Tell HN: Transfer your Google domain to other registrar before it locks you out | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Transfer your Google domain to other registrar before it locks you out

150 pointssaradhi94 comments

I have been running imagetoexcel.com registered with Google Domain. The service is live since May 2019 with 1000 DAUs. I have auto-renewal turned on, so every year it renews for one year charging my credit card linked in the account. I lost my cards in February, so I had to block my cards with the bank. Apparently, in May, Google Services tried to take the payment and hit a bad response from the Payment. I received an email stating the same, so when I tried to add a new card(s) it threw an error `OR-HDT-09`. Understandably they had to verify me and asked me to submit my ID, which I did. Two weeks to date no response from the Google Pay services, even on the follow-up. Now the site is down.

As a precautionary step, I've transferred my 4 other domains to the porkbun, which was super easy. I just thought of informing fellow hacker news followers to keep them out in such a situation.

View on HN

Anything registered with Google seems like such a risk nowadays.

A friend’s business site which I help with got removed from Google Business without warning or any known reason 2 weeks ago(they’ve been listed for over 2 years with no changes to the listing in that time). The company already lost over 50% of their regular leads during their normal peak time(it’s a junk hauling business) since their business page accounted for most of their organic searches. Even though Google states an appeal response normally takes 3 days, they haven’t heard anything for going on 2 weeks now.

This whole ordeal led me to begin forwarding all my existing emails to my own custom domain on Fastmail since seeing the result of these arbitrary bans firsthand really drove home the risk you take when using Google services. Unfortunately for my friend’s business, they really have no other options to get as much exposure for their business as a Google business listing provides.

I'm sure fastmail are great folks but if everyone who feels nervous because of Google's shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn't really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.

Definitely. I’m sure there’s other great email providers and would recommend people do their research :) I just already use Fastmail and while I was already forwarding some emails there, this just expedited the full migration.

This keeps being bandied around as a reason to NOT switch to Fastmail, but the truth of the matter is: if I need to get in touch with Fastmail support, I can. Easily.

That itself makes up the difference.

Admittedly, the more important part is maintaining your own custom domain, so you can switch email providers with a simple DNS update.

This is the difference. There was something fastmail was doing that I didn't like and someone followed up with me to find out what's going on and try to solve my problem for me. It was also someone with real knowledge and power to get something done as well.

Yup- I've used fastmail for about three years now (previously I self hosted).

What OP is missing is that the "single provider" is about bundling dns, email, hosting, etc together. If you use Fastmail by itself and something happens to Fastmail you can change your email provider pretty easily. I do regular backups of my email anyways, so I'm not locked into Fastmail at all.

Using GMail and having your domain registered with Google means that if something bad happens and Google locks you out you are simply screwed with no recourse except running a PR campaign to hopefully get someone's attention. Even pretending like Google and Fastmail are the same (they aren't, Fastmail actually offers real support) these are still very very different scenarios.

There are also various regional email providers around the world with good pricing and good track record.

Decoupling email and domain names is an added layer of protection. If Fastmail isn’t reachable then you can port your domain elsewhere, however your domain remains a big risk.

For me the point is that if you're choosing a service provider whose only offering is that particular service (e.g. Fastmail, pCloud, domain.com, ...) then the chances of being treated as a customer and getting some level of service are orders of magnitude higher.

Fastmail support is actually responsive. Let's run this argument again if their reputation worsens.

There are two problems. One is reliance on a single provider and the other, much larger, problem to rely on a provider who makes opaque decisions that screw over their customers and don't have anyone you can talk to. That latter problem seems almost exclusive to Google.

> if everyone who feels nervous because of Google's shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn't really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.

In these discussions it's not really about the volume of people using a single provider, but about individual users relying on a single provider to perform multiple functions.

So the issue of over-reliance on a single provider is usually in the context of that provider being in a situation to take offence at something unrelated and apply penalties that impact other things you actually rely on.

For example Google don't like something you do related to YouTube or AdSense and they kill your account. Now you've got no email and your domain expires as you can't pay for it.

In these kinds of cases it exactly solves the problem as the vital stuff is not affected by shenanigans with the everyday stuff because you've spread the functions across multiple providers.

My rule of thumb is that any organization playing-as-registrar, who is not deathly afraid of getting a reputation as a bad registrar, have no reason to not become a bad registrar.

In practice, this means that organizations like Google and Cloudflare, for whom the registrar business is either a cost center or at best a drop in the bucket for their revenue (and likely the pet project of a small team that is almost certainly being reallocated away from it in this economic climate), aren't registrars I would use or recommend. They can be great for other services though, where there's alternatives if there should ever be a disruption to one's account!

