I don't think so, I see it on both my work and home computers, both of which are running OS X. Also to clarify I'm talking about the CrunchBase widget on this TechCrunch article, not the entry on the actual Crunchbase website.
I started moving all of my domains back to NameCheap from Badger after they raised their prices to what Hover charges.
The domain renewal with whois privacy/guard at NameCheap ends up being a little more than Google Domains.
I keep hoping NameCheap will overhaul their control panel design like they did with their main site.
I will probably end up moving to AWS Route53 or Google Domains or to use their DNS and a clean/modern interface and simpler pricing (include whois privacy).
DANE can work perfectly fine with the existing CA system to provide another way of verifying that the correct TLS certificate (or CA) is being used. Or... it can be used with a completely different trust anchor or TLS certificate that you control. Your choice.
But you and I will just have to disagree on this topic. Your dislike of DNSSEC is well-known, as is my support for it.
The USG controls .com, .net, and .org. The government of Libya controls .ly. DNSSEC puts cryptographic key material under the influence of the DNS. "No it doesn't" isn't a rebuttal to that.
But Thomas ... I still don't understand the attack that you say can be made against DNSSEC-signed domains. Here's what I see, if I have a .COM domain:
1. I sign my domains and generate a DS record.
2. I upload the DS record to my registrar who passes the DS record up to the .COM registry.
Now, when someone does DNSSEC validation on my DNS records, they wind up doing this process:
1. Going through the DNS process to get my DNS records as well as the DNSKEY and RRSIGs.
2. Following the chain of DS records up to the .COM registry and on up to the root of DNS... being able to validate along the way the integrity of the records.
Where do world governments get to interfere here?
If a govt were able to manipulate the TLD registry the best they could do would be to point my domain to some other name servers that weren't mine... is THAT the attack you see? I seriously would like to understand.
Your "1. Going through the DNS process" starts with records the USG controls! Yes, "the best they could do" would be to defeat the entire system. What do you think happens in a TLS MITM? They USG isn't trying to sign your keys and publish your addresses!
This is not, of course, the only problem with DNSSEC. It's also an archaic 1990s cryptosystem built around 1024-bit PKCS1v15 RSA, which by default makes every DNS record in the system public, trivially dramatically amplifies DNS traffic, and does all this without actually securing DNS lookups from browsers, which still run the old insecure DNS protocol to talk to DNSSEC-enabled caches.
It's a silly system, has been since the USG paid TIS to design it in the 1990s, is nearing two decades delayed, and isn't going to happen. Look at what Chris Palmer from Google has to say about it. Whatever the opposite of "betting on it" is, that's what Chromium is doing with DNSSEC. We should get to work designing a modern alternative.
> In a filing with the European Union, French authorities declared in an emergency procedure its intentions to block "at domain level" access to sites the French government deems to be in breach of its law.
I agree with you AlyssaRowan. I also moved some domains away from NameCheap/eNom when they didn't provide DNSSEC support.
I did move a couple of domains to Google Domains. While they do not provide DNSSEC in their DNS hosting, they do support DNSSEC records (DS) if you host your domains somewhere else that supports DNSSEC signing.
I always have a hard time understanding why price is such a motivator for people in domain registration, when we're talking about differences of a few dollars a year, and when a bad registrar can screw you over royally. I mean, sure, if you have thousands of domains, it matters. But if you have a handful, isn't it worth paying a bit more if needed to get a better registrar? Not really aiming this directly at the parent; it's just that it seems like price is the main thing that ends up being discussed every time this topic comes up.
But really all registrars boil down to two "types" the sub-$20/year ones (which are like 90% of the market) and then the $1K+/year ones which bundle in all kinds of brand protection products and domain protection stuff (e.g. Mark Monitor).
Neither Google or Name Cheap are different enough for price to be a deciding factor, but NameCheap has a better track record than Google in this specific space. GoDaddy is someone I wouldn't touch even if they were cheaper, I hate their bullshit (e.g. upsell, misleading checkout, misleading prices, etc).
If you could pay $5 extra a year and get better service, if it was a business website I'd definitely consider it, but for personal shit I wouldn't, and in general there is no way to spend just $5 or similar more a year and get any marked improvement.
The only thing which might be an upgrade is $12/year for the registrar and then $6~7 for Route53 on top. That's a nice improvement for an extra few bucks.
Not to derail too much, but I have worked with MarkMonitor, and their price is FAR less than $1k/yr per domain. Much closer to the $20 end, though I'm sure it depends on the specific deal, and I'd guess they probably have some minimum number of domains they'd want to manage for it to be worth it to them.
Funny, I had just switched over my last GoDaddy domain yesterday to start using a different nameserver and finally move it off their system entirely. Might have to give this a try.
+1. As much as I like the idea of managing everything from one place, Google's propensity to have crap-tier support and their other propensity to drop services with little warning means I've got no desire to even try this.
I hadn't considered Google's lack of commitment to their non-core services, but that's a good point. Over the years I've consolidated at Namecheap while several other providers shut down. For me, domains are a long-term service.
I'll stick with NameCheap. All else being equal, I prefer the vendor whose core business is the service I'm seeking. They can neither drop the service nor quintuple the price (a la Google AppEngine). Same reason I use DropBox.
Google has the worst customer support I have ever seen.
I once had to transfer a domain for a client that Google had registered with Godaddy. Google blamed Godaddy and Godaddy blamed Google. What a nightmare.
Same experience, I spent probably over an hour trying to get a domain off Google where Google went through GoDaddy. Wasn't able to make it work, gave up. Tried again a year or two later and did it after maybe 45 minutes.
Also an issue is what ends up becoming benign neglect after the new shiny ball is no longer fun. That actually is my biggest concern. Example is google voice which is frozen in time.
No kidding. The integration with Google Hangouts has been a disaster, and me moving to iOS has made it even worse. Of course, there are no good competitors, so I'm stuck in the holding pattern just hoping some of the ridiculous issues get fixed.
As a long-time Google Voice user, I've been pretty happy with Hangouts integration. Texts, VoIP, cross-platform use... could still use invisibility and a (much) better set of "stickers," but I'm otherwise pretty happy with it and Google ecosystem integration. Admittedly, I'm on a Galaxy Note right now and can't attest to the iPhone experience.
