Integration with Google cloud resources (a la AWS Route 53), 10 million lookups/year free, pricing appears off the bat to be $12/year, free private registration.
And support! "With Google Domains, you get phone and email support (M-F, 9am to 9pm EST)."
If they do decide to staff the support for this service, instead of their usual "bot or FAQ/help-page only" annoyance... how long until all their OTHER services figure out that this is how you contact a human at Google? Youtube, in particular, comes to mind.
Will be interesting to see how this fares - perhaps Google can use positive results from here to improve their customer support image (despite Larry Page's voiced opinions saying Google call centers "are ridiculous").
Google has datacenters in low energy cost locations (Oregon, Iowa, etc). Why not source low-cost, quality call center staff from those locations as well ("in sourcing")?
This idea is being used by several registrars, they domain registration/renewal priced at a premium price and bundle in other things which makes it look like its worth it. Not that Google would be bad but the price $12 is technically the same as everywhere.
Example at Namecheap :
New Registration : Domain Price + Whois guard is FREE for 1 year ( With a coupon code your domain cost is reduce by $1-$2 )[1]
Transfer : Its treated as a new registration too, so the same applies. And usually transfer has some coupon or discount attached.[1]
Renewal : Domain costs + Whois guard is $2.88 [2] ( With coupon code your domain cost is reduced by $1-$2. So effectively its comes to be at the same price.
Now talking about Google, the only awesome thing I can see it provides with $12 is we get to use their Apps for Business which includes their robust email service [3] of course. This recently became paid-only service.[4] Now its not unlimited accounts but 100 alias is enough if you have multiple domains and just need one account to handle everything.
and speed of site will never be an issue (host wise)... and indexing out the gate. wish i would have waited to buy that domain i just had to have saturday night :/
google has attempted domain names previously, and it has previously sucked, very badly,
1. you could never get to a customer support, no phone number, and emails were all auto responses sending you to faq
2. there was no dedicated dashboard for domain management, billing etc
this is a revamp and product consolidation and it is super late to the game, hopefully the transition for current users will be easy
The reason it was unsupported was because they were just fronting for godaddy and enom and expected that you'd get support for the domains from those registrars directly.
"No additional cost for private registration" is badly required in the industry, and glad to see Google take the lead.
Also, there should be an option to 301 redirect your blogspot blog to a domain held by Google. Lots of bloggers have outgrown their .blogspot.com blogs.
I'm not sure if this is a positive or negative comment, but I'll explain why they do that.
There are two main ways to mask domain name whois information: 1) go through a proxy service, i.e., a company buys the domain under their name and gives you control, or 2) effectively use another entity's contact information with the exception of name, which is what Gandi does.
a) is rather risky to both parties. You do not own the domain, but another entity does. If you somehow lose the domain name or the entity holding the name goes under, you won't be able to get it back because it technically never belonged to you. The holder is also now legally responsible for the domain name.
b) is a much safer route with the constraint that your name must be attached to the domain name. This makes it so you always remain responsible for and the registrant of the domain name. It is yours.
Well, the subtlety is that only applies to domain registered for "personal", not "business", use.
Gandi support used to be the best. Now that domain isn't they core and only business, support quality is falling. Fast.
I have an old account. And some point they migrated my old account. And now my domain is flagged as a business type domain, which it isn't. It is lock as they changed it themselves. When I've contacted them, they did not want to fix it. They messed up, denies it and won't fix it. So, for me, not so great customer support ... Anyway, I'm moving away, domain by domain.
Hello from Gandi.
The scenario you're describing sounds like a result of a change we made in 2006 when we added a new domain contact type. If so, we _can_ do something about it. Either way, we're not in the habit of messing up and refusing to fix it. If you have a ticket number from your previous exchange, we could go from there, or you can email me directly (aj@).
Not on your life. Domains simply aren't complicated or expensive enough to think twice about feeding Google's consolidation and analytics game. Perhaps harsh, but come on. Domains.
