Registrar email plans can be tempting to have an "all-in-one" solution at the same place with your domain. Often, registrar emails are usually the weakest product they sell offering small storage, clunky webmail and poor spam filtering compared to other email providers. Uncheck this box on purchase and worry about your email plan after so you can compare plans and features while you're not under price pressure to purchase your domain. Learn more about business email options.
The pattern behind all of these is that extras are added to your cart by default and registrars make it your responsibility to untick them before purchase. Often the price you saw at the start is not the price at payment. Read the cart line by line before you pay so you can confidently untick the boxes you don't need. Still unsure? Contact us to register the domain for you and skip the cart entirely so we manage the process and ongoing renewals for you and avoid the traps of buying features you don't need.
There is no "official" place to buy a .au domain. auDA, the .au administrator, accredits many competing registrars, and every one of them sells you the identical product: the same domain, from the same registry. The only real differences are price, service and what gets pushed into your cart.
Some registrars trade on official-sounding names and charge accordingly. One example we checked in September 2026: the registrar at domainregistration.com.au, an accredited and long-established Australian company, lists .com.au registration at $139.70 for a compulsory two-year term, quoted before GST. That works out to roughly $70 a year plus GST, around three times what VentraIP or GoDaddy charge in the table above, for exactly the same domain. Nothing about it is illegitimate. It is simply a price no informed buyer would pay, wrapped in a very reassuring domain name.
Heritage names play the same game. When we last checked its public pricing in April 2025, Melbourne IT, one of the oldest names in Australian domains and now part of the same Webcentral family, listed .com.au registration at $88 a year. Age and brand recognition are not a discount. If anything, they are what lets a registrar charge four times the market to customers who signed up in 2004 and never looked again. If your domain has been sitting with the same provider for a decade, pull up your last renewal invoice and compare it with the table above.
The defence is simple: never judge a registrar by how official its name sounds. Check any registrar against auDA’s accredited registrar list and compare its RENEWAL price with the table above before you pay.
Related and nastier: unsolicited "domain renewal notices" that arrive by post or email from companies you have never dealt with. Some are lookalike operators inviting you to transfer to them at a premium; some are outright fakes. A real renewal only ever comes from the registrar you actually bought from, and if you are unsure, log in to your registrar account directly rather than clicking anything in the notice. Scamwatch tracks these schemes, and after 15 years and 2,000+ client sites we can tell you they land in Australian inboxes every week. Managed clients can simply forward anything suspicious to us.
They are often confused, partly because their pricing pages look so alike, but they are different companies. WebCentral grew out of Melbourne IT, one of the original .au registrars, and is Australian. Crazy Domains was founded in Australia but is now owned by Singapore-registered Dreamscape Networks and managed by the US web giant Newfold Digital. Neither publishes a plain .com.au renewal price: WebCentral shows a first-year promo against a $29.95 "was" price, and Crazy Domains only shows renewal pricing once you are logged in.
On reviews, WebCentral rates 4.8 out of 5 on ProductReview from over 3,000 reviews, while Crazy Domains sits at 3.3 from around 1,900. In January 2024 the owner of Crazy Domains also paid $56,340 in ACCC penalties over misleading claims about "free" products added at checkout and about its Domain Privacy product (ACCC media release).
If you are choosing between the two, WebCentral. If you would rather not think about it at all, that is what we are for.
Price matters less than three practical things:
Contact our Sydney web design team for a custom quote. No obligation. No pressure. Just honest advice about whether we're a good fit for your business.
Somewhere between $20 - $50 + GST per year for a .com.au once the sign-up discounts wear off. Anything far above that range is very expensive and not needed.
.com.au requires an ABN and signals an Australian business to both Google and customers. .com is worldwide. Australian businesses should hold the .com.au first and take the .com for branding security against future impersonators.
Yes, and it is easier than registrars make it look. You need the transfer key (EPP code) from your current registrar and importantly, the current registrar needs to approve the transfer from their site. Learn more with our domain transfer guide, or ask us to assist.
Almost never. auDA rules already limit what is published for .com.au registrants, and standard DNS is fine for a small business website.
Not likely for a com.au, sometimes they can come bundled but if you see a cheap or "free" domain, make sure you check the ongoing renewal costs for the real price. It's often cheaper to buy it outright from a legitimate registrar.
Your website and email will stop working as it will be disconnected from the registrar. There is usually a short period in which you can still renew it as normal but after this grace period, the domain can be bought by anyone, including competitors and squatters. You may have to pay a redemption fee to get it back in addition to the domain cost. This is why we run renewal reminders for managed clients.
Run a WHOIS lookup on your own domain: auDA’s site has an official .au WHOIS tool and any registrar’s WHOIS page works for .com. The result names the registrar of record. If the answer surprises you, that is worth five minutes, because it usually means a past developer or a reseller is in the chain. Managed clients can just ask us; we keep this on file.
They can manage it, but the registrant must be you. The registrant is the legal holder, and a domain registered in a developer’s name is a business asset you do not own. We manage domains for hundreds of clients and every one is registered in the client’s name. If a past provider holds yours, our domain transfer service fixes it.
Domains are typically registered for one or two years, and your registrar emails renewal notices to the address on the account as expiry approaches. Two rules keep you safe: renewal notices only ever come from the registrar you actually bought from (anything else is the renewal letter trap covered above), and the contact email on the domain must be one you still read. Domains die of expired credit cards and abandoned inboxes far more often than anything technical.
Because the product is identical and the margin is not. Every accredited registrar pays the registry the same wholesale rate, around $9 to $10 a year including GST for a .com.au. One registrar adds a few dollars and makes it up on volume; another adds sixty and makes it up on customers who never compare. The domain you get is exactly the same either way, which is why this page compares renewal prices and nothing else.