Comment only a 1st year fix (Score 1) 242
The providers that you mentioned will sell you a cheap domain name, but only for the first year. Then they want to jack up the price if you want to keep it. If you're only using the name yourself then I guess just changing domains every year might be acceptable, but in my case I have a number of friends who all connect through my Teamspeak server for gaming and it is disruptive to try to get all of them to change their settings (some are extremely non-technical and don't respond to instructions to change an address well).
Looks like I'll try switching to an alternative free provider, at least until Dyndns buys them out or convinces them to start charging too.