They have had registrar-level access for quite some time already, presumably using that to "connect the dots" of domain ownership. So this just takes it to the next level... now they can see 'inside' private domain registrations? What else could they do with this that they can't already do? Hmm.
I'm excited. Not so much by the fact that Google now provides this service (which I may or may not use) but because this is going to put a tremendous amount of pressure on other ISP's, and competition is badly needed in this field.
If I had to guess, it offers a service similar to what Route 53 and DNSimple offer for cloud-hosted apps: A CNAME-like functionality but that functions at the root level record.
I would far rather deal with Google than GoDaddy or some of the other domain registrants I've dealt with. I realize some people have had poor customer service experiences with Google, but mine have always been OK. Obviously I speak as a consumer, if I were running a business depending on Google services my support needs would be more urgent and my expectations higher.
Domain name registrar like Hover, NameCheap, NameBright and NameSilo still do not yet support DNSSEC (nor have an ETA for it!). Here is a list of DNSSEC supporting registrars: https://www.icann.org/en/news/in-focus/dnssec/deployment
Based on pricing ($9.99/.com) and a growing irritation with GoDaddy, I finally moved my domains to Dynadot:
Take a look at the RFCs coming out recently. DANE, in particular.
DNSSEC is an important trust root that can be used to pin certificates in addition to PKIX (CAs), or, in some practical cases (such as mailservers), instead of them.
FWIW, I left Namecheap for GKG.net for the sole reason that Namecheap didn't support DNSSEC. And yes, I have deployed DNSSEC and DANE. On https for emailprivacytester.com, and on https, smtp, imap and xmpp for grepular.com.
I'm guessing for DNSSEC, the usage is probably low and for DANE it's probably almost non-existant.
FWIW, I use the Firefox addon "DNSSEC Validator" (also does DANE) - https://www.dnssec-validator.cz/ - So if somebody managed to MITM my connection and insert a different, but still trusted, cert in the way, I'd notice.
DNSSEC/DANE would probably see a lot more adoption if one or more of the main browsers did this sort of validation by default.
That registrar list is way out of date. Sadly, none of the entities involved nor historical list maintainers have made it easy to find an updated one, but if they did, Joker would be on it.
It was one of the few lists I found. Although the url redirects to an url containing 'deployment-2012-02-25-en' the page actually states 'Last updated: 27 May 2014', so it's not so out of date.
If your registrar currently accepts DS records, please
send an email with subject "DNSSEC REGISTRAR UPDATE"
and body containing company name, country location, URL,
what TLDs you accept DS records for, whether your Web
interface supports DS records, whether you provide
DNSSEC signing services to dnssec@icann.org and the
Security team will add your registrar to this DNSSEC
page.
I had this experience when trying to verify my Google Wallet account and my Google Music membership due to their failures with Google Wallet. I had no way to pay for Google services for over a year. I also had problems upgrading my Google Drive disk space at some point, and it was again a matter of throwing an email into a hole and waiting for the problem to be fixed with very little feedback.
Would you rather deal with Google as opposed to Namecheap? A great company with superb support that specializes in nothing but domain names and dedicated hosting?
Or a badly seated network cable that managed to vibrate loose. Had that one happen to me, and there's absolutely nothing that can fix it other than feet on the ground.
Yes, when they type the ticket in it pages someone who can action it. They don't wait till 9am next morning to service the ticket. They get it done as humanly as possible.
EDIT: its not just for total system outages, it can be things which are localised to your cluster, or whatever - who knows. This is why these services are offered. To give those who need the piece of mind that if shit goes wrong, the company you're paying will deal with immediately.
If Google is positive that their services will be uninterrupted or error prone between 9pm and 9am then they should advertise so. Things happen. Things do go wrong, they should think about expanding their support teams in other international offices to have a good coverage for the world clock.
Yes, when they type the ticket in it pages someone who can action it. They don't wait till 9am next morning to service the ticket. They get it done as humanly as possible.
I'm not sure where you get that idea from but companies the size of google don't page engineers because of customer tickets, regardless of whether they're opened by a callcenter agent or e-mail.