GVoice used to have ATROCIOUS call quality that seems to have been ameliorated by Hangouts. Calls within the US and Canada are still free, voicemail service is second to none, and I'm extremely happy with the texting integration with Hangouts. What else do we want?
Here's a simple thing: I want to SMS a friend. I type in their name in my Hangouts OSX app. It brings up their GTalk interface. No. I want to SMS. In iOS texting or Android texting, all I need to do is search the name (obviously) to call/SMS. In Hangouts I need to know the person's number, so what I do is open the Google Voice app (which is deprecated), search their name, copy/paste their number into Hangouts, and SMS them. Ridiculous.
EDIT: Also, the OSX Hangouts app crashes about every 2 hours with no error message. This is a "known issue" of varying types on Google's site, but customer service with them, well, you know how that is.
Ah, I think it's a UI problem. Open up your friend's name. In the bottom left corner is a little green chat icon, which signifies that you're sending a Hangouts message. Tap that and you should see the option to send a text to the associated phone number.
It's not necessarily intuitive unless you know to look for it, and it might not work if your Google Contacts are incomplete (as in, you don't associate your Hangouts friend with his phone number). But it works really well for me.
With Google's track record of customer service and product abandonment, I can't see doing business with them, except when there is no alternative.
Why would a company as rich as Google want to be in the domain business? It can't ever be material to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Google abandoned this business and transferred domains to, say, Godaddy.
This is partly why they should add "premium" support to the Play Store for developers. Right now their free support for their almost free developer accounts (one time $25 is "free" in this context) is just atrociously bad, and the only way to fix it is to fund more human support personnel.
If I was a developer bringing in several thousand a year on the Play Store, I'd happily shell out $99/year for better support. I imagine I am not alone in that.
I agree. Both devs and Google earn money from Play Store& Admob. Right now with their intelligent algorithms, Google behaves as only devs are earning something.
This has been very much my experience. With paid products I had a Google representative actually on the phone and then following up after to make sure I was set. That payment part is key, and not unexpected given the HUGE number of unpaid people using their service.
I've been using Namecheap consistently for more than 8 years, in combination with Gandi. Never had any issues.
Recently, I had to contact support for a failed payment (obscure domain extension, some address verification error), and the experience was great. I got it fixed in less than 5 minutes by contacting their live support.
Will keep using them. Their name doesn't do them justice, they are an A player in the domain space.
I have limited experience with Namemcheap, but my most recent experience was not exactly a positive one.
Backstory: I have five .io domains, three that I registered with Gandi, and two with Namecheap. When the expiration period for the Gandi ones was coming up, I got an email saying "the domains expire on xx/xx/xxxx, renew by then if you want them to stay active. If you don't renew, you can renew then any time up to 90 days after the expiration date".
As it happens, I let the three with Gandi expire, and then logged into their dashboard, renewed them about 60 days after the expiration date, end of story.
Compare: I accidentally let the two I had registered with Namecheap expire. "OK" I figured, "not a big deal, they probably have some kind of grace period as well." No. I got an email saying "these domains expired and you cannot renew them through your Namecheap account. You can contact support and they might be able to help you renew them." So, I contact support and they write back and say "we'll try, but it's going to cost $XXX.XX (somewhere around $250, if memory serves) to renew".
OK, to be fair, I did let the domains expire, so I guess I deserve what I get. But the experience renewing an expired domain with Gandi was so much better than what it was with Namecheap, that I've basically written Namecheap off as a registrar to use in the future.
No, all the domains in question were .io. The first few .io domains I registered, I used Gandi, then I thought I might switch to namecheap since they were, well, cheaper. Now, I think I'll stick to Gandi.
I like everything about namecheap, except the name. I hate having to mention their company name to a customer who I'm managing the domain for. It sounds like I'm using a discount service from the bottom of the barrel when that's really not how the company operates.
It would be nice if I could refer to a parent company with a more appealing name.
Maybe they could rename to Nameaffordable. Amusingly enough, Googling for "nameaffordable" does, in fact, show Namecheap (for me): http://i.imgur.com/BCV8aXG.png
I've been using Namecheap for a few years, and have (for the most part) been pretty happy. Their SSL certificate service is super clunky, but the domain stuff is decent.
Funny you should mention that. At my previous employer I needed to buy some domains and our current registrar was simply horrifyingly terrible (like $30 per sub-domain, yes you read that right: sub-domain. Bad support. Payment issues. Their website had issues in general) so when they asked me for alternatives I gave them NameCheap, and the biggest sticking point was the name (and how it didn't sound professional).
We did eventually go with NameCheap and had no issues. But the name definitely does them more harm than good for business users.
It is fascinating that people look past that, it's far worse than Name+Cheap. I imagine it's due to the very large brand recognition they now possess.
When Google first launched and I tried referring friends to use it, as a superior search service to AltaVista et al., friends would give me a look of "what the hell?" due to the name. Back then it wasn't uncommon to see media stories referencing Google's childish / baby sounding name, and how it was a ridiculous name for a service, and that the logo made it come across even worse.
I was actually running a hosting company in 2006 and we had a lot of domains under management at eNom. ENom charged us $8.95 per domain per year, and we charged our customers $15 per year for registration through us. (I went back and looked up our prices back then just for this post.)
Domains haven't been $70 each since around 1996 or so.
My experience with namecheap has been considerably different. Their website for managing my domains never seems to work right and 2 factor auth seems to barely work sometimes. I'm looking forward to moving away from namecheap if it means a better management interface experience.
They're are already a certificate authority (they issue their own certs for google.com, etc.) and do lots of interesting "tricks" like only issuing them for 3 months at a time so they can roll them over faster as things like SHA1 get deprecated.
None of Google Domain's features are novel. In fact the article spent most of its time talking about an up-sell. Which isn't to say Google Domain isn't a good product, just that we now should look at price because nothing else seems interesting...
~ Google Domains charges $12/year for .COM, .NET, .ORG.
~ NameCheap charges $10.69/year for .COM, $11.98/year for .NET, and $11.48/year for .ORG. Sometimes with an 18c/year fee tacked on.
