Google Domains is out of beta

https://domains.google/learn/out-of-beta/

by Garbage • 4 years ago

143 215 4 years ago

snek_case• 4 years ago

Does that mean it's cancelled then? ;)

henriquez• 4 years ago

It means your domains have been canceled by an algorithm that determined your account is in violation of Google's terms of service. Hopefully you know a Google engineer or have experience starting Twitter mobs.

dtparr• 4 years ago

'Have experience starting Twitter mobs' is something I'm excited to start seeing on resumés soon. Followed by the discussion over whether that shows key leadership/organization abilities or not, a la the "Wow Raiding Guild Leader" debates of the late 2000's.

sumedh• 4 years ago

Hopefully you know a Google engineer or have experience starting Twitter mobs.

or you can start a Tell HN thread here and hope it blows up and then someone from Google can look at it.

JacobHenner• 4 years ago

Over/under for how long it'll be before it's shut down?

munk-a6• 4 years ago

Considering it just left beta... I'd give it three weeks.

NKosmatos• 4 years ago

They’re also giving a 20% discount for getting domains from them. Keep in mind the Google domains is not available in all countries: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/4639612?hl=en

blindseer• 4 years ago

lol no thanks. Congrats to all the engineers that have worked on this and getting this out the door, but I don't think anyone should use or recommend these Google services, especially when they have been SO inconsistent about the life, longevity and future of their products.

I'm curious to be proven otherwise (and open to criticism of my claims), especially when other services have existed for a while that provide the same functionality, or offer better tie in with alternative products (hosting, pages, workers, lambdas, compute etc).

mmastrac• 4 years ago

I got burned by the apps domain fiasco this year and it was the final nail in the coffin for me. I'm minimizing my reliance on Google now.

vincentmarle2• 4 years ago

apps domain fiasco

What happened?

robbiep2• 4 years ago

What was the apps domain fiasco? I have a .app domain. How worried should I be

larrymyers2• 4 years ago

I believe this is in reference to the legacy Google Apps for your Domain being sunset and the free accounts being moved over to paid accounts on Google Workspaces.

I did the same after having one of the free legacy accounts for about a decade. Migrated over to Fastmail and de-googled myself.

colesantiago• 4 years ago

I don't think anyone should use or recommend these Google services, especially when they have been SO inconsistent about the life, longevity and future of their products.

Can we also say the same thing for GKE and Google Cloud since it is also a Google service?

mdoms• 4 years ago

Yes. Obviously.

ghusto2• 4 years ago

I think so, yes. I remember reading that the future of Google Cloud was to be determined from how well they did this year.

Of course, I'm too lazy to find the source now, but I remember it was here in Hacker News.

dsr_• 4 years ago

Yes.

Google's behavior has convinced me that it's perfectly OK to use their services, as long as you don't rely on them. They may terminate your account at no notice, or announce that a service is shutting down or adopting an unworkable pricing scheme at what would be reasonable notice to an individual, but is not acceptable to a business.

The worst things seem to happen randomly. They happen to a small percentage, perhaps even a small absolute number of their customers -- but they do happen, and there is no recourse.

TrainedMonkey• 4 years ago

I would expect that projects that are rapidly growing and profitable to be relatively safe from Google's we-don't-wanna-do-this-anymore hammer.

forgetfulness• 4 years ago

Google Cloud is a whole different game. If they have shut down any service there I can't remember.

But it's generally a bad idea to rely in any capacity on products marketed to consumers (not B2B) by Google, even Workspace I feel iffy on using, as you can be locked out on everything at any time.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

What I need from Google before using their service for something important is a promise along these lines:

We will keep running this product, with existing functionality substantially unmodified and backwards compatible, for at least 10 years, with pricing not increasing by more than inflation. Or, if we discontinue the product, we will refund 10x the amount you have paid for the product, plus $1000.

tjoff2• 4 years ago

That wouldn't be enough, since you'd still have no recourse if you were banned.

Just don't use it. It isn't hard to not use google.

vinceguidry2• 4 years ago

Now that it's out of beta I should probably move my domain to somewhere more trustworthy.

Tostino• 4 years ago

Could be sunset any day now. It's "legacy".

s0rce• 4 years ago

Thats exactly what I did. Didn't feel like paying $6/mo for gmail. Moved to zoho.

ChuckMcM3• 4 years ago

This is my feeling as well. When I left in 2010 I shared in my exit interview that they should seriously consider embracing actually investing in customer support and leaning into the idea of a "normal margins[1]" kinds of businesses. I speculated that as their advertising margin continued to deteriorate (it was already going down fairly rapidly by then) that without these sorts of 'base load' businesses to carry the operational costs Google would begin to struggle to maintain goodwill with their "free" services and "lavish" workplace perks.