Their callcenters process thousands of calls per hour. Yours is, quite literally, a drop in the bucket.
They have monitoring in place where one of the metrics is is elevated support inquiries. However, you only appear in that bucket after someone, and usually not the callcenter agent, has triaged your ticket.
> I'm not sure where you get that idea from but companies the size of google don't page engineers because of customer tickets, regardless of whether they're opened by a callcenter agent or e-mail.
Maybe not for a $12 domain registration but Amazon does in some cases.
I'm also pretty sure that is what Google's Cloud Platform Platinum offers if you are willing to pay enough. [This part is just a guess]
The people at the business may only work during business hours, but people purchase items and interact with websites 24/7 meaning that if you get a text saying your domain is down at 03:00, then by 03:02 you want to be in touch with someone figuring out why.
It'd be awesome if there was an automation service for this. I'm sure tons of people would gladly pay to say "fuck waking up, it's already being handled."
Sweet - I had no idea. Thanks. It just seemed like that was a fairly common opinion being voiced that they were tired of getting woken up at 3 am haha.
While that implies Domains support will be offered in US business hours only, most Google enterprise products offer 9-5 support worldwide, which effectively translates to 24/6. (Yes, 6, there's still a gap between Friday 5 PM PST and Monday morning in Asia.)
When dealing with Google Apps, if they are not satisfied that my issue is perfectly resolved in a very short period of time, they hunted me down until I confirmed that everything was working honkey dorey. That includes cold-calling me to ensure everything is good. Their support is top notch for paid products.
Yup, +1. I had a few questions during an Exchange to Google Apps migration last week, and I [voice] called support - they took my call, called back, followed up by email and voice and allowed me to re-open the case as required with related questions; all with the same support representative. Top notch, happy to be paying.
I had a dissimilar experience. I upgraded our account to the Apps for Business trial. Although it was neat, I didn't really need it - so when the trial ended, I decided to revert to my free account.
It turns out they don't let you do that. "Free trial" means 30 days free, then it's Apps for Business or no Apps at all.
I felt (and, to some extent, still feel) extorted by that. The customer service experience was extremely dissatisfying. So, will I eventually use Google Domains? Probably. I just won't depend on it without a failsafe - which is what I should have done since the beginning.
There is no free apps account and they make that pretty clear I don't see how you have a complaint to stand on, just about any service with a free trial means paid after the trial period is up.
They had a free tier for several years and people who had it are grandfathered in. Apparently you don't retain the grandfathered status if you want to try out the paid features though.
I am having that experience right now with Google Apps Mobile Device Management. I turned it on to do some testing, didn't realise that it 'autoenrolled' phones with existing accounts on that domain (There is a separate section for signing up phones that it looked like you had to go through). Now I've unticked every 'enable' box and tried to purge MDM from everywhere I can find it, but it still has the affected phones demanding to be signed up. I've lodged a support ticket, because there's a 'turn on' option, but doesn't seem to be a 'turn off'...
Similarly, if you have Apps for Business like we do, you don't get to see the history of your support cases - that's in the Google Enterprise Support Centre, which becomes available when your user count reaches 100. They did enable it when I asked for it, but it's just very odd that you can have a paid service like this, yet not see your case history unless you're 'big enough'. I don't understand why the case history triggers on '100 users' rather than 'is paying us money'.
Overall GApps is nice... but there are a lot of rough edges and corner cases.
Exactly my thoughts. It may be acceptable-ish for a personal home page, but using this for anything that's remotely useful and/or has more than one user, no way in hell.
Already tried that with email (Google Apps for Business), and the punishment was swift like the new Apple programming language.
Some Google Apps users got banned (allegedly for TOU violation, but no one cared to even tell wtf was wrong), a number of emails weren't delivered, no support whatsoever was provided for a paid product — long story short, it was pretty bad.
Are you being sarcastic? Although it might not be well-known, Google actually does have excellent customer service. Google Places, Google AdWords and Google Analytics all have excellent customer support. My only complaint is that Google Analytics isn't as clearly listed if you're not an AdWords user.
