Hacker News Reader

Comment by gogopuppygogo | Hacker News Reader

You get free email forwarding (even wildcard), free domain privacy, free website forwarding (with ssl), Google infrastructure behind all of that and the authoritative DNS they offer.

Cloudflare also offers a registrar service and its good.

View on HN

Second this. Transferred 8 domains a months ago from GoDaddy to Google.

GD was good when I was brainstorming ideas and wanted to buy domains for peace of mind just for $1.99 or some other big promo discount. But is goes to $22+ the next year, while the normal price is $12. Google.Domains offers flat $12 + lots of value in email forwarding et al. I used to add domains as aliases to my old free GSuite subscription just for emails, which was highly inconvenient. Also redirects from e.g. .org/.info/.net to .com is small but handy thing.

Last time I registered 3 domains with GD 3 months ago there was no promo give-away prices for the first year. Registered with them by inertia. But without almost free prices to "reserve" a domain dealing with GD makes no more sense.

One good thing about GD is that domain transferring from them to Google takes couple of clicks and is pretty fast. I did not have to leave my PC during the process - couple of page refreshes.

Cloudflare Registrar offers domains at cost, which makes it the least expensive option for the TLDs it supports:

https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/

If you use Google Domains, you risk losing access to the domains if Google suspends or terminates your Google account for some reason unrelated to the domains.

You can add multiple Google accounts to admin a domain. Increases the survivability of access to them.

They better not be on the same G Suite account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826368

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109809

Google Domains charges $12.00/year for .com renewals, compared to $8.56/year at Porkbun and $8.03/year at Cloudflare. With Google's reputation for poor support, most domain owners simply have no good reason to use Google Domains.

Interesting. I'd never considered Google for my domains.

Any idea if the '£10/year' is every year? Or does it go up after the first year?

Also, I found it weird that they promote a .app and .dev TLD as 'More Secure'.

I think all domains under `dev` have HSTS turned on.

They call them more secure because the whole TLD is on the HSTS preload list, so no downgrade attacks.

Which means that an SSL certificate is required

It’s the same every year. I’m sure they could raise the price later on, but if you’re that worried, you can extend your registration to 10 years for 10x the one-year price. And if they do end up raising the price, you can also transfer your domain away.

Does Cloudflare still require you to transfer in or can you actually buy domains from them directly now? The buy and then wait 90 days to transfer in thing is a hassle.

you can buy now but the tld is limited

how's google support?

It’s Google, I haven’t had any issue with the service and been using it since launch.

Biggest problem is that the site doesn’t work well in ios on iPhone so I use mobile chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com