The company says that the price hikes are allowed under its agreement with ICANN (icann.org), which stipulates that Verisign can raise registration fees for .com domain in four of the six years between 2006 and 2012.

The .com domain will now be priced at $6.86, while a .net domain will cost $4.23. These fees are part of the overall cost to register a domain, says the company. And while different domain registrars have varying fee structures, they will most likely pass along these fee increases directly to domain buyers.

VeriSign says the rise in fees can be attributed to increasing Internet traffic, the explosion of consumer-driven Internet services and the need to further reinforce the TLD's infrastructure against "increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks."

The company plans to increase the capacity of its overall Internet infrastructure tenfold by 2010, bringing bandwidth at major operation centers around the globe to over 200Gbps while expanding its DNS capacity from the ability to handle 400 billion queries a day to over four trillion queries a day.

Earlier this month, VeriSign announced it will integrate RatePoint's online reputation management and customer feedback platform as a value-added offering for customers to purchase as part of VeriSign's retail SSL certificate.