I could have sworn it was possible to register domains directly through Google, but I guess it could have been a cleverly disguised front-end to another registrar.
> It most certainly won't be a representative sample.
They don't want a representative sample, and they say that (and how they want it to be non-representative) right on the page. So, why is that even an objection?
gmail completely upset the mail game, offering a product that was so outrageous that most took it as an April fools joke.
This...looks like a registrar + nameservers, and doesn't seem to really differentiate itself in any compelling way at all. Name serving + registration anywhere else, or at two separate places, isn't that different in price from the price they show in their screenshot.
Invite only for something like this is incredibly lame. I mean, whoever thought they'd pull that tactic again needs to seriously be corralled. It is amateur hour.
Serious question: What happens in three years when Google decides to "sunset" this service like Wave, Labs, Reader, Buzz, Code Search, Knol, etc? Their target audience doesn't know how to work with registrars, which puts them in the worst possible situation when Google Domains is dropped. Will they help their users transition to other registrars?
Has Google ever "sunset" a product they actually charge money for? That might help us understand what they'd do in this case. But I don't think there's a lot of precedent there.
Google closing down the radio & tv ads business (c. 2009) was a function more of an acquisition that went badly and an industry that was loathe to change - so imho don't think there's a great corollary here.
It's been years since I worked in the domain name space, but as I recall vaguely, part of the registrar accreditation agreement is that you have provisions to transition your customer domain names to another registrar in the event you stop being a registrar, voluntarily or involuntarily.
The way this has worked in the past (again iirc) with other companies is that the registrar wholesale migrated their names to another provider who purchased them at a discount.
I've never been through the process personally, but given the quantity of registrars that are going into and out of business from time to time, I'm sure it's a process that's been pretty well standardized.
I had to move my domains from an unresponsive/dead registrar (NameTerrific). I emailed Tucows (the parent?) and they sent me a domain migration code for the domain. It was pretty simple, luckily.
I had to do the same thing from NameTerrific but got my migration code from the top-level.
The worst part is that I was "in contact" with the owner via Twitter, and he assured me that he would totally look into things at some point in the near future..
> Serious question: What happens in three years when Google decides to "sunset" this service like Wave, Labs, Reader, Buzz, Code Search, Knol, etc?
Any company can close a service (or go out of business and close all its service), and if a service fails to make a profit, eventually the company will almost certainly do so, one way or the other.
The only reason Google has a high count of such services is because Google went through a period where it started lots of services (and, also, because its remixed and rebranded a lot of services, so that more service names have gotten retired than actual services.) There's no strong reason to think that the actual risk -- particularly with paid services -- is particularly high with Google.
Not sure what the terms for Domains are, but for App Engine they will give you at least one year, IIRC. They introduced the policy when they started charging for the platform.
Yeah, there is no way I'd trust Google with something as important as domains.
At this point they create and destroy products on a whim. They have 900 products so who cares if a million users get pissed.
Like Google Play Music All Access or any number of modern Google Things, this is something they're doing because "what if we don't", not because they have anything special to provide.
237 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadIntegration with Google cloud resources (a la AWS Route 53), 10 million lookups/year free, pricing appears off the bat to be $12/year, free private registration.
And support! "With Google Domains, you get phone and email support (M-F, 9am to 9pm EST)."
This looks like a sensational service.
Curious the sign up for an invitation only asked if you've bought a domain before.
Example at Namecheap :
New Registration : Domain Price + Whois guard is FREE for 1 year ( With a coupon code your domain cost is reduce by $1-$2 )[1]
Transfer : Its treated as a new registration too, so the same applies. And usually transfer has some coupon or discount attached.[1]
Renewal : Domain costs + Whois guard is $2.88 [2] ( With coupon code your domain cost is reduced by $1-$2. So effectively its comes to be at the same price.
Now talking about Google, the only awesome thing I can see it provides with $12 is we get to use their Apps for Business which includes their robust email service [3] of course. This recently became paid-only service.[4] Now its not unlimited accounts but 100 alias is enough if you have multiple domains and just need one account to handle everything.