~ GoDaddy charges $12.99-13.99 for a .COM but that might increase randomly because they're scumbags.
So my point is that this article claims that everyone is "rushing" to this new product, and while this product doesn't seem "bad" it also isn't exactly market changing. The prices are well within 10% of the market (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) and the features are pretty generic also.
Can someone explain why Google Domains is compelling and not a "me too!" product?
Private registration usually costs extra, but not with Google domains. That is a compelling reason to me. I also like the clean interface, some of the other vendors have horrible interfaces.
Registration without revealing your private information in the whois database. Providers usually put their own details there and forward emails to the end user.
Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.
> Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.
And yet other TLD registries are sensible enough to make privacy the default for private individuals. .EU isn't bad in this regard, and others like .SE even go so far as to hide your name (most only hide your postal, email, telephone)
Frankly I don't know why anyone who can avoid it would want to touch Verisign TLDs with a barge pole... they have the continued gall to keep putting their prices up despite more competition than ever, and fail to raise the bar on basics like whois protection. Even .UK domains can be had for $5/year with registry level whois protection for heavens sake.
It's an add-on service that domain registrars offer which hides your personal information from the public.
When you register a domain, it's a requirements that you list contact information publicly. Companies usually don't mind doing this but many people don't want to list their home address and phone number for the world to see. Private registration lists a proxy company's information as the contact for the domain and they forward the information to you.
With standard registration, the site is registered to you with ICANN. With private registration, it is registered to your registrar and you are provided access. Whois will show their info.
Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it. Permissions are limited to what the registrar allows instead of what ICANN allows, although in most cases they give you nearly full control. You'll just have to read their terms if you want to know what you can do with it.
> Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it.
This is a myth. ICANN has published requirements on how private registrations must operate; ownership of the domain always goes to the paying owner, not the registrar.
That's interesting. Do you know where the requirements are published? I've read language recently from at least one registrar specifically stating that private registration prevents transfers to other registrars. Maybe this was before these new requirements were published.
In my recent experience, private registration prevents transfers because you are unable to receive the email message that contains the code you need to complete the transfer. I am still able to transfer my domains, but I need to turn off private registration first, so the email is sent to my real email address. This seems like a silly problem, and one that the registrars cold solve if they wanted to, but obviously they don't.
I believe some of the registrars provide a rolling email address on your whois info, which forwards the mails to your inbox. But the address is changing at intervals, therefore if anybody scraped the address it won't be of use.
I have transferred multiple domains with the privacy service turned on. No problem whatsoever. Every registrar worth doing business with (i.e. not GoDaddy) will forward all important mail to your real email address. Emails can take a few minutes or hours to get forwarded and/or end up in the spam folder, but that's about it.
If your registrar's privacy service is so bad that emails don't get through, transfers should be the least of your worries. Because of the new ICANN verification rules, you're at risk of losing your domain if emails don't get through to you.
If you don't have private registration a whois query on the domain shows the public your name and address. If you do it shows some nominee company instead.
$15-17 for .com/net/org, but as well as whois protection you also get a 1 year SSL cert. Unlike StartSSL, this includes fee-free revocation. Probably not worth much given that 'Lets Encrypt' is just around the corner, but it's still a respectable gesture. They also have a really good management UI, responsive customer support, free (roundcube) webmail, and DNSSEC management (Namecheap lacks this). Also, they're French, if you're feeling a bit US-wary lately.
I don't agree. I have a one-man online business, which means I can operate from home to save a lot of money, making it possible to charge less to my customers while still making a profit. I really would rather not have people who are angry at the business, for whatever reason, have easy access to my home address.
There's no requirement that you use your home address for registrars (or the IRS, for that matter). It's also not terribly expensive to get a PO Box/virtual office address, and if you're concerned about privacy then it sounds like it'd be worth it to you.
(d) A vendor conducting business through the Internet or any other electronic means of communication shall do all of the following when the transaction involves a buyer located in this state:
(1) Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3), the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.
(2) If the disclosure of the vendor's legal name and address information required by this subdivision is made by on-screen notice, all of the following shall apply:
(A) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall appear on any of the following:
(i) the first screen displayed when the vendor's electronic site is accessed,
(ii) on the screen on which goods or services are first offered,
(iii) on the screen on which a buyer may place the order for goods or services,
(iv) on the screen on which the buyer may enter payment information, such as a credit card account number, or
(v) for nonbrowser-based technologies, in a manner that gives the user a reasonable opportunity to review that information. The communication of that disclosure shall not be structured to be smaller or less legible than the text of the offer of the goods or services.
(B) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall be accompanied by an adjacent statement describing how the buyer may receive the information at the buyer's e-mail address. The vendor shall provide the disclosure information to the buyer at the buyer's e-mail address within five days of receiving the buyer's request.
(C) Until the vendor complies with subdivision (a) in connection with all buyers of the vendor's goods or services, the vendor shall make available to a buyer and any person or entity who may enforce this section pursuant to Section 17535 on-screen access to the information required to be disclosed under this subdivision.
(g) Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
It's free on Dreamhost. I don't use them for hosting anymore, but still keep a few domains there. 10 bucks a year for .coms.
The interface is ... almost ok. It's cluttered because it's used for more than just domain registration (think it's cPanel, actually) but the registration part is ok.
I found the console way better than Gandi, that I was using before. A few other integrations are simpler and quicker, such as creating email forwards. It seems also really well integrated with Google Cloud, but that's only relatively useful :)
Edit: oh, and it's fast to update, especially if you use Google as DNS server as I do.
I believe when you add whois guard to NameCheap, it actually comes out a little more than Google Domains, which I think offers free private registration.
No offense to you or your firm, but fuck coupon codes. When I go to Trader Joe's for groceries, I work out what I want to eat and note the prices. When I make one of the occasional trips to Safeway I spend half my time trying to match up what I went there to buy with the particular coupon that's running this week or that my wife added to loyalty card, and more time attempting to decrypt my receipt after I get home to see if I succeeded.
Coupons are just a way of creating psychological anxiety about missing a good deal, an archetypal 'dark pattern'. That sort of thing actively drives people like me away from your business. I know I'm not a mainstream consumer, but IMHO neither is the average domain registrant.