Back in the 2000s it used to be common advice to tell people never host anything with their registrar- your registrar should basically just be your registrar and nothing else. This way issues with your hosting (or email) can be resolved by changing providers. I think it's time to start handing this advice out again.

This guidance has never changed, IME.

Hosting and domains can be two different products, and you can just switch hosting, right? All registrars I have seen allow custom DNS so this should not be an issue.

Yeah that's the point.

They do need to keep dabbling as registrar in order to operate .dev. that's some incentive for them to not kill off the service.

Enjoying all the benefits of an otherwise-great Internet service, but where a random false positive from automation may destroy you any minute, is the modern-day version of the Sword of Damocles[1] parable. You can't really depend on any of these services, because you never know when the strand of hair will break and the sword will come down.

Self-hosting and/or moving to smaller, less full-featured hosted services, is a lot more work, but I rest easy at night knowing that my self-hosted services are always going to work.

1: https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-sword-of-damocles

Sorry to hear, and good warning for anyone still relying on Google for anything critical really (business or personal).

The moral here I'd say is transfer any service you have with a company that doesn't even have the possibility of customer-service, with everything running with crappy ml models (that get them probably around 40% accuracy and product managers are fighting about how/who can fix it, or even if they should).

Leave any company that has automated customer service with AI.

+1 hate when your companies HR tools use this crappy AI stuff and you are stuck trying to figure how in the hell to get help, spending hours and hours finding out how to get help because your issue wasn't one of the 3 things the AI was made to answer (and AI is such a generous term, its more like a dialogue game)

Something's wrong at Google. I was trying to setup my new startup with a project on GCP and had a very similar problem. I was told to go to a page, upload my ID and wait. Four weeks went by without an answer. Finally, I opened a customer support ticket and got a response 3 days later that said they'd asked the other group to validate my account. Another day passed and I was approved to give them money.

Lol, no. I had long since taken my business elsewhere.

I do consulting and use GCP on behalf of clients so I’ve been through this process of creating a new account about half a dozen times now, and your experience is mine, every time. Blocked, submit information to verify identity, hear nothing back, chase, eventually get chastised for chasing in the wrong way / submitting to the wrong people, and eventually manage to get approved.

Google are famous for bad support so it’s not surprising but it’s perplexing that it is so consistently bad. I continue to use GCP though and know I’ll someday be paying for trusting Google despite constant reminders not to.

And yet they wonder why they've failed to surpass AWS and have fallen to #3 in the cloud space.

This whole thing and the stories from others have made me so nervous that I'm moving my personal stuff off of Google, too. Future tech decisions I make will likely exclude Google. They don't seem to understand how devastating this will be for them.

This is hilarious to me because that means GCP is worse than Alibaba Cloud.

AWS -> near instant

Alibaba Cloud -> some shenanigans with the business cert but done in two days

GCP -> apparently four weeks?!

LOL!

Google marked my Google Payments account as fraud for some unknown reason last year and it won't allow me to put in a credit card. They have a form I've filled out 2-3 times that requires my Drivers License, etc. I've never received a response and I still can't add a credit card.

This broke my Gmail account (I was over the free limit) and I had to migrate everything to fastmail and delete a ridiculous amount of mail.

This also broke my domains DNS resolution, I had no idea my custom domain didn't have mail flowing until people told me they were getting bouncebacks.

This broke all of my app subscriptions.

Since then I've de-googled everything, including my phone. The only thing I can't get off is SSO but I use email as much as possible now. If they nuke my SSO login I will be screwed.

Literal same issue. I messed up the payments, got marked as some type of fraud, and have had no luck in resolving it

I started moving everything off of Google last year. Two months ago I finally moved the last piece, which was my domain. There's just too many of these Google horror stories. To lose access to your most important account, with no recourse, because of an innocent slip up (or even something completely out of your control) is unacceptable.

Its amazing how Google transformed itself from "a convenient place to centralize my digital life", to "I've made a huge mistake" this quickly.

Don't ever trust your business, hobby, important services to a company without a working customer support. Mistakes do happen, and when they happen, you need someone to react quickly.

Since I moved my custom domain mail hosting out of Google, I don't have to worry anymore. I finally put my Google password in a password manager, since I don't use it that often.

Nowadays, I would recommend using Google account only for a throwaway stuff, like setting up a new Android phone, E-Mail used for spam, etc, ... for anything real, thanks but no thanks.

I currently host my custom domain email at Google, and am thinking of switching for this very reason. Do you recommend any specific email providers with reliable customer service?

Fastmail has been great since I've switched to them, and others seem to agree. I know a lot of people also like ProtonMail but I don't have much personal experience with them.