1. https://www.namecheap.com/promos/coupons.aspx
2. https://www.namecheap.com/security/whoisguard.aspx
3. http://domains.google.com/about/features.html
4. http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/pricing.html
Something they said they won't do on 8.8.8.8.
this is a revamp and product consolidation and it is super late to the game, hopefully the transition for current users will be easy
Also, there should be an option to 301 redirect your blogspot blog to a domain held by Google. Lots of bloggers have outgrown their .blogspot.com blogs.
There are two main ways to mask domain name whois information: 1) go through a proxy service, i.e., a company buys the domain under their name and gives you control, or 2) effectively use another entity's contact information with the exception of name, which is what Gandi does.
a) is rather risky to both parties. You do not own the domain, but another entity does. If you somehow lose the domain name or the entity holding the name goes under, you won't be able to get it back because it technically never belonged to you. The holder is also now legally responsible for the domain name.
b) is a much safer route with the constraint that your name must be attached to the domain name. This makes it so you always remain responsible for and the registrant of the domain name. It is yours.
Very much positive, for exactly the reasons you specified.
https://www.gandi.net/domain/whois/
http://wiki.gandi.net/en/domains/private-registration
http://wiki.gandi.net/en/contacts/privatewhois
From the home page, it's at the bottom of the green box under "Every domain name includes".
Gandi support used to be the best. Now that domain isn't they core and only business, support quality is falling. Fast.
I have an old account. And some point they migrated my old account. And now my domain is flagged as a business type domain, which it isn't. It is lock as they changed it themselves. When I've contacted them, they did not want to fix it. They messed up, denies it and won't fix it. So, for me, not so great customer support ... Anyway, I'm moving away, domain by domain.
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Domain_WHOIS_Privacy_Service
What is Google Synthetic Records? Google Search doesn't know.
Based on pricing ($9.99/.com) and a growing irritation with GoDaddy, I finally moved my domains to Dynadot:
https://www.dynadot.com/
They have a (custom) 2FA app and 2FA SMS. BTW this friend referral https://www.dynadot.com/?s9N6j7d9G8B07i73 gives you & me $5 after purchase.
DNSSEC is an important trust root that can be used to pin certificates in addition to PKIX (CAs), or, in some practical cases (such as mailservers), instead of them.
Are you still running Telnet?
FWIW, I use the Firefox addon "DNSSEC Validator" (also does DANE) - https://www.dnssec-validator.cz/ - So if somebody managed to MITM my connection and insert a different, but still trusted, cert in the way, I'd notice.
DNSSEC/DANE would probably see a lot more adoption if one or more of the main browsers did this sort of validation by default.
(Slightly confused by this board.)
https://joker.com/faq/content/6/461/en/dnssec-support.html
1. Hunt for solutions to your problem on forums.
2. Discover the magic link where you can submit a form with a message regarding your problem.
3. Sit back and wait for 24 hours.
4. Your problem is resolved, and you may or may not receive an email stating that the issue was resolved.
Communication is completely one way for most products.
Others with the same issues:
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=google+wallet+account+v...
Would you rather deal with Google as opposed to Namecheap? A great company with superb support that specializes in nothing but domain names and dedicated hosting?
I wouldn't.
Perhaps that has changed.
People have been asking for, what, five years now?
With Google Domains, you get phone and email support (M-F, 9am to 9pm EST).
No thanks. I'd rather have 24/7 support.
Plenty of domain & DNS providers offer 24/7 x 365 support.
The callcenter agent will type your inquiry into the exact same ticket system that your email would have ended up in.
EDIT: its not just for total system outages, it can be things which are localised to your cluster, or whatever - who knows. This is why these services are offered. To give those who need the piece of mind that if shit goes wrong, the company you're paying will deal with immediately.
If Google is positive that their services will be uninterrupted or error prone between 9pm and 9am then they should advertise so. Things happen. Things do go wrong, they should think about expanding their support teams in other international offices to have a good coverage for the world clock.