You can say that to any firm then. Given our razor thin profit margins, the pricing is there for a reason. The coupon codes are also there simply to sweeten the deal.
Bear in mind the products we're mostly represent cost a low $10. If we had more wiggle room on pricing, we'd offer low pricing all the time. It's just not feasible for a business like ours to do 24/7.
What I'm saying is that I am more quality- and convenience- sensitive than I am price-sensitive. Not because I'm rich, but because the mental overhead of coupon deals etc. carries a cost that typically exceeds the saving on the coupon. If you make the service sufficiently attractive, you can raise your prices. Admittedly this is a bit challenging when your firm is branded as 'namecheap' in order to attract the most price-conscious consumers, but companies can and do rebrand themselves.
I mean, Google is charging more than you, and it's not like they couldn't win a price war if they were so inclined - they could probably sell domains for $1/year without significant damage to their bottom line. Maybe it's time to get out of the 'cheap' box.
>One of the headaches of setting up a domain is getting the email sorted correctly. Instant integration to Gmail is a nice feature.
name.com has had that for years. Click a button and it configures all the MX records for you and a few CNAMES on top (so you can do stuff like mail.yourdomain.com and calendar.yourdomain.com).
I think this product is about filling a hole in their lineup of products, more than it is supposed to be innovative itself. The other products are innovative, this supplements those products.
They no longer have to send people across the street for this critical part of hosting and can also easily integrate it with their other services, such as gmail forwarding.
they do include private whois, and X subdomains for your domain, X emails available... but game changing would include SSL for all, or free hosting from your google drive - even if it was just static content.
it's a classic google "me too" project. i always get the feeling a lot of google projects come up because someone somewhere is going to be in a high level meeting with execs, and one exec sees something interesting and asks "why aren't we doing this?" and then someone gets to chime in "we already are!" and then they check the box for DONE and never look back.
Haha, thanks. My problem is that it takes a while sometimes, and it doesn't work when I'm out of the country. TOTP works everywhere all the time, though.
It doesn't have to be anything more than a "me to" product.
Noting that if you google "domains" they now come up as the 2nd organic link. Nice to be king, eh?
Edit: I own a registrar and we compete with them (if you want to call it that). Obviously I am just referring to the fact that they can instantly rank high with what amounts to a beta product hence the "king" comment. Of course they need to be more than "me to" but that ranking goes a long way in getting them business even if they do very little.
It's not compelling, it just fills the gap, as mentioned. It gives them more info to adjust their search algorithms and weed out bad apples imo. Now they know who has registered even private domains. Make an inadvertent "bad move" on one domain/site, and they will be killing traffic to everything you own.
I've been a beta-tester of Google Domains for months, and it's just such a nicer experience than GoDaddy/Namecheap. Particularly with GoDaddy, I feel like there's always a chance I'm going to click on the wrong thing and then get subscribed to some ridiculous service. With Google, it's a clean, transparent, USABLE interface.
I'd encourage people to try it out with a domain and form your own views. As for me, I'm moving all of my domains over to Google (as they get close to renewal.)
Hey jedc - Tamar from Namecheap here. Can you provide insights into the Namecheap experience? I hear the GD side. Would like to know what you mean from ours.
As far as our dashboard, we're building a better user experience, so that's nothing to fret about. I bet you'd agree when it's live that the experience is far more stellar than anything you'd find anywhere else.
Here's some feedback: your 2FA experience is terrible. I appreciate that you use 2FA, but I have to hit the send button multiple times to get a text message every single time on my US mobile phone. After that the form fails 50% of the time.
I also find it frustrating that the domain dashboard has no clear path to my host record settings, which is 90% of the use case for me. I always have to click four or five times to find it.
Otherwise I love the product and pricing, and I will probably continue to use Namecheap in the future.
I'm not sure what it takes for registrars to accept various TLD's but support for more exotic ones would be nice to have from Namecheap. I carry most of my portfolio there but have .ht, .sr, .as and a few others that I would love to roll in.
>The dashboard is, frankly, out of date compared to the UI experience people would expect from us in 2015. We're building that right now.
As a sysadmin who deals with your website a lot, I actually like the current management UI.
Yes, it could use a few tweaks here and there, but overall I quite like it. I hate websites that update their user interface and hurt my ability to get things done.
I use another registrar for some of my .de domains, and their web interface is horrible. I have ongoing issues with their interface not saving changes to my zone because the button says the zone was saved when it wasn't.
tl;dr - The current interface doesn't look nice but it works damn well and I can find everything. Please don't ruin usability in the new version. I care more about functionality than looks.
Almost always, what is really called for are multiple interfaces:
1. a "power user" interface, stripped down, that allows for the fastest ways to do XYZ (key bindings, fast client-side validation, batch uploads, etc).
2. a "first timer" interface, with explanatory info, slower pace so people don't feel like they're getting overwhelmed or pushed in to something, etc.
I've yet to see any registrar do this. Many do offer APIs, which, for developer power users, might be sufficient. I'd suggest to this company that they perhaps keep the current version as a fallback to the existing power users that already know how to 'get things done' with it; maybe not forever, but for a while so they can learn the new interface on their own schedule at the very least.
I wouldn't hold my breath. Namecheap has been saying they will implement a decent 2FA solution for ages now. I got tired of waiting and have been slowly transferring my domains out.
I'm a current namecheap customer as well. When I have to use your management interface for something, I feel like I've been transported back in time to a cpanel interface ca. 1999. I have 25 some odd domains but you can't show them all to me at once unless I expand preferences and select "all" which, by the way, I have to do every time I navigate back to the list.
It's a minor quip (and just one off the top of my head), granted, and otherwise I'm a happy customer, but am very tempted to migrate as well as my domains come up for renewal.
Any screenshots or other indications of where you might be going?
Nope, I haven't even seen it yet. I know that we have a dedicated team working on the domain dashboard exclusively though. And yeah, 1999... close. 2001. :)
I think you just explained peoples problems in your own post. "we're building a better user experience, so that's nothing to fret about". People have the option of "good right now" or "good in the indefinite future", and the decision is pretty obvious. Not saying Namecheap is bad (I use them myself), but the crux of this argument is that GD has the right interface NOW, while Namecheap will have it EVENTUALLY.