To be fair though I was a lot more pessimistic (which is why I exercised and sold off all of my ISO options and RSU options) so left some money on the table. :-) That said, having gone on to be responsible for operations at Blekko I felt I got a pretty good understanding of the moving pieces associated with the operational costs of providing "web 2.0" services. And that informed a better sense of what level of margin was required. Certainly Amazon does that calculation all the time in pricing their AWS services.

So I read this announcement and wished the people who signed up a good experience that didn't leave them high and dry with no where to turn. I've got high hopes and low expectations.

[1] Search ads generating a billion dollars a quarter in free cash flow that can be run by a company 1/10th the size of Google is how profitable they were at the time.

Permit2• 4 years ago

When I left in 2010 I shared in my exit interview that they should seriously consider embracing actually investing in customer support and leaning into the idea of a "normal margins[1]" kinds of businesses. I speculated that as their advertising margin continued to deteriorate (it was already going down fairly rapidly by then) that without these sorts of 'base load' businesses to carry the operational costs Google would begin to struggle to maintain goodwill with their "free" services and "lavish" workplace perks.

What would it have looked like if you were right about this? What would it look like if you were wrong?

I ask because later you mention that you left some money on the table, but it looks more like you left most of it (85%+) on the table (which is fine and impossible to know ahead of time!). It just seems to me like you made some predictions but every metric points to those predictions being incorrect. Have perks been removed? Has compensation fallen?

dark-star• 4 years ago

I don't see a problem. It's a domain. You can always transfer it somewhere else. It's not like other Google services that hold your data and which you might not be able to get out anymore

starwatch• 4 years ago

The difficulty is that if your account gets suspended, you are unable to do anything - including transfer domains out.

kelnos2• 4 years ago

I think a larger worry would be running afoul of one of Google's capricious, difficult-to-reverse account suspensions. I wouldn't want my domain to end up expiring or becoming otherwise inaccessible because Google's algorithms decided to suspend my account over something innocuous I posted on YouTube or put in Google Drive.

reset-password• 4 years ago

Judging by my own initial thoughts to this and the confirming commentary, I'd say that Google sure has built quite a reputation.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

To be fair they just raised GCP prices this week.

AceJohnny2• 4 years ago

That's the point of brands! I don't understand how they don't understand the damage they've done to themselves in certain circles. Clearly their brand is still valuable to a wider audience.

I've long wondered why companies don't put their more experimental stuff under a different brand ("X by Google"-- no not that X), and promote them to full brand-name once they've gone reliable. Probably they want such experiments to get a boost from being associated with the better brand, and they figure the brand stain of stopping those experiments isn't so bad. But these things build up over time, and each individual product manager probably don't think they're the last straw...

Another thought is that Google comes from an era of much more experimental web. Now the Internet is a much more established market, and platform stability is more a premium. Google is having trouble transitioning from their wilder younger days (of just a few years ago) to a more reliable company.

chaostheory2• 4 years ago

I've long wondered why companies don't put their more experimental stuff under a different brand ("X by Google"-- no not that X), and promote them to full brand-name once they've gone reliable.

They still have most of the Alphabet to do this too. I'm still surprised they didn't already do it years ago.

oh_sigh2• 4 years ago

Query your non-hn friends about Google. I swear there are people who just ctrl-f for Google on hn and post the same "when's it going to be cancelled?"

I would wager that almost all of these posters just happen to have philosophical/political problems with Google too.

humanwhosits• 4 years ago

Just because non-hn crowd isn't aware of it, doesn't mean it isn't a big problem

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

Absolutely, HN's echo chamber is not reflective of normal people. But there is a growing worldwide discontent with FAANG's domineering influence. Google is hammered almost as much as Meta by political/regulatory bodies, and news of that influences how regular people see those companies. The ever-encroaching ads also push people towards competitors. Wait a few years and most users will be looking for alternatives.

stickfigure• 4 years ago

I don't know about your initial thoughts, but I'm wondering how long until Google Domains has its own chat app.

Slade1• 4 years ago

Most users on this site would cut off their own thumbs before saying something about Google that isn't negative; it's just one of the hallmarks of the HN community.

To everyone complaining about the possibility of you google account getting false flagged as TOS violation: do you actively use this reason to avoid all other domain providers like GoDaddy who can terminate your account?

Just make a separate email account that exists solely to manage your domains, and this advice goes for using ANY domain registrar/provider.

efdee• 4 years ago

The point is against putting all your eggs in one basket (especially with said basket's track record).

Sure, GoDaddy could. But then I just lose my domains. If Google does it, I lose all my eggs.

jackvalentine• 4 years ago

To everyone complaining about the possibility of you google account getting false flagged as TOS violation: do you actively use this reason to avoid all other domain providers like GoDaddy who can terminate your account?

