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Comment by ep103 | Hacker News Reader

So now my domains can be hosted by a company famed for its responsive and transparent customer service!

Google: Our bot has blocked your domain for a specific reason. Please whine on hackernews and hope for frontpage to reach support.

Where can I get an invite code?

The bot will who get's an invitation code.

When dealing with Google Apps, if they are not satisfied that my issue is perfectly resolved in a very short period of time, they hunted me down until I confirmed that everything was working honkey dorey. That includes cold-calling me to ensure everything is good. Their support is top notch for paid products.

Yup, +1. I had a few questions during an Exchange to Google Apps migration last week, and I [voice] called support - they took my call, called back, followed up by email and voice and allowed me to re-open the case as required with related questions; all with the same support representative. Top notch, happy to be paying.

And what about the people who are paying by providing their information to Google for free? I don't see much support for them.

So don't use Google. Then you can stop whining.

That's not what "cold calling" means ...

Why so pedantic? It seems to me cold calling might as well mean any unprompted call...

But that's exactly it, the call isn't unprompted, it's to resolve an open incident. It's the opposite of a cold call.

But they did so when he least expected it!

Fine. Point is, they were proactive.

I had a dissimilar experience. I upgraded our account to the Apps for Business trial. Although it was neat, I didn't really need it - so when the trial ended, I decided to revert to my free account.

It turns out they don't let you do that. "Free trial" means 30 days free, then it's Apps for Business or no Apps at all.

I felt (and, to some extent, still feel) extorted by that. The customer service experience was extremely dissatisfying. So, will I eventually use Google Domains? Probably. I just won't depend on it without a failsafe - which is what I should have done since the beginning.

There is no free apps account and they make that pretty clear I don't see how you have a complaint to stand on, just about any service with a free trial means paid after the trial period is up.

They had a free tier for several years and people who had it are grandfathered in. Apparently you don't retain the grandfathered status if you want to try out the paid features though.

I am having that experience right now with Google Apps Mobile Device Management. I turned it on to do some testing, didn't realise that it 'autoenrolled' phones with existing accounts on that domain (There is a separate section for signing up phones that it looked like you had to go through). Now I've unticked every 'enable' box and tried to purge MDM from everywhere I can find it, but it still has the affected phones demanding to be signed up. I've lodged a support ticket, because there's a 'turn on' option, but doesn't seem to be a 'turn off'...

Similarly, if you have Apps for Business like we do, you don't get to see the history of your support cases - that's in the Google Enterprise Support Centre, which becomes available when your user count reaches 100. They did enable it when I asked for it, but it's just very odd that you can have a paid service like this, yet not see your case history unless you're 'big enough'. I don't understand why the case history triggers on '100 users' rather than 'is paying us money'.

Overall GApps is nice... but there are a lot of rough edges and corner cases.

I would far rather deal with Google than GoDaddy or some of the other domain registrants I've dealt with. I realize some people have had poor customer service experiences with Google, but mine have always been OK. Obviously I speak as a consumer, if I were running a business depending on Google services my support needs would be more urgent and my expectations higher.

I would rather deal with DNSimple than Google.

Try Hover. Customer support is great and there's zero up-selling when buying a domain. It's a couple dollars more than GoDaddy but more than worth it.

Hover is without a doubt the best domain registrar I've dealt with.

e: nevermind they fixed it

Domain name registrar like Hover, NameCheap, NameBright and NameSilo still do not yet support DNSSEC (nor have an ETA for it!). Here is a list of DNSSEC supporting registrars: https://www.icann.org/en/news/in-focus/dnssec/deployment

Based on pricing ($9.99/.com) and a growing irritation with GoDaddy, I finally moved my domains to Dynadot:

https://www.dynadot.com/

They have a (custom) 2FA app and 2FA SMS. BTW this friend referral https://www.dynadot.com/?s9N6j7d9G8B07i73 gives you & me $5 after purchase.

Dynadot doesn't support .io, looks like?

Correct, no .io support.

Are you doing anything interesting with DNSSEC?

Take a look at the RFCs coming out recently. DANE, in particular.

DNSSEC is an important trust root that can be used to pin certificates in addition to PKIX (CAs), or, in some practical cases (such as mailservers), instead of them.

Are you still running Telnet?

So you have deployed DNSSEC and are actively using DANE?

FWIW, I left Namecheap for GKG.net for the sole reason that Namecheap didn't support DNSSEC. And yes, I have deployed DNSSEC and DANE. On https for emailprivacytester.com, and on https, smtp, imap and xmpp for grepular.com.

Neat. It's probably difficult to tell but do you have any idea what usage is like?

I'm guessing for DNSSEC, the usage is probably low and for DANE it's probably almost non-existant.

FWIW, I use the Firefox addon