On June 28, 2011, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer for Microsoft announced the worldwide availability of its new Microsoft Office 365 for small businesses. ( Press Release )
This new service is replacing the extremely popular Office Live Small Business. Microsoft will deactivate all websites and domain names not switched over to its new service around March 2012. Later this year, Microsoft will provide existing Office Live Small Business customers with additional details about the transition and how to claim a free 3 month promotional offer with Office 365 . If customers do not opt-in to have their accounts transitioned to Microsoft Office 365, their accounts and website will be deleted when the Office Live Small Business service comes to an end.
The biggest complaint with consumers is over the domain name registration that was offered with Office Live Small Business. Once again Microsoft railroads the little man by constantly changing its mind about its domain registration fees. Office Live Small Business was launched in 2006 and offered its customer totally free “lifetime” domain name registration. Then in 2008, Microsoft began charging its customer $15.00 per year for domain names. Now with the introduction of Microsoft Office 365 the domain registration fees will increase by five times.
Microsoft will simply not allow customers to obtain domain names only. Instead each customer must pay a monthly fee of $6.00 for a domain name and website hosting. So if you want to keep a domain name with Microsoft Office 365 it will now cost $72.00 per year.
For customers who are unwilling to pay the new fees they will have to move their domain to another registrar. There are some good free domain companies such as Weebly and Yola . For and easier route, Melbourne IT is the company that handles the Microsoft customers domain name registration so they probably already are the holder of the domain. Switching to Melbourne It will cost around $35.00 per year.