My domain provider is only used as a domain provider, everything else - email, hosting etc is elsewhere.

I won’t wake up one morning and find that I’ve been caught in some kind of youtube purge that disables my account.

Doches• 4 years ago

But...why? I mean, I get it -- domain registrars aren't exactly at the top of my list for easy-to-use, reliable, trustworthy partners that I want to build a core part of my business or identity on top of. But I'm damned sure that Google isn't either, after 15+ years of launching or acquiring fantastic tools and swiftly burying them in the Google Graveyard [1]. Say what you want about Namecheap or GoDaddy; at least being a registrar is core to their business and not just a lark.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/

Spivak• 4 years ago

Not Route53? I've pretty much just bought my domains and completely forgotten they existed for years secure that they'll just autorenew.

mminer2373• 4 years ago

Namecheap and Porkbun are actually very easy-to-use, reliable, and trustworthy. I don't think Google is trying to actually be better than other solutions. They're not competitive on price or support. I think their whole plan is to capture people using GCP since they're already there anyway, a la Route53 or GoDaddy. Why add complexity to your system with multiple providers to save a few bucks a year or help with theoretical issues?

sodality22• 4 years ago

Porkbun is amazing. I had a problem with my FIDO2 key (there was no password reset path for you if you still had your FIDO2 key), so I let support know. Less than a day later their engineers got back to me letting me know they had added the feature and deployed it. Everyone there is super nice as well :)

mardifoufs• 4 years ago

Namecheap recently suspended an account because of a tweet thread speculating that a domain was maybe related to abusive behavior. Turns out it wasn't at all. It was so arbitrary even the people who were speculating were surprised by that decision.

Even Google isn't sk arbitrary as to base their ban decisions on random Twitter discussion

https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284

rendall4• 4 years ago

Gandi ftw!

MikeDelta2• 4 years ago

What if Google suddenly blocks your domains because the algo said so, and no way to talk to a human?

I am having difficulties putting trust back into this relationship.

wohfab5• 4 years ago

Do you know GoDaddy?

munk-a6• 4 years ago

Yea - they're an absolutely terrible service that has lost a lot of ground to more relevant comparisons in recent years. Personally I've had no issue with webnames.ca but I assume that's just a Canada thing.

______-_-______• 4 years ago

This is being downvoted but I think it's an interesting question.

If your life was on the line and you had to choose—would you do business with Google, or GoDaddy?

pasiaj• 4 years ago

I started using Google Apps for Domains pretty much the day it came out. 3 of my companies are using Gsuite right now.

But all my domains tied to a Google Account that could get cancelled with no recourse?

No, I think I'll pass.

ProAm3• 4 years ago

I would never trust google with a product that isn't ads for long term use.

a5aAqU4• 4 years ago

Google's "customer support" is so bad, I think it would be a huge mistake to let them control your domains. Dealing with Google's "support" has been a nightmare over and over on many unrelated issues.

They also abandon many projects or hold you hostage in extremely inconvenient ways.[1]

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/gsuite-legacy-free-edition-...

chaostheory2• 4 years ago

People have been complaining about this for years. Besides Google Cloud, have they addressed this or do they keep ignoring it? Does anyone know if Google Cloud has customer service that's equivalent to AWS?

sofixa3• 4 years ago

They have addressed it with Google One.

GCP does have support, but the things I've heard about it from are meh ( still better than Azure or OVH though).

a5aAqU4• 4 years ago

It isn't just Google Cloud. I've had absolutely terrible experiences with several Google support departments. It's often impossible or difficult to resolve the problems.

A domain isn't the kind of thing that you can quickly move somewhere else when things go wrong.

lern_too_spel• 4 years ago

I could be convinced to put up with the lack of customer support if the price is right, but the price is higher than competitors. I'll stick with Cloudflare Registrar.

sofixa3• 4 years ago

Which customer support? I've heard nothing but good things for the actual customer support you pay for ( Google One) as a consumer, and a mixed bag for the not-enterprise GCP support you kinda pay for.

floatinglotus• 4 years ago

I’ve had simple issues with Google Ads that took MONTHS to resolve. Basically their algorithm marked one of my sites as having an image that contained malware. There was nothing I could do about it. That’s right, somehow they think a PNG hosted on AWS Cloudfront had malware. It was absurd, and they kept canceling my ads and never fixing the problem. Their customer service is atrocious.

MrWiffles• 4 years ago

How long until Google kills this one? TAKING ALL BETS!

mkl95• 4 years ago

What do they offer vs some powerful competitor like Namecheap?

ugjka• 4 years ago

24/7 surveillance by AI algorithms for any infringement of TOS

rectang2• 4 years ago

Tying your domain to a Google account — or any centralized megaprovider account — seems fraught with risk. What happens when Google bans your account for some misstep, or even a mistake on Google's part, in some other service? Does the domain just expire because you can't access your account?

