I hate VAT!
As much as I loathe this country at times, I’m so glad that we don’t have Value Added Tax like some other countries, like those in Europe in particular. I have to renew my imeridian.co.uk domain, pretty normal as I have a dozen or so I need to renew on a yearly or semi-yearly basis, but the VAT thing annoys me considerably. Regardless of where you’re from you need to pay it, of course being a non-EU citizen one can file a claim to recover it… in my case it’s totally not worth it of course.
The VAT on a domain purchase is insanely high by ‘our’ standards. I was pissy about having to pay Texas sales tax for my company’s usage of servers… they finally stopped doing that, which is nice, because given the dollar volume it really does add up after a while. Renewing the .co.uk domain is fairly inexpensive, a little over five quid (and that’s for two years). In essense this makes my .co.uk domain the cheapest one I hold. Then VAT hits, and granted it’s only another quid or so… but in the grande scheme I’m paying 25% tax on that domain! That’s as much as is built into the price of alcohol here, excise tax, yum… lol. I’ve not kept up on conversion rates, and oddly enough the dollar is a bit stronger against GBP than it had been when I was ‘aware’ of it, but still, give or take, a pound is worth two dollars — I’m paying $2 of my $8 purchase on tax to Her Majesty (making it about $10 — still cheaper than I’m paying for dot coms anyway, I guess).
It’s a stupid thing to complain about, I don’t need the domain, I can’t do anything to change it, but it’s just one of those annoying little things, that’s all.