I went with https://mailfence.com a small Belgian provider called. I needed to contact their support only once, and they were prompt and helpful. The only shortcoming compared to Gmail is their web interface is a bit minimalistic, but fully functional and incredibly fast, also on mobile.

Other mentioned Fastmail, which is also fine as a provider, but I somehow trust EU / Belgian regulations more than Australian.

EDIT: Replied to the wrong post, I wanted to actually reply to the parent post.

I've been a ProtonMail paid subscriber with a custom domain for several years. Very happy customer, wouldn't go anywhere else. I haven't needed to contact customer support often, but service was good the few times I did.

Something tangentially related happened to me: After my wife's card was cloned and used, I decided to block all my cards. My banks allow me to use their app to block and unblock my cards at will. So I decided to block all of them and then only unblock them when I am going to use them.

I got a surprise that *most companies, including Google!! do not support this*. Apparently, Tidal, Google (all Google related billing including Youtube, Google Domains, etc), DigitalOcean, among others attempt to bill you at some random time during the night/early-morning. Of course when they tried to charge my card the payment was rejected as it was blocked.

I contacted all those services asking them the process to actively perform the payment (like, me clicking a button so that they could charge me), but they DON'T have that option. AWS surprised me, because they DO have an option to charge on demand.

How is it possible that something so simple like that is not commonplace? So now, I have to leave one card unblocked, exposed to being stolen, so that all these half cooked services can bill me (I got several warnings from Google Domains saying that my payment could not be processed). At the end, I left a card with $500 USD limit permanently unlocked... but I shouldn't have to.

DigitalOcean do support paying on demand in the form of depositing a balance via paypal. Just add more balance when it's almost run out.

I had a google ads account and I misconfigured the payment details. Something in my configuration google didnt like, and it banned me for life from using Google Ads until I "resolve the issue". The domains I was trying to advertise on are also banned from being used on Google Ads. There's no one to contact, no response, just rejections and no answers.

That is why monopolies need a regulator to arbitrate these kind of problems

The annoying part is I am trying to give them my money. But they wont even say whats wrong, just that something is wrong. Tons of posts on reddit and elsewhere with the same issue

That arbitrator used to be the government, then google became a surveillance tool, and one hand washes the other. Microsoft should have played ball earlier with the agencies, and maybe we'd not be having to deal with IE deprecation this week.

Or just anti-trust actions.

I wonder if consumer protection agencies can do anything.

State level ones may exist, but maybe we can convince the CFPB to strongarm corporations into the desired compliance over matters like this

I cant edit the post, hence posting an update

I guess this has brought the attention at the Google. The verification is done. I was able to renew immediately. The site is up and running now. I am going to transfer this domain too under porkbun.

Congrats.

On a lighter note, another anecdote to validate the need for "Complain on HN as a service" (COHNaaS) (or COSMaaS for more generic service posting complaints to twitter/fb as well) which seems to be the only way to get any sort of customer service these days! ;)

My mum's phone was stolen last week, got her a new phone two days later but couldn't login to her gmail account while setting up the new phone.

I created the email myself, so I retrieved her password from bitwarden but couldn't login. Confused, I tried the same password multiple times, then tried the 'forgot password' feature, entered her phone number and got another shock when google asked me to get a code from my samsung galaxy S20 app - I don't use galaxy.

Google refused to send a reset code to her phone number even when I provided the original password.

Turns out she needed some contacts the previous day and asked my siblings for help. They used the forgot password feature, got a code through the retrieved SIM card, changed the password and logged in through an app on a samsung galaxy phone.

It's crazy, someone who didn't know the password could change it. But I who had both the original password and the SIM card but couldn't.

We'd have lost her contacts if it was thief who changed her password before we retrieved her SIM card.

This scares me. I have a .dev domain, though managed through Cloudflare. I feel like I should get another from another gTLD not owned by Google...

What do you all think, are the .dev domains safe enough?

Safe enough. These sort of issues are rare enough that I don't think you have anything to worry about.

The issues themselves may be rare, but abysmal customer support is quite typical from Google. And if there's one thing you can't just pack up and leave is DNS.

I'd rather not have to worry about some algorithm deciding to throw a fit and locking me out without any chance of recourse other than hoping a Googler reads my woes on Twitter or Hacker News. So I guess I wonder about some requirements from ICANN or some guarantees in this regard from Google

Wait, you are using cloudflare as your .dev registrar or just DNS? My CF dash still shows my .dev domains as unsupported for transfer in.

Sorry, I mean just the DNS itself, the nameservers point to Cloudflare

In that case you should def transfer your domains out of google registrar, I would recommend porkbun.