At least if you separate your email provider and your domain, if the email provider decides to ban you you can move the domain to a different email provider and maintain continuity. But if the domain registrar bans you, what then?

It seems as though the wisest move is to keep your domains hitched to the most minimal account you can — avoiding centralized service providers such as Google, Amazon, etc.

paxys• 4 years ago

I use Google Domains with an isolated single-purpose Google account. Emails from it are forwarded to my main account. It is easily the best domain registrar out there IMO.

cute_boi• 4 years ago

Have you tried cloudflare? They take 0% profit, and should be better than Google.

rectang2• 4 years ago

I'm skeptical that accounts with megaproviders can effectively be isolated. If one account gets banned, and Google determines that another account is owned by the same person, they may well ban the other account too.

The solution is to register your domain (at least) with a provider that doesn't have so much insight into their users.

Again, this applies not only to Google, but also to Amazon and others. It's really a problem with centralized reputation.

Navarr• 4 years ago

I only use Google Domains for any domains I can't get on CloudFlare. I definitely used to agree that they were the best, but CloudFlare is basically wholesale pricing and have the best DNS management, so I've moved over there for pretty much everything

kd913• 4 years ago

How is it better?

Cloudflare offers everything they do. It's cloudflare's core business and I don't have to deal with Google's tiny attention span.

tjoff2• 4 years ago

Nothing about that setup is normal, feels quite risky... Every login you make, perhaps years apart, will be wildly different from the norm and could easily be flagged.

remram• 4 years ago

A few weeks back I couldn't add/edit/remove domain names that start with a _ and contained an accent. That's when I found out how good their support really is, even for a bug on their side.

Probably best to use a service from a company primarily in the business of offering paid services.

tyingq• 4 years ago

You can add users, identified by their email, that have permission to manage the domain, and the email doesn't have to be a google one.

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/7179397?authuser=1...

Though I don't know what happens if/when one of the users gets banned for some reason.

kelnos2• 4 years ago

Why jump through these extra hoops and deal with the risk? There are tons of reputable domain registrars out there, and I don't see Google Domains as providing some kind of killer feature to make it worth it.

mission_failed2• 4 years ago

Google has history of banning company accounts because they have a contractor who has previously been banned by Google.

pyrale• 4 years ago

I clicked on the link half-expecting that "out of beta" was the jargon to say that Google closed another product.

monktastic1• 4 years ago

Out of the Google beta frying pan and into the Google dumpster fire.

adamors• 4 years ago

This whole thread has tickled my funny bone in ways I didn’t expect.

blakesterz• 4 years ago

"We launched Google Domains in 2015 to be the easiest place to find, buy, and manage a domain."

I'm sure we're all painfully aware of the longevity of many Google services that are considered "in production", there's a long list of things shut down.

BUT is it common for something to be in BETA for 7 years? That seems like a REALLY long time for something to be beta anywhere. Is that common at Google?

zerocrates• 4 years ago

Gmail was famously "beta" for a very long time but I don't know how long exactly. A quick search seems to say 5 years?

andrewguenther• 4 years ago

Pretty common for Google. Gmail was in beta for five years, Google Docs and Calendar I believe were also in beta for similar lengths of time.

joeconway• 4 years ago

If you’re buying a domain, you should consider http://gandi.net/

No affiliation, I just love it and see people in this thread rightly lamenting godaddy, and surprisingly no mention of this gem of a company

a5aAqU4• 4 years ago

Another vote for Gandi. Each domain also comes with 2 email accounts and extra forwarders.

anderspitman5• 4 years ago

Fun fact: Gandi is what AWS uses under the hood when you buy a domain from them.

vincentmarle2• 4 years ago

Gandi still offers services in Russia and Belarus [1] while Namecheap discontinued its services to them [2].

No affiliation with Namecheap, just a happy customer of a company that is not supporting a dictatorial regime.

[1] https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-one...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/1/22956581/russia-ukraine-na...

sodality22• 4 years ago

Providing services to Russians =/= supporting a dictatorial regime. That's very reductionist in my view. Many Russians simply cannot up and leave their country at once, or worse, maybe they are running a website that broadcasts against the Russian government, and Namecheap was one of their only options. I don't think it's as clear cut as "provide them service" but it's more nuanced than that/

bartvk• 4 years ago

Gandi still offers services in Russia

What does that tell you?

shiomiru• 4 years ago

Meaning Namecheap treats those living under dictatorial regimes as second class people. As a citizen of a country headed in a similar direction, this only makes me less inclined to deal with the company.

nullwarp• 4 years ago

Gandi and Porkbun are my two go to registars. I dunno if I'd ever trust google with that TBH

srhngpr2• 4 years ago

I've used Name.com for many years and have been very happy, but recently switched basic shared hosting from another provider to Gandi.net and got exposed to their backend and tools. I am now considering transferring my domains over as they come up for renewal; been very impressed!

pupppet• 4 years ago

I used to host with them but found their interface painfully slow. I see the admin UI has updated since then, maybe they fixed the issues..

