If you wanted good customer support you shouldn't have gone with Google. There are plenty of other more reputable domain regrestrars.
The same message could also be worded more like "once you get past this, I'm sure you're already considering moving registrars. But please let us know if the support you're receiving from them is as bad as (my experience / reputation / etc.)".
I am a fan of NameCheap personally.
I've been using them for years, and never had any technical issues...
Better than what Google Domains did to Gitbook.
Something similar happened to me – Namecheap dumped the wrong (private) information into WHOIS immediately after a redesign of their systems. It definitely was not user error.
Dealing with Namecheap's customer support to try to resolve this was possibly the worst customer support experience I've had in 20+ years in the tech industry. Lots of lies about getting back to me the next day, passing the buck, blaming everybody but themselves, extended periods of flat-out ignoring me, and eventually a complete inability to fix it.
I've been a happy user of Hover ever since, but I'm unable to recommend them – ironically because nothing has ever gone wrong with them. I used to recommend Namecheap until that nightmare happened, then I found out just how shockingly useless they are when it comes to customer support and privacy. Ever since, I only recommend services where something has gone wrong so that I know they are capable of resolving problems well. I regret ever recommending Namecheap and don't want to make the same mistake again.
Some more Namecheap horror stories here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18087862
It's cheap, at-cost, and they support a lot of the new TLDs like .io which is also a lot cheaper.
That to me is a downside since that means that that is not a core part of their business. Financially, it makes no difference to them if I use their service or not.
I would rather pay a little extra to a company that has domain registration as a core part of their business and actually makes a profit from me.
And domain names are cheap. Even if you pay twice as much as the cheapest service, it still will not make any difference in your bottom line.
I know the concern of putting all your eggs in one basket is real, but since CF's business is literally to take over your domain DNS and slap on some add-on services, adding domain registration in-house seems like a good fit.
You can avoid this issue by going with a registrar that focuses on bulk domain sales (eg. internet.bs in my case, but there are more, like eNom I think?), as they have a high-enough volume that they can easily stay afloat even when charging reasonable prices and without aggressive upsells.
It's mostly the consumer-focused "$1 for the first year" registrars like GoDaddy that you want to stay away from. Those are the really problematic ones.
> but since CF's business is literally to take over your domain DNS and slap on some add-on services, adding domain registration in-house seems like a good fit.
Sure, if you want to send all the traffic of all of your users through a man-in-the-middle US-based company with a very dubious past and a questionable business model revolving around basically centralizing the internet.
It's not a great recommendation to make. It also raises the question of why they seem intent on killing off the registrar market by offering "at cost" (which honestly isn't much lower than what aforementioned internet.bs charges anyway).
Net result: You get the domain at your preferred registrar, but you get 90% of the savings you would have got if you had it at the cheap register.
You might want to pick another example, .io is 23 years old [0]
Same with .ai fwiw.
https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-ly/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/oct/08/bitly-lib...
Some random British company convinced IANA to let it run the .io domain for their own profit. Their operation of it has nothing to do with the interests of its exiled inhabitants (the Chagossians), the British territorial and military authorities, or the US military presence which constitutes the the territory's raison d'etre.
I think it likely that, one of these days, something is going to happen to the .IO ccTLD operators. Their rights to it are very dubious, and someone else (the British government, the government of Mauritius, the Chagossians) could end up wresting it from them.
(Disclaimer: I work there)
apple.com, twitter.com and ocado.com use CSC Corporate Domains [2]
I have no idea what such services charge, but they're all "call for pricing" and none of those companies would blink at spending $10k/year on their domains.
Not every well known brand uses such a service, though. bbc.com uses tucows, stackoverflow.com uses name.com and ycombinator.com uses gandi. facebook.com uses RegistrarSafe, a subsidiary of themselves, and almost every domain registrar is registered with themselves.
[1] https://markmonitor.com/ [2] https://www.cscglobal.com/global/web/csc//micro-domain-name-...
How recent is your experience with MarkMonitor?
Because 99% of people don't realise that their domain registrar holds the keys to their business's entire internet presence.
They can switch off your website/email at any time, with no real consequences apart from a little bit of bad PR if you have enough social media followers or post in the right forums where their staff hang out.
They can also do a shitty job of securing your domain, and let it get stolen/hijacked. The attacker then gets to set up their own MX records and collect all the password reset emails they triggered on every other important site, and pretty much own anything you doin't have 2FA set up on.
Anyone who doesn't think customer support from their business domain registrar is a thing worth paying for, most likely hasn't evaluated the risks properly.