead.

Frequently Asked Questions