Jayschwa• 4 years ago

I've been a Gandi customer since 2014 and my opinion of them is not as favorable, especially since they rolled out a new and buggy dashboard a few years ago. Historical problems I've had:

1. When attempting to update the email address on my domains and accounts in 2018, the form to do so was broken. Support merely linked me to the broken forms and did not comprehend the problem. After re-explaining the problem, they changed my address to something completely wrong, which was alarming because it wasn't an address I controlled. It was eventually resolved, but it was not an experience that inspired confidence.

2. After getting married and having my legal name changed in 2019, there was no easy process for updating Gandi's records. Support walked me through some convoluted and time-consuming process that involved creating a new account and transferring all my domains to it. I recognize this use case isn't as common, but it shouldn't have been as difficult as it was.

3. Because of the combined shenanigans of (1) and (2), I now get five duplicate emails from Gandi for everything. I have notified support of this a few times over the last couple years, but it's always met with, "sorry, it's a known bug", and I guess it will never be fixed.

The only reason I haven't moved off of them at this point is because of inertia and I don't know what other registrar would be better.

acdha• 4 years ago

In an amusing bit of naming similarity, discontinuing “Google Apps for Domains” is why I migrated my last service _off_ of Google. Not going back.

wohfab5• 4 years ago

Oh man, this comments...

The number of products, Google actually "killed" and not just rename, merge into another product, or develop further under a new name, is quite low. And frankly, most people, complaining about product lifetime, probably never even used any of those products at all.

Yes, killedbygoogle.com is fun, but come on...

munk-a6• 4 years ago

Hey - I'm still personally sore over iGoogle. They killed off an absolutely trivial to use RSS reader - I made heavy use of iGoogle while it still existed... and they killed it off to try and save Google+ which they then proceeded to also abandon.

I've definitely felt the burn of Google just randomly killing off a useful thing for some opaque marketing decision that turned out to be extremely ill-advised.

sigmonsays• 4 years ago

but it's true...

MikeDelta2• 4 years ago

I'm not worried about them killing the service, I am worried about them blocking the domains of my business, for some vague reason, and me having no ability to talk to anyone to have it solved.

I am sure it doesn't happen often, but if it does it sure is not going to be to me.

wohfab5• 4 years ago

But that can happen with every domain registrar, can't it?

rurp• 4 years ago

So you're saying all I have to worry about is my account being nuked by an opaque algorithm or the price suddenly being jacked up 20x, like say the Maps API?! Great, sign me up!

rendall4• 4 years ago

The number of products, Google actually "killed"... is quite low.

That is an extraordinary claim, but I'm listening.

https://killedbygoogle.com has 264 listings. Are you saying that if we excluded those that were actually renamed or folded into other products, that it would reduce 264 products to some number that is "quite low"?

wohfab5• 4 years ago

Of the stuff, more than a very specific niche group of people can use and then actually used? Yes.

hashamali• 4 years ago

I've found Google domains to be considerably more expensive than Namecheap. Anyone have a good reason to use it over other registrars?

bradfa• 4 years ago

I used to be a Namecheap customer, I have been using Google Domains for a few years now. Namecheap isn't that much cheaper, maybe a dollar or two per year in my quick look just now. I've found Google Domains really easy to use for my personal domains, including for dynamic DNS. So far it's just worked and I've been happy with it.

Not to say that Namecheap was hard to use, just that Google is pretty easy and the cost difference isn't enough to make me want to consider switching back to Namecheap.

I do not recall why I stopped using Namecheap, it was a while ago.

midnitewarrior• 4 years ago

Google has a product out of beta? Time to shut it down.

jghn• 4 years ago

As someone leery of tying my domain to my Google account, I'm curious what people recommend for this use case. I have a vanity domain currently hosted on a web hosting platform. These days it only gets used to forward the email of a few people to their contemporary email accounts, all gmail based.

As I no longer use the web hosting, storage, or anything else like that I'd love to find something cheaper that can just handle the email forwarding. I like the idea of using Google as for many things I trust them more than a smaller company. But there are too many stories out there of people having no idea what they did wrong and losing all access to their account, with no recourse.

bxparks2• 4 years ago

Cloudflare Domain Registrar. They sell at-cost, so $9.95/year for a .com/.net domain. But don't use your gmail account as the admin account.