At work we had an entire .dev domain nuked at the registrar level by google because a developer generated some traffic google didn't like on a subdomain. They replaced the ENTIRE domain with a google phishing warning page with no way to bypass to get to the actual site.

It took multiple days to resolve the phishing false positive and restore the domain, if it had been our main domain it would have a major emergency at work.

Porkbun does not sell `.nl` tld / domains... weird.

Google keeps shooting itself in the foot.

Trying to save a lousy dollar here and there they're destroying billions of dollars of goodwill that'll be hard, slow and expensive to rebuild.

Paying Google for things was a massive pain in the ass for us at times too, until we were "big enough". I don't know exactly how we earned the privilege of easy payments, and there may have been some decision other than a mechanical threshold.

That's for work. On a personal level, I block their ASes at my router.

The problem with Google is that not only are they too big to fail but their main business is advertising - paid Google services are peanuts in comparison that doesn't even make it worthwhile for them to care about paid customers.

My personal policy is: only relay on national enterprises, possibly NOT much big, who happen to have a phone line with some humans on the other side. That's is. A secondary policy is NOT relaying (as possible) on a single company. For domains that means use different companies on different domains and advertise up front your other domains on all of them as possible so third parties can know what to do if something goes wrong.

Not complex, not complicated, not much expensive.

Yeah I'm on the edge too about domains. Will be switching to Gandi I think. I honestly don't know any good registrars at the moment.

I’ve been satisfied with Dynadot.

I've had a good experience with DNSimple. Gandi is okay too. Porkbun is frequently mentioned on HN so could be a good option as well.

Classic Google support...there are no humans

Ah ha, they wouldn't let you pay and then they blocked you for not paying? Bad scene, man. Part of the whole problem with the Google thing is that they unify payments across all properties but they're rubbish about doing it.

They have a good interface for buying domains, but thanks for this warning.

Just called Porkbun and got a human on the first try, sounds like a good place to move to.

Kind of funny to see this site sort of become a Google complaint forum, haha.

I’d love to transfer my remaining domains to iwantmyname, but their 2fa uses SMS, so it’s subject to trivial SIM-swap attacks :( Considering my domain is used for my email address, that’s a huge issue.

FWIW, we have ToTP 2FA at DNSimple, and we're prepping launch of FIDO support as well (feature is dark launched internally).

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

Are there any alternatives that people are fond of? I’ve been on Google domains so long I’m not sure what the playing field looks like these days.

I've found name cheap rather good. But the problem is the long tail situation. Most of us won't encounter these problems so it's more a question of which registrar deals with problems well.

porkbun is great.

I’ve had a pretty good experience with Route53 on AWS. However, as with all things on the AWS console, it is very configurable and thus can be a bit confusing and over complicated.

I’d be interested in hearing about other smaller services that work well.

gandi.net has been around for a very long time

Cloudflare has full registrar services now, along with email forwarding. I've been moving everything off Enom to them as renewals come up

While I use and enjoy their other services, I would advice taking this incident into consideration about their registrar services that "prevents transfer-out of domains, sets to 'pendingdelete'"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353

Considering cloudflare registrar doesn't even let you change your nameservers, saying they have "full registrar services" is a bad joke. They also don't support a lot of TLDs.

I would highly recommended porkbun over CF for registrar services.

I'd recommend Namecheap, they have active customer support. Only minus is I couldn't use Let's Encrypt with them.

Why couldn’t you use LetsEncrypt with them? I’ve been using and recommending Namecheap for years and I’ve never had a problem setting up LetsEncrypt on any domains through them.

they've cancelled their Russian and Belarusian customers. and while I personally couldn't care less about either of the three countries involved in a war half a world away, I would prefer not giving my personal details and stewardship of my valuable assets to an activist company if I had any choice, and there are plenty to choose from

They're predominantly Ukrainian in staffing, so I suspect this is less activism and more just a consequence of whom they employ, but the point is taken. I wonder if a broader employee base means less activism (no single dependency) or more activism (more likely that any specific employee has trouble).

I am also a Namecheap customer. But unfortunately I stopped trusting the company after I tried to register a domain and they prevented it, claiming that it is a 'premium' [5 letters] domain. Note: I created the domain from scratch and with 100% certainty that it is (was) unpublished [aucky.com, for an auction site].

I tried to reason with Richard [CEO who says to be 'open' to user input], but I didn't even get a robotic response.

The truth is that the web environment is totally corrupted and the domain registration process seems like something under the control of the mafia. A refoundation of the network is in order.

Disclosure: The domain is registered on the excellent and unbiased Registro.br [unfortunately below the top level .com]. Namecheap allowed me to create aucky.live and aucky.app. I want my aucky.com. (*)The service proper is in the making.

