VeriSign [ http://www.verisign.com ]   has announced its almost-annual price increases for .com and .net domain names.

The wholesale cost from VeriSign for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 on January 15, 2012 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.

The VeriSign fee doesn’t include ICANN’s 18 cent fee per year. So the wholesale cost of a .com domain name will be $8.03 and a .net will be $5.29.

VeriSign just renewed its contract with ICANN to run .net. It allows VeriSign to continue jacking up .net prices 10% a year. ICANN didn’t provide an explanation for this arbitrary increase.

VeriSign’s press release about the price increase mentions the increasing load of DNS queries the company handle.

This increase has come about after an agreement was signed with ICANN, the organisation responsible for managing domain names on the internet. Of course, the price increases will be passed down to the clients of registration offices.

To justify this increase, Verisign indicates that they have been forced to increase their security due to multiple distributed denial of services attacks (DDoS). The company states that they recorded more than 57 billion domain lookup requests on their servers each day in the first quarter of 2011. At this time, there are 96 million .com web sites and 14 million .net websites present in the world.