For email forwarding, Cloudflare Email Routing looks promising. I'm just about to give it a try. It's currently in beta though.

srhngpr2• 4 years ago

Happy customer of Cloudflare Email Routing - it works exceptionally well. I've paired it with Amazon SES for the occasional time I need to send emails from custom domain.

dazc2• 4 years ago

Agree, cloudflare is ideal for parent's use case although you have to join a waiting list of several weeks for forwarding to be activated (my experience anyways).

sneak2• 4 years ago

Now seems like a good time to point out that Google is fully aware of the linkages between all of your various Google accounts (work, personal 1, personal 2, side project, other domain, etc). Both mobile platforms allow multiple Google account login and if you use one account for work slack and one account for personal gmail then thanks to your phone OS's giant gaping per-app sandbox hole, big daddy G can see all of your credentials are being used on the same device and connect them together as a single user.

This means that any itty bitty TOS violation on one account means you potentially lose all your accounts. Accidentally contradict the WHO (who, for example, said not to wear masks) in a YouTube comment and get your personal video watching account TOSed for posting fake news? Accidentally mention an ITAR/SDN country by name in a comment field in a Google Wallet/Pay transaction? Send a zipped malware sample to a colleague for analysis from your gmail? Say goodbye to your Play Store apps published under your work account, AND your domain names registered under your side project account, AND your Google Voice number, AND all your cloud instances on your GCE account, AND all your YouTube uploads on the video account, AND all your files in Google Drive, et c.

You also lose ability to reset all of your accounts that have your @gmail.com address as the login name, and you lose the ability to even log into any accounts for which you may have used that "Login with Google" button.

Google is not trustworthy. Don't give them your money or data. Register a domain with someone who isn't Google, and point it somewhere that isn't Gmail. There are step-by-step instructions on how to do this on my website.

aluminussoma• 4 years ago

Since complaining on Hacker News is the only way to effectively reach Google employees, I'll say that as a customer I am confused at the offerings of Google Domains and GCP Cloud Domains (via Cloud DNS). I recently registered a domain via Cloud Domains and it shows up under Google Domains.

qmarchi• 4 years ago

They're backed by the same registrar, so it makes sense.

Disc. Googler, not in Domains.

sofixa3• 4 years ago

Since complaining on Hacker News is the only way to effectively reach Google employees,

That's an exaggeration. You can find a bunch of them on Twitter or LinkedIn. Joking aside, B2B services have support, and consumers can pay for it via Google One.

andyfleming• 4 years ago

Semi-related: What alternative is your registrar of choice and why?

sneak2• 4 years ago

Additionally: Are there any good registrars that support U2F/FIDO/WebAuthn (aka hardware tokens) for 2FA? Mine only does TOTP and I would like the security provided by hardware.

mminer2373• 4 years ago

Namecheap does: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

anderspitman5• 4 years ago

https://TakingNames.io obviously. Disclaimer: I run it.

DomainEater247• 4 years ago

I'm curious what goes into running one? Do you need to have stable NameServer's with static IPs that have 100% uptime? Why create one?

imilk2• 4 years ago

porkbun.com is great

mminer2373• 4 years ago

I use Porkbun because they're typically the cheapest, tbh. They have a really nice interface too, but my registrar isn't something I interact with more than once a year typically. As long as they aren't shady like GoDaddy, it doesn't matter that much. There's tons of good options.

alligatorplum• 4 years ago

+1 to Porkbun. I think cloudlfare sells domains at-cost so if you want something cheaper than they might be worth looking into.

But I have been a happy porkbun customer for a few years and they are my go to recommendation to anyone who asks.

imilk2• 4 years ago

Also have quite a few great easter eggs on their site. Always nice when a company has a bit of personality.

PascLeRasc• 4 years ago

Porkbun has been good to me, but I can't get it to work for iCloud custom domains.

Jabbles• 4 years ago

Hopefully incidents like [1] will never happen outside of the beta.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417046

Folcon• 4 years ago

Seeing as they took down the blog post, link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210319023509/https://blog.gitb...

Jason_Protell3• 4 years ago

Unpopular opinion: Google Domains is easy to use, has great customer support, and offers competitive prices.

I've used Google Domains for years and I don't have any complaints.

bxparks2• 4 years ago

I agree, very easy to use. Prices are pretty good, but not the cheapest. But the most important question is: What happens when they ban your account? You will lose your domains.

Congrats to the Google engineers who made this happen. But I transferred my domains out a few months ago because I will never win against the Google AI.

Jason_Protell3• 4 years ago

"What happens when they ban your account?"

