Google Apps Botches Domain Renewals, Websites Go Dark | Hacker News Reader

Google Apps Botches Domain Renewals, Websites Go Dark

discuss.joelonsoftware.com

72 pointspatio1119 comments

As others have said, never ever ever use google as your domain registrar. In general, you usually don't want to buy a domain name "bundled" with other services such as google apps or hosting. (Note: Dreamhost is a terrible host, but a decent registrar.)

Always always keep control over your DNS. If this guy was hosting with Slicehost or Linode, he would've had the option to point the MMX records anywhere he liked, and problem solved (or at least, temporarily contained.)

Lastly, I can say from personal experience that Google's support is shockingly bad. It is a deep and twisted warren of blind alleys, misinformation, and a million different paths that all end in "fuck you". You will not contact a human. There are no humans. Thousands of genius engineers engineered teh googelz to be perfect and human free for your utopian pleasure, and then they spent all day riding around on bikes and playing ping pong and eating free food and getting massages and inventing world-changing things. They're better than you. Google doesn't have problems. Ever. You must have done something wrong.

Please wait 5 days, and try again. If you continue getting this error, please contact support. Sorry, support is only available to Premium customers. Would you like to purchase Premium service? To purchase Premium service, simply log into your domain. Sorry, that domain is no longer active; if you have recently changed that domain, please wait 5 days, and try again. Contact support if you have any questions.

Their approach to customer service is to send their customers in circles until they give up. It's evil. Very extremely cruel and evil.

I use google apps for two of my domains. What can I say, their software is very well designed, and on the net balance, it's easier to manage than postfix. But the lack of support is a major down side, certainly. I wouldn't even consider paying a dime for any of their services without seeing some huge changes in their approach.

I do have paid premium and a good amount of users, and support also was frustating when it came to a certain fairly technical problem to do with DKIM/DomainKeys signed emails being silently discarded. It went on and on in circles and even when escalated to "engineering" they failed to understand the problem. Finally I ended up implementing a horrible hack to receive the email.

Mind you, we have a fairly esoteric mail forwarding setup, but still one that their support documents describe as possible.

Haing said that I've been happy with how Gmail has been compared to a traditional UNIX-based setup in administration and would not want any other email interface.

That I wouldn't even consider paying for the Google Apps suite is why I've moved away from using their free service to Postfix and Dovecot. You may find Postfix admin less of a pain with http://sourceforge.net/projects/postfixadmin/

Holy crap, you mean I shouldn't use a company that isn't a domain registrar as my domain registrar?! This is like complaining when you get a dedicated server from GoDaddy -- they're a fine registrar, but a completely horrible host and many employees will tell you not to order servers from them.

There's a reason that no company can truly "do it all" -- it's just too difficult and quality starts to suffer. Google does e-mail pretty well, which is really the only thing we use the Premier Apps for.

You're right about GoDaddy doing domains well, and not much else. Their hosting is the worst. However, other simple services like domains, for example: SSL certs are also done well.

Actually Google makes it pretty clear that they aren't a domain registrar, and their sign-up process used to encourage you to get a domain before you get started. I am curious as to why they don't serve as domain registrar. I actually have my Google Apps domain through Yahoo, who used to host my mail....

This must incredibly frustrating, but I don't think it has anything to do with Gmail, Calendar, etc. It sounds as though it's a domain registration problem due to Google acting as a domain reseller for eNom, or something. If anything, the lesson is, "don't use Google as a registrar", though I suppose you could argue that the bad support is an overall issue.

In general, I would avoid any of these reseller situations, since the error could occur in multiple places and both parties would probably assume that it's the other's fault.

Counterargument: Obtaining the usually-excellent reliability and stability that Google usually offers would be time-consuming, difficult, and a distraction. Sure I could set up a server with Postfix et al, but there's no way I'd be more reliable than Google without investing a substantial amount of time, money, and energy.

I don't want to spend my time maintaining a mail server. Let someone else do that.

I 100% agree with you, which is why I use them for email. But if they were to drop my business off the Internet for days at a time and make it impossible for me to get in touch with them, I'd be a little more concerned with that than with sporadic email downtime.

Agreed. I was in the process of moving our small set of users to Google Apps Premier. The phone support and quick response time was crucial to convincing my boss to allocate the funds. I think such a change:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid...

is a dramatic change in the product. Hopefully they will give me a refund.

I'm confused. The links and text in the page you link to all say that Phone support is still available, just you have to login to a support page and enter some pin and then you get the number. Is this not true?

> the usually-excellent reliability and stability that Google usually offers

This is most of why I put aside my reservations and used them as a registrar intermediate. I am quite sure I said to myself, "well, you can trust Google".

My domain expires in March. Bad news for me. Bad news for Google too. I can't trust them implicitly any more. I'm sure anyone else who is in the crosshairs on this issue feels the same.

I agree. It never occurred to me that Google would manage to screw something up as fundamental as making sure domain renewals worked properly. Of course, given the recent issues we've seen reported with SSL certificates being allowed to expire (GrandCentral comes to mind), maybe we should be more worried.

I have one domain registered with them, and supposedly I should be able to transfer the domain to another one of my registrar accounts (I can unlock the domain and receive the authorization code, transaction ID, and security code), but something keeps rejecting the transfer. Let's see how long it takes to work through this!

I've been usign Google Apps for the past year or so for my email host. Though I have my registration and DNS with GoDaddy, I'm terrified of Google shutting me off one day and having no recourse other than to reroute everything and suffer the downtime.

I realize this was a registration issue, but when I keep reading horror stories about people being shut out of their accounts and having no one to talk to at the Big G, I think it's time to look elsewhere.

Does anyone know of a good email-only host that has a good admin interface, support, etc?

If you're worried about it, I'd upgrade to the paid version, which seems to have at least a modicum of support.

I have a bunch of domains registered with them - it's so easy, isn't full of spammy ads like godaddy, and the extra stuff just makes it even better. Now I'm getting nervous, though... I wanted to sell a domain, and the Google 'support' guy was completely clueless. Luckily it was nothing important, but I am now looking for a way out:-/

If you're running a serious business you should really be using a dedicated management company for your domains.

We use CSC (www.cscprotectsbrands.com) who bought the enterprise domain management business from Register.com

I also recommend using a dedicated DNS company like UltraDNS.

You get what you pay for.

Yeah, the bottom line is that things go wrong with Apps from time to time, and there are no human beings working there that you can talk to without upgrading your service.

I can't log in to the Apps account for one of my domains, and their error page says that no domain exists by that name, even though they are hosting email for it. It's a 30 second fix for anybody willing to look at it. But since I'm not paying for the premium account, nobody will even respond to my support mail.

We use a hosted exchange server, costs $8/mo per user. Gives free Outlook/Entourage, has pretty solid web access (similar to hotmail) and best of all, if something goes wrong, we can leave and take our MX records with us with relatively little pain. Oh wait, I lied, best of all is free ActiveSync.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com