> Only minus is I couldn't use Let's Encrypt with them.

If you mean namecheap doesn't support letsencrypt DNS-01 challenge, you can still buy your domain in namecheap but point your NS somewhere else that support DNS-01 challenge (e.g. cloudflare, Route53, or even Google Cloud DNS).

Most letsencrypt clients uses HTTP-01 challenge though, which doesn't care about who's hosting your dns.

I’ve been using Gandi since 2009 and I don’t have any complaints https://www.gandi.net/en

I have been using Gandi (1) for the last yen years or so and have been very happy with them. I originally went with them because they were one of the few registrars that did the .cat TLD. I liked the experience and eventually transferred all of my domains to them.

They are a french company. Their slogan is "No Bullshit," (2) and I think they've done a decent job of living up to that.

My only frustration has been a situation where I was transferring an existing domain over to them. I wanted to create the zone file ahead of time so that when the transfer happened, there would be an identical zone file ready to go. But they wouldn't allow me to create a zone file for a domain that hadn't transferred over to them yet. Since I'm not doing anything critical with my domains, it was just an annoyance, but that would be a show-stopper for some.

As it pertains to billing problems, they allow you to pre-pay a chunk of money to your account. (They take PayPal.) It deducts from that amount when domains renew. That provides a buffer if you need to cancel your credit card.

Also, on the occasions that I have created trouble tickets, they have been responded to in a reasonable amount of time with helpful information.

(1) https://www.gandi.net (2) https://www.gandi.net/en/no-bullshit

I’ve been a happy customer of Gandi for 6-7 years. I originally chose them because I operate my own DNS server on my VPS and Gandi made it easy to add a glue record for the primary nameserver and they provide a free secondary nameserver¹ but these features wouldn’t be something that 99% of customers need nor want.

On that note, their secondary nameserver suited my needs until I started using DNS authentication for Let’s Encrypt wild-card certificates. Their secondary nameserver only supports requesting a full zone transfer (AXFR) every half hour or so. For some reason, they don’t use IXFR or – what would be more useful to me – DNS NOTIFY. This means that the secondary name server lags behind the primary nameserver by about half an hour. This results in the Let’s Encrypt DNS authentication failing randomly, depending on whether they checked the primary or secondary nameserver for the authenticating TXT records. I plan to move the `_acme-challenge.example.com` to a different zone that doesn’t use the secondary nameserver but I haven’t got around to it yet.

Otherwise, I’ve been very happy with Gandi.

¹ https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/advanced_users/second...

Curious… i see .eu, .nl, and .de domains on Gandi cost like 3 times as much (€15 vs €5) compared to for example inwx.com or strato.com.

What is the reason, surely there must be some service/quality difference or… something?

Before yesterday, I would have said Cloudflare. But after (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31573854) and (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353), I'm planning to transfer out of Cloudflare. Probably Namecheap or Porkbun.

+1 I've been starting to consolidate to Porkbun as of those last threads. They support all the TLDs I have except one, the only provider to have that many. They're also local to me which feels nice.

I've had good experiences with hover.com

I've been using inwx.de since 2015, and they've been around for longer. The couple times I wanted something from support, they've been swift and helpful. My biggest criticism is that the API lacks the ability to do any sort of fine grained access control and you have to go through support to get a separate account that is limited to DNS configuration, for example.

Depends on how big your system is. Losing rights on your domain is a real risk, especially at the highest levels, and some of the big players have taken bold steps to reduce this risk.

There exist some companies who specialize in protecting domain names. Not just from fradulent transfer attempts, but also from bad corporate actors (like Google, Cloudflare?, etc). The two ones I know of are Mark Monitor and AppDetex, though I'm sure there's others. [AppDetex is a former client of mine].

As a related comment said - if the registrar you're using isn't afraid of a bad reputation (Google, etc) then you probably should think of using one that is.

Not the cool kids, I know, but I've never had issues with Moniker after many years and many domains.

GoDaddy just for domain registrar and DNS (no other services). It has performed solidly for many, many years, Can reach helpful humans in support.

I've got my personal domain in Google Domains, and the only "custom" feature I use is that they can forward email addresses to some other address. I wonder if there is any other DNS provider that has the same feature?

Multiple providers. Porkbun does it. Cloudflare even supports it (although they are a bit persona non grata as far as registrars go on HN)

ITT we can recommend your favorite alternative registrars.

I'm invested: I have a lot of domains on Google and would rather not lose them!

Anyone using aws workmail ? How has been the experience ? i think Aws uses gandi for domain registration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com