Not when, but if. Either way, being banned by Google would be catastrophic.

munk-a6• 4 years ago

Google delivers services that work wonderfully for 95% of customers until the day they arbitrarily decide to shutter the service with no warning. I use a whole bunch of google services these days but they're all the services that have clear exit strategies - unless Google pulls the plug without warning we've got migration strategies to get off them without too much damage.

Jason_Protell3• 4 years ago

I know that Google is notorious for shuttering services, but I can't imagine they would shutdown Google Domains without giving customers an opportunity to transfer domain ownership to another registrar.

jyu• 4 years ago

I was using a Google Cloud database last year on a production system. It shut off without any emails or notifications or messages or phone calls. I won't be fooled a second time.

anderspitman5• 4 years ago

Domains are incredibly cheap for what you get, but they're harder to use than they need to be. Someone shouldn't have to understand DNS records, IP addresses, ports, NAT, TLS certs, VPSes, the command line, etc in order to securely connect their domain to an app like Plex/Jellyfin/Nextcloud running on their own hardware.

You should be able to install a Nextcloud app on an old unused Android phone, go through a quick OAuth flow to connect it to a subdomain, plug the phone into power in a corner and be done with it.

Cloudflare is currently the closest to this ideal with their domains + Cloudflare Tunnel, but cloudflared is still CLI-only and all their products are built for developers. Plus they'll never offer end-to-end encryption.

I also maintain a list of more DIY tunneling services[0], but again CLI knowledge is currently a requirement. My main side project at the moment is seeing how far I can lower the barrier of entry.

[0] https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

3np• 4 years ago

DNS records, IP addresses, ports, NAT, TLS certs

These and then some are things you will not have to care about if you instead expose it as a Tor hidden service - worth considering for the self-hoster.

May not be ideal for high-bitrate movie streaming but for many other use-cases like Nextcloud it's great and easy to set up.

anderspitman5• 4 years ago

Does it really work well for Nextcloud? Seems like Nextcloud would be both bandwidth and latency sensitive, both of which are problematic over Tor.

Also, in order to use a hidden service the client device needs to be running Tor, right? Sorry I've never really used it myself.

hedgehog• 4 years ago

My recent experience with Domains was trying to delete a Google Workspace account that used to have an attached domain. It took several weeks of back and forth with their support due to problems on their end, with them asking me various things like to help them debug the admin console front end, to pay them to re-register the domain so they could cancel the account, etc, etc. Lots of pass the buck "oh that is a different department" but no follow-through on connecting me to the right one. It was bizarre.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

Just more things to tie to Google and thus risk losing when Google flippantly locks or closes your account.

newhouseb• 4 years ago

PSA: If you use Google Domains to buy a domain for your company DO NOT USE IT TO ALSO BUY GOOGLE APPS (or whatever it's called this month).

If you ever want to change your company's primary domain... you can't. We're stuck now with a legacy domain (configured with an alias so it's invisible to others) that we can't move off of without basically burning the whole thing down and starting fresh. It reeks of technical debt and poor engineering design that buying Google Apps through a reseller (where that reseller is _also_ Google) totally ties your hands for properly managing your deployment.

cryptozeus• 4 years ago

have bought few domains with them, seems pretty basic but works

albertopv• 4 years ago

Here only to read all (deserved) negative comments on Google products management. I wasn't expecting less.

aaronbrethorst• 4 years ago

Ooh! Another Google product I will never use because they’ll get bored of it in 2 years and leave me stranded!

baggy_trough• 4 years ago

Any domain consigned to the tender mercies of Google is as good as lost.

sharno• 4 years ago

I've started using Cloudflare's domains and getting away from Google. Their reputation of shutting down services and accounts is well established

mmcgaha• 4 years ago

Interesting when I clicked the link they offered a 20% discount. Two minutes later I get an email offering a 30% discount.

I used Network Solutions before moving to Google Domains and I will take no customer support over bad customer support any day. With network solutions, domains were over priced. To get the real price, you had to call customer service and ask for a lower price.

cletus• 4 years ago

Until Google comes out and segregates actual and false positive ToS violations such that it doesn't kill your entire Google account, I can't in good conscience use any additional Google services.

This began TEN YEARS AGO when Google+ "real name" violations disabled your entire Google account. Gmail, Google Photos, AdWords, everything. This is completely unacceptable and has never been addressed or rectified.

If you use Gmail then your Google account is simply too large of a single point of failure to risk further exposure.

What happens when a false positive disables my account? Can I still transfer my domains out? I'm not convinced that's true so thanks but no thanks.

account-5• 4 years ago

I feel sorry for anyone who actually use(s|d) this. Google have proven time and time again their services cannot be trusted. Why anyone would actually use this is beyond me.