Good point, but along the same lines: Namecheap existed as a registrar when I purchased my domains, and GD did not. The interface isn't enough to make me want to go through the hassle of switching.
The main thing is just clutter. Google Domains has a very simple user interface. It only has the stuff you need. NameCheap and every other registrar has a million links everywhere and all this random crap you never use, making it hard to find the stuff you do need.
NameCheap is better than most, though. The only reason I don't keep a lot of domains with you is price. Your renewal fee's are significantly higher than budget registrars like Dynadot. And when you own a lot of domains, that extra 10% adds up fast.
I've been a Namecheap customer for years and a GD user since the early beta. For my purposes, the only real advantage of GD is the free WHOIS privacy with every registration. I have many domains and this adds up significantly. I will probably move over at next renewal, simply to save money.
Like others have said, it's mainly that the interface looks and feels like something circa 2001. I inevitably click into the wrong menu/interface/page for something I want to do, and it just feels inefficient whenever I want to get something done.
I use Namecheap for SSL certificates (we have domains and hosting elsewhere).
The old interface within the redesign is jarring and, as you know, that old interface is pretty ugly! I love how it will show me the first 10 in a listing and then offer paging rather than showing 100 or all by default. Will be happy to have that fixed.
Other than that, I have at times found the split between the old (customer) and new (sales) interfaces confusing. I'll often be clicking through SSL info in the sales interface when I'm trying to remember where to get my client SSL lists.
Apart from that, I've been happy with the pricing and when I've needed support via live chat it's been really polite and quick. I recommend Namecheap despite that interface issue.
I would be interested to know Google's plans for selling SSL certs, if any. They have been quite vocal that sites should switch from HTTP to HTTPS at the risk of having their Page Rank downgraded if they don't, but this requires paying for and deploying an SSL certificate.
So, if Google is so interested in seeing universal HTTPS, what sort of SSL cert carrot will they provide to their registered domains to go along with the Page Rank stick?
I pay $8.19/.com with GoDaddy with the Domain Club - nobody can touch their prices, but GoDaddy doesn't have an API and according to their account executives I spoke to, they won't offer one anytime soon.
Trust in the brand is negated for me by the fact that if this doesn't go well, I know they'll just shut it down or neglect it in a year or two. You want to know your registrar will be there in 10 years.
Because once they have the Credit Card number from a customer it is extremely easier to sell him other products.
That's quite the Google way, they are not looking for the one-time immediate profit, but for customers that will somehow generate income in the long term. It seems it's not working bad for them.
Namecheap includes WhoisGuard with all their domains for those prices, so they're even LOWER than they seem.
It seems to me that Google is just trying to throw their enormous weight into every space now and it sickens me. This is how we end up with mediocre goods and services... No thanks Google.
They are much, much more than a monopoly at this point.
Not to mention, with Namecheap, GoDaddy or really any other company, you can probably get ahold of tech support 24/7. Good luck getting that from Google... Not that I've tried yet, but my experience with them in the past has been that it's mission impossible to talk to a human being in charge of something there, unless you're trying to hangout with the devs on Google+ or something for smalltalk, which seems to always be available.
I've been using this for a few months now and it's been great. The cool thing is that they allow you to solve the problem of having domain emails pointing to your personal emails so for example blahblah@joeblau.com -> josephblaus@gmail.com. The only challenge with this is that I use Cloudflare as my CDN and Google's email redirects work if you use Google's nameservers.
> The cool thing is that they allow you to solve the problem of having domain emails pointing to your personal emails so for example blahblah@joeblau.com -> josephblaus@gmail.com
Am I missing something...? I didn't realise this was a problem - I've never used a domain provider that doesn't let you do this. I currently use Namecheap, which certainly do.
The painful thing I've found with this is that it leaves myname@gmail.com as a valid email address. So there I am signing up for other services with myname@mydomain.com and meanwhile some typo-ridden fool in the US keeps signing up myname@gmail.com instead of theirname@gmail.com and I end up receiving their hotel receipts, iTunes receipts, etc.
Very few of those services have a good way of dealing with "No, that wasn't their email address they signed up with, it was an alias of mine". And while for some of these, I could presumably click the "forgot password" link and go into their account, I'm not sure that would be legitimate and wouldn't know what their correct email was to change it.
So when somebody steals your domain, do you actually get to talk to a person at Google to help resolve the matter, or is it like every other customer service experience they offer?
The best feature is that it's not GoDaddy, or NameCheap. Having registered hundreds of domains, dealt with all kinds of customer service and had to perform numerous operations for my domains the user experience matters and though Google hasn't has the best track record with UX they certainly do invest in it more heavily than GoDaddy & NameCheap.
They have been around for years. Their deisgn is pretty standard for a domain name seller, if you want to talk about web2.0 and cliche have a look at the Google Domain website. Also, .net is the correct tld to use in this situation....
Soon enough you will store your website entirely on SERPs. Instant load times will mean better user experience. A to Z solution will ease up developers life.
....in before "Google has decided to end support for this product; your 10-year-registered domains that last longer than next month will be moved to GoDaddy."
(edit: actually, they'd never voluntarily transfer your domain; they'd force you to transfer it, at some kind of discount. suffice to say i am less than confident)
The last thing I trust Google with is my domains. They can outright ban or disable you just like with any of their products and not offer support or explanation.
Ive had beta access for a while now and havent had any problems yet. The main reason why I switched my domain to google was how seamless it works with gmail.
I think integration with other Google products is the main reason they are venturing here. It can offer one click integration to google apps, app engine, cloud compute and blogger. If they offer free google apps for personal use, I think it can be a major selling point.
I doubt they'll go down that road again (I' ma free Gapps user - grandfathered in). It's also the most terrible experience these days. I still don't have Inbox by Gmail or the ability to view my orders in Google Wallet.
> I' ma free Gapps user - grandfathered in ... So much for being an early adopter :|
You, like me, was an early adopter which provided the platform with traction when it was new.
Now the platform is proven, established and popular.
From an economic point of view we're now merely free-loading leeches, and I honestly don't find it reasonable to expect that we should be given the best treatment at the expense of others.