I'm not sure where you get that idea from but companies the size of google don't page engineers because of customer tickets, regardless of whether they're opened by a callcenter agent or e-mail.
Their callcenters process thousands of calls per hour. Yours is, quite literally, a drop in the bucket.
They have monitoring in place where one of the metrics is is elevated support inquiries. However, you only appear in that bucket after someone, and usually not the callcenter agent, has triaged your ticket.
Maybe not for a $12 domain registration but Amazon does in some cases.
I'm also pretty sure that is what Google's Cloud Platform Platinum offers if you are willing to pay enough. [This part is just a guess]
There are plenty I can get Live Chat and/or 15min email responses out of. That is all I really require to do business with an infrastructure provider.
SaaS, I'd be fine with business hour support. SaaS failures don't directly cost me money and/or reputation.
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/
Because you don't get any support whatsoever past forums without paying for it directly.
To be fair, I think the last time I was woken up to deal with something was like a year ago. ;)
https://support.google.com/enterprisehelp/answer/142244?rd=1
It turns out they don't let you do that. "Free trial" means 30 days free, then it's Apps for Business or no Apps at all.
I felt (and, to some extent, still feel) extorted by that. The customer service experience was extremely dissatisfying. So, will I eventually use Google Domains? Probably. I just won't depend on it without a failsafe - which is what I should have done since the beginning.
Similarly, if you have Apps for Business like we do, you don't get to see the history of your support cases - that's in the Google Enterprise Support Centre, which becomes available when your user count reaches 100. They did enable it when I asked for it, but it's just very odd that you can have a paid service like this, yet not see your case history unless you're 'big enough'. I don't understand why the case history triggers on '100 users' rather than 'is paying us money'.
Overall GApps is nice... but there are a lot of rough edges and corner cases.
Already tried that with email (Google Apps for Business), and the punishment was swift like the new Apple programming language.
I guess the new part is they're offering it standalone? Seems like a lead gen effort for AdWords/AdSense more than a serious product.
I could have sworn it was possible to register domains directly through Google, but I guess it could have been a cleverly disguised front-end to another registrar.
They don't want a representative sample, and they say that (and how they want it to be non-representative) right on the page. So, why is that even an objection?
watch the hype fade away in a week and everyone will forget this exists (hello Google+)
This...looks like a registrar + nameservers, and doesn't seem to really differentiate itself in any compelling way at all. Name serving + registration anywhere else, or at two separate places, isn't that different in price from the price they show in their screenshot.
Invite only for something like this is incredibly lame. I mean, whoever thought they'd pull that tactic again needs to seriously be corralled. It is amateur hour.
This does seem entirely like a whimsical side project for Google. If you want a reliable domain registrar, find one that doesn't do anything else.
Seems pretty logical to me considering they have a very popular email and cloud business that requires you to have a domain.
They're in the domain business now, and I don't think they're going to drop out any time soon.
http://socialmediatoday.com/jordanv/2264086/google-sunsets-w...
The way this has worked in the past (again iirc) with other companies is that the registrar wholesale migrated their names to another provider who purchased them at a discount.
I've never been through the process personally, but given the quantity of registrars that are going into and out of business from time to time, I'm sure it's a process that's been pretty well standardized.
The worst part is that I was "in contact" with the owner via Twitter, and he assured me that he would totally look into things at some point in the near future..
Any company can close a service (or go out of business and close all its service), and if a service fails to make a profit, eventually the company will almost certainly do so, one way or the other.
The only reason Google has a high count of such services is because Google went through a period where it started lots of services (and, also, because its remixed and rebranded a lot of services, so that more service names have gotten retired than actual services.) There's no strong reason to think that the actual risk -- particularly with paid services -- is particularly high with Google.
At this point they create and destroy products on a whim. They have 900 products so who cares if a million users get pissed.
Like Google Play Music All Access or any number of modern Google Things, this is something they're doing because "what if we don't", not because they have anything special to provide.