I'm sure there will be some play at vendor lock-in and definitely holding your data to ransome; but worse is the uncertainty this service will exist for any meaningful length of time. How long before you're mysteriously locked out with no way to log back in and no one to contact to sort it out?

rinze• 4 years ago

All other domain registrars out there have probably started thinking about their "transfer back your domains from Google Domains" for when whoever at Google loses interest in this and shuts down.

arunharidas• 4 years ago

no thanks! If you go against the popular narratives, you'll be banned from using your domains.

maartn• 4 years ago

Right around the moment Google Analytics is going to be prohibited in the EU...

sdfhbdf• 4 years ago

Could you elaborate?

noneeeed• 4 years ago

Given Google's habit of having some "AI" randomly kill someone's account, combined with a total lack of customer service, I can't think of a company I would trust less with my domains. It still makes me nervous that my email is hosted with them, but that's something I'll probably get sorted soon.

tommiegannert• 4 years ago

Google Domains is available to anyone whose billing address is in one of our supported countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, Philippines, Poland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Sweden. We’re working hard to expand our availability.

https://domains.google/support/

willmadden• 4 years ago

I’ll take “Things I’ll never use for $500, Alex.”

toothpicked• 4 years ago

Since gmail came out of beta, it is worst. I never had any issues with it when it was in beta.

pedalpete• 4 years ago

Aside from all the very good reasons people are giving for not using google, the question I'm asking is

What is google doing in the domain space that is different from any other provider? What's their unique USP?

Anyone technical can use another provider and connect to Google services if they'd like (or other service).

Anyone non-technical that is using SquareSpace (Canva now has a website builder as well - but no domain sign-up yet), can get a domain through SquareSpace.

So, the question is, who is this for?

Crash0v3rid3• 4 years ago

So, the question is, who is this for?

For people who want a domain, it's really that simple.

Who cares if there are other providers in this space, consumers can pick and choose the service providers they prefer.

mushyhammer• 4 years ago

If I were you I would never do this, mostly because there’s already an insane amount of competition so it’s really, really not worth giving yet more power over your sanity to Google.

Someone marks your business @domain emails as spam, now your account is locked. Why would you put yourself in this situation? Just, don’t.

Corrado• 4 years ago

I wanted a ".dev" domain for a project a few years ago. At the time, Google was the only one offering that TLD. However, it looks like you can get ".dev" domains anywhere. Was this change part of Google Domains leaving beta? Or is it completely unrelated?

gverrilla• 4 years ago

Never ever.

devoutsalsa• 4 years ago

Can you imagine losing your domain name because a Google bot locked your account? No thanks.

buro9• 4 years ago

Even beyond the risk to the account (a non-zero risk), Google has other issues. Only this week I've had an order for some hardware cancelled by them for "sales terms" with no way to identify what sales terms I was in breach of even though I could contact a support person and was spending hundreds of $$$. It's not a huge loss for me to not be able to purchase some Nest equipment as there are a lot of competitors I can purchase equivalents from, but the experience underlines that Google support is terrible - support people are hard to contact and have no agency/autonomy/authority to solve anything.

The T&S risk is real enough that I wouldn't use Google Domains. But that they can't even support products that they 100% own and sell and which are very high margin (compared to domain names) really doesn't inspire confidence.

oxfordmale• 4 years ago

Is this yet another service to be added to Google's graveyard in a few years time?

Domain registration is not Google's core business and I can't see it being massively profitable(double digits), so it will likely face the chop soon.

I am sure they will offer a way to transfer your domains, however, why go through this pain when the outcome is inevitable.

My rule of thumb is to only buy a service of a company if it is their core business and customer retention actually matters to them. If Google Domains gets shut down none of the share holders will suddenly panic, it probably won't even register. As a result customer retention and satisfaction will not be very high on the priority list.

FerretFred• 4 years ago

Is this yet another service to be added to Google's graveyard in a few years time?

came here to say this :/

ck2• 4 years ago

Looking how much of a mess they made ending the free Gsuite accounts with the multi-users, mail routing etc. you'd be a fool to trust Google products for any free feature.

They even promised the free gsuite accounts would be free forever in writing and they aren't, so imagine relying on any feature of Google domains.

I'm wondering how long until certain aspects of gmail aren't free anymore.

K5EiS• 4 years ago

How long until this service is shut down?

daveed• 4 years ago

It looks like a lot of people here are unhappy with this. I'll add a voice as someone who recently used Google Domains and had a pretty good experience.

DoItToMe812• 4 years ago

With my experiences with Google in the past, I would never trust my domains with them. Not my personal ones, and especially not my business ones. I also don't trust their customer support.

windex• 4 years ago

Launch a service, gather data, shutdown the service. Nope. Not trying. I am now scared about the years of stuff I have on gmail.

Google Domains is out of beta

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