Google now has a shitload of paying customers, and they are getting prioritized. And I'm completely fine with that. Our reward is that unlike others, we're allowed to go free-loading!
I've noticed too that I'm not getting features and upgrades paying customers get. That's Google trying to give me an incentive to convert to a paid account, because obviously Google wants to convert us free-loaders to paying customers too. And I'm fine with that as well.
Just don't act entitled because you were the first one to sign up for a free product. You don't deserve anything in return for that.
Agreed. On the website, it mentions that it'll integrate with Blogger, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix. Integration with App Engine would be a big selling point.
247 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadNamecheap takes great care of me at $10/year though, so I'm not very compelled to switch.
The domain renewal with whois privacy/guard at NameCheap ends up being a little more than Google Domains.
I keep hoping NameCheap will overhaul their control panel design like they did with their main site.
I will probably end up moving to AWS Route53 or Google Domains or to use their DNS and a clean/modern interface and simpler pricing (include whois privacy).
It's been how many years now? And all they say is "we're working on it" and have no ETA. So we moved most things to Gandi.
Feels good having no GoDaddy, however.
<insert-standard-many-hundred-line-exchange-between-you-and-I-that-has-happened-in-other-HN-threads-here>
DANE can work perfectly fine with the existing CA system to provide another way of verifying that the correct TLS certificate (or CA) is being used. Or... it can be used with a completely different trust anchor or TLS certificate that you control. Your choice.
But you and I will just have to disagree on this topic. Your dislike of DNSSEC is well-known, as is my support for it.
1. I sign my domains and generate a DS record.
2. I upload the DS record to my registrar who passes the DS record up to the .COM registry.
Now, when someone does DNSSEC validation on my DNS records, they wind up doing this process:
1. Going through the DNS process to get my DNS records as well as the DNSKEY and RRSIGs.
2. Following the chain of DS records up to the .COM registry and on up to the root of DNS... being able to validate along the way the integrity of the records.
Where do world governments get to interfere here?
If a govt were able to manipulate the TLD registry the best they could do would be to point my domain to some other name servers that weren't mine... is THAT the attack you see? I seriously would like to understand.
This is not, of course, the only problem with DNSSEC. It's also an archaic 1990s cryptosystem built around 1024-bit PKCS1v15 RSA, which by default makes every DNS record in the system public, trivially dramatically amplifies DNS traffic, and does all this without actually securing DNS lookups from browsers, which still run the old insecure DNS protocol to talk to DNSSEC-enabled caches.
It's a silly system, has been since the USG paid TIS to design it in the 1990s, is nearing two decades delayed, and isn't going to happen. Look at what Chris Palmer from Google has to say about it. Whatever the opposite of "betting on it" is, that's what Chromium is doing with DNSSEC. We should get to work designing a modern alternative.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/europes-answer-to-terror-attack...
Welcome to the new world.
I did move a couple of domains to Google Domains. While they do not provide DNSSEC in their DNS hosting, they do support DNSSEC records (DS) if you host your domains somewhere else that supports DNSSEC signing.
But really all registrars boil down to two "types" the sub-$20/year ones (which are like 90% of the market) and then the $1K+/year ones which bundle in all kinds of brand protection products and domain protection stuff (e.g. Mark Monitor).
Neither Google or Name Cheap are different enough for price to be a deciding factor, but NameCheap has a better track record than Google in this specific space. GoDaddy is someone I wouldn't touch even if they were cheaper, I hate their bullshit (e.g. upsell, misleading checkout, misleading prices, etc).
If you could pay $5 extra a year and get better service, if it was a business website I'd definitely consider it, but for personal shit I wouldn't, and in general there is no way to spend just $5 or similar more a year and get any marked improvement.
The only thing which might be an upgrade is $12/year for the registrar and then $6~7 for Route53 on top. That's a nice improvement for an extra few bucks.
* Use code WGSPECIAL for a discounted whoisguard. :)
* Renewals for several years at a time offer a baked-in savings.
* Our control panel overhaul is underway. It's a huge project for us, but we're ecstatic.
No Canadian support yet.
Soon, eh!
I recently had an issue with Google Apps, and contacted them via email for support.
I received a phone call almost immediately and the issue was resolved in minutes. I live in Fiji.
I once had to transfer a domain for a client that Google had registered with Godaddy. Google blamed Godaddy and Godaddy blamed Google. What a nightmare.
No kidding. The integration with Google Hangouts has been a disaster, and me moving to iOS has made it even worse. Of course, there are no good competitors, so I'm stuck in the holding pattern just hoping some of the ridiculous issues get fixed.
GVoice used to have ATROCIOUS call quality that seems to have been ameliorated by Hangouts. Calls within the US and Canada are still free, voicemail service is second to none, and I'm extremely happy with the texting integration with Hangouts. What else do we want?
EDIT: Also, the OSX Hangouts app crashes about every 2 hours with no error message. This is a "known issue" of varying types on Google's site, but customer service with them, well, you know how that is.
It's not necessarily intuitive unless you know to look for it, and it might not work if your Google Contacts are incomplete (as in, you don't associate your Hangouts friend with his phone number). But it works really well for me.
Oh finally, Bob Robot comes up. I click it. It says "Bob Robot isn't on Hangouts right now..." Well I don't want that. I want to send an SMS.
OK let's look for a green chat icon. Nope, just a smile button to put emojis in there.
This is OSX's Chrome plugin as stated.
Why would a company as rich as Google want to be in the domain business? It can't ever be material to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Google abandoned this business and transferred domains to, say, Godaddy.
- if you are paying google on an ongoing basis for something (adwords for example) they are very pro active with support.
- if you are using a free product, expect 0 or less support
- if you are receiving money from google, expect active hostility.
If I was a developer bringing in several thousand a year on the Play Store, I'd happily shell out $99/year for better support. I imagine I am not alone in that.
... you would be automatically paying Google with $300 for every thousand of sales. $99 would be redundant.
Recently, I had to contact support for a failed payment (obscure domain extension, some address verification error), and the experience was great. I got it fixed in less than 5 minutes by contacting their live support.
Will keep using them. Their name doesn't do them justice, they are an A player in the domain space.
Backstory: I have five .io domains, three that I registered with Gandi, and two with Namecheap. When the expiration period for the Gandi ones was coming up, I got an email saying "the domains expire on xx/xx/xxxx, renew by then if you want them to stay active. If you don't renew, you can renew then any time up to 90 days after the expiration date".
As it happens, I let the three with Gandi expire, and then logged into their dashboard, renewed them about 60 days after the expiration date, end of story.
Compare: I accidentally let the two I had registered with Namecheap expire. "OK" I figured, "not a big deal, they probably have some kind of grace period as well." No. I got an email saying "these domains expired and you cannot renew them through your Namecheap account. You can contact support and they might be able to help you renew them." So, I contact support and they write back and say "we'll try, but it's going to cost $XXX.XX (somewhere around $250, if memory serves) to renew".
OK, to be fair, I did let the domains expire, so I guess I deserve what I get. But the experience renewing an expired domain with Gandi was so much better than what it was with Namecheap, that I've basically written Namecheap off as a registrar to use in the future.
It would be nice if I could refer to a parent company with a more appealing name.
I've been using Namecheap for a few years, and have (for the most part) been pretty happy. Their SSL certificate service is super clunky, but the domain stuff is decent.
We did eventually go with NameCheap and had no issues. But the name definitely does them more harm than good for business users.
When Google first launched and I tried referring friends to use it, as a superior search service to AltaVista et al., friends would give me a look of "what the hell?" due to the name. Back then it wasn't uncommon to see media stories referencing Google's childish / baby sounding name, and how it was a ridiculous name for a service, and that the logo made it come across even worse.
I don't care for the name NameCheap either. On the other hand it's been easy to remember.
The brand grew from there. That's why Namecheap is still called Namecheap.
Disclosure: Namecheap employee/personal experience
Domains haven't been $70 each since around 1996 or so.
~ Google Domains charges $12/year for .COM, .NET, .ORG.
~ NameCheap charges $10.69/year for .COM, $11.98/year for .NET, and $11.48/year for .ORG. Sometimes with an 18c/year fee tacked on.
~ GoDaddy charges $12.99-13.99 for a .COM but that might increase randomly because they're scumbags.
So my point is that this article claims that everyone is "rushing" to this new product, and while this product doesn't seem "bad" it also isn't exactly market changing. The prices are well within 10% of the market (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) and the features are pretty generic also.
Can someone explain why Google Domains is compelling and not a "me too!" product?
Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.
And yet other TLD registries are sensible enough to make privacy the default for private individuals. .EU isn't bad in this regard, and others like .SE even go so far as to hide your name (most only hide your postal, email, telephone)
Frankly I don't know why anyone who can avoid it would want to touch Verisign TLDs with a barge pole... they have the continued gall to keep putting their prices up despite more competition than ever, and fail to raise the bar on basics like whois protection. Even .UK domains can be had for $5/year with registry level whois protection for heavens sake.
When you register a domain, it's a requirements that you list contact information publicly. Companies usually don't mind doing this but many people don't want to list their home address and phone number for the world to see. Private registration lists a proxy company's information as the contact for the domain and they forward the information to you.
Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it. Permissions are limited to what the registrar allows instead of what ICANN allows, although in most cases they give you nearly full control. You'll just have to read their terms if you want to know what you can do with it.
This is a myth. ICANN has published requirements on how private registrations must operate; ownership of the domain always goes to the paying owner, not the registrar.
If your registrar's privacy service is so bad that emails don't get through, transfers should be the least of your worries. Because of the new ICANN verification rules, you're at risk of losing your domain if emails don't get through to you.
For example https://who.is/whois/habinow.com is one of mine that is private
while https://who.is/whois/ycombinator.com is pubic and shows Nicholas Sivo as the admin and an address and phone number for y combinator
https://www.gandi.net/domain/whois/
Do you remember RegisterFly?
(d) A vendor conducting business through the Internet or any other electronic means of communication shall do all of the following when the transaction involves a buyer located in this state:
(1) Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3), the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.
(g) Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that imprisonment and fine.The interface is ... almost ok. It's cluttered because it's used for more than just domain registration (think it's cPanel, actually) but the registration part is ok.
Edit: oh, and it's fast to update, especially if you use Google as DNS server as I do.
Oh, and if you renew for several years at a time, the cost per year goes down too.
Disclosure: Namecheap employee
Coupons are just a way of creating psychological anxiety about missing a good deal, an archetypal 'dark pattern'. That sort of thing actively drives people like me away from your business. I know I'm not a mainstream consumer, but IMHO neither is the average domain registrant.
Bear in mind the products we're mostly represent cost a low $10. If we had more wiggle room on pricing, we'd offer low pricing all the time. It's just not feasible for a business like ours to do 24/7.
I mean, Google is charging more than you, and it's not like they couldn't win a price war if they were so inclined - they could probably sell domains for $1/year without significant damage to their bottom line. Maybe it's time to get out of the 'cheap' box.
Sadly, there isn't anything like this.
If you want privacy protection on your whois lookups, then Google would be cheaper than the other providers, as they sell it as an add-on.
I also trust Google to have speedy DNS servers, if you're leaving the defaults in place. GoDaddy's DNS can be quite slow.
Perhaps not a "mind-blowing" product, but one I'd consider using.
Godaddy also sells this as an addon, actually, every domain seller does, I don't know what is so special about Google's offert.
name.com has had that for years. Click a button and it configures all the MX records for you and a few CNAMES on top (so you can do stuff like mail.yourdomain.com and calendar.yourdomain.com).
I whish I could make a poll on this subject: Do you think you can trust a website if it is hidding its whois information ?
Would you trust a bank where all employees were wearing a mask ?
They no longer have to send people across the street for this critical part of hosting and can also easily integrate it with their other services, such as gmail forwarding.
it's a classic google "me too" project. i always get the feeling a lot of google projects come up because someone somewhere is going to be in a high level meeting with execs, and one exec sees something interesting and asks "why aren't we doing this?" and then someone gets to chime in "we already are!" and then they check the box for DONE and never look back.
Let's Encrypt is going to be doing that later this year anyway.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/certificate-authority-...
https://letsencrypt.org/
That doesn't make it non-weird. Obligatory Godwin, "meh, Hitler was no more horrible than Stalin or Pol Pot."
Edit: enjoyed your godwin ref though ;)
It doesn't have to be anything more than a "me to" product.
Noting that if you google "domains" they now come up as the 2nd organic link. Nice to be king, eh?
Edit: I own a registrar and we compete with them (if you want to call it that). Obviously I am just referring to the fact that they can instantly rank high with what amounts to a beta product hence the "king" comment. Of course they need to be more than "me to" but that ranking goes a long way in getting them business even if they do very little.
They come up as the 2nd for you. Google Search results are personalized. It's 6th in mine, behind Hostgator.
I'd encourage people to try it out with a domain and form your own views. As for me, I'm moving all of my domains over to Google (as they get close to renewal.)
As far as our dashboard, we're building a better user experience, so that's nothing to fret about. I bet you'd agree when it's live that the experience is far more stellar than anything you'd find anywhere else.
I also find it frustrating that the domain dashboard has no clear path to my host record settings, which is 90% of the use case for me. I always have to click four or five times to find it.
Otherwise I love the product and pricing, and I will probably continue to use Namecheap in the future.
The dashboard is, frankly, out of date compared to the UI experience people would expect from us in 2015. We're building that right now.
And we plan to support TOTP 2FA, so you don't necessarily have to rely on SMS at all.
But noted. Just wait -- we've got some pretty cool things in store for you.
As a sysadmin who deals with your website a lot, I actually like the current management UI.
Yes, it could use a few tweaks here and there, but overall I quite like it. I hate websites that update their user interface and hurt my ability to get things done.
I use another registrar for some of my .de domains, and their web interface is horrible. I have ongoing issues with their interface not saving changes to my zone because the button says the zone was saved when it wasn't.
tl;dr - The current interface doesn't look nice but it works damn well and I can find everything. Please don't ruin usability in the new version. I care more about functionality than looks.
1. a "power user" interface, stripped down, that allows for the fastest ways to do XYZ (key bindings, fast client-side validation, batch uploads, etc).
2. a "first timer" interface, with explanatory info, slower pace so people don't feel like they're getting overwhelmed or pushed in to something, etc.
I've yet to see any registrar do this. Many do offer APIs, which, for developer power users, might be sufficient. I'd suggest to this company that they perhaps keep the current version as a fallback to the existing power users that already know how to 'get things done' with it; maybe not forever, but for a while so they can learn the new interface on their own schedule at the very least.
It's a minor quip (and just one off the top of my head), granted, and otherwise I'm a happy customer, but am very tempted to migrate as well as my domains come up for renewal.
Any screenshots or other indications of where you might be going?
NameCheap is better than most, though. The only reason I don't keep a lot of domains with you is price. Your renewal fee's are significantly higher than budget registrars like Dynadot. And when you own a lot of domains, that extra 10% adds up fast.
Like others have said, it's mainly that the interface looks and feels like something circa 2001. I inevitably click into the wrong menu/interface/page for something I want to do, and it just feels inefficient whenever I want to get something done.
The old interface within the redesign is jarring and, as you know, that old interface is pretty ugly! I love how it will show me the first 10 in a listing and then offer paging rather than showing 100 or all by default. Will be happy to have that fixed.
Other than that, I have at times found the split between the old (customer) and new (sales) interfaces confusing. I'll often be clicking through SSL info in the sales interface when I'm trying to remember where to get my client SSL lists.
Apart from that, I've been happy with the pricing and when I've needed support via live chat it's been really polite and quick. I recommend Namecheap despite that interface issue.
So, if Google is so interested in seeing universal HTTPS, what sort of SSL cert carrot will they provide to their registered domains to go along with the Page Rank stick?
That's quite the Google way, they are not looking for the one-time immediate profit, but for customers that will somehow generate income in the long term. It seems it's not working bad for them.
$12 is really expensive...
It seems to me that Google is just trying to throw their enormous weight into every space now and it sickens me. This is how we end up with mediocre goods and services... No thanks Google.
They are much, much more than a monopoly at this point.
Not to mention, with Namecheap, GoDaddy or really any other company, you can probably get ahold of tech support 24/7. Good luck getting that from Google... Not that I've tried yet, but my experience with them in the past has been that it's mission impossible to talk to a human being in charge of something there, unless you're trying to hangout with the devs on Google+ or something for smalltalk, which seems to always be available.
Am I missing something...? I didn't realise this was a problem - I've never used a domain provider that doesn't let you do this. I currently use Namecheap, which certainly do.
Very few of those services have a good way of dealing with "No, that wasn't their email address they signed up with, it was an alias of mine". And while for some of these, I could presumably click the "forgot password" link and go into their account, I'm not sure that would be legitimate and wouldn't know what their correct email was to change it.
On the marketplace, your display name is the same as the username. What a security risk.
And most of all: why charge at all for the domain name privacy option? As if this is such a costly tech thing to accomplish.
1: https://internetbs.net/domain_names_usd.html
Who shat in your cocopops?
Agree though - clear instructions are missing.
https://twitter.com/geeknik/status/555150703090364416
Soon enough you will store your website entirely on SERPs. Instant load times will mean better user experience. A to Z solution will ease up developers life.
(edit: actually, they'd never voluntarily transfer your domain; they'd force you to transfer it, at some kind of discount. suffice to say i am less than confident)
Adding support for more .bullshit TLD's that no one cares about?
Connecting to Blogger?
Yawn...
So much for being an early adopter :|
You, like me, was an early adopter which provided the platform with traction when it was new.
Now the platform is proven, established and popular.
From an economic point of view we're now merely free-loading leeches, and I honestly don't find it reasonable to expect that we should be given the best treatment at the expense of others.
Google now has a shitload of paying customers, and they are getting prioritized. And I'm completely fine with that. Our reward is that unlike others, we're allowed to go free-loading!
I've noticed too that I'm not getting features and upgrades paying customers get. That's Google trying to give me an incentive to convert to a paid account, because obviously Google wants to convert us free-loaders to paying customers too. And I'm fine with that as well.
Just don't act entitled because you were the first one to sign up for a free product. You don't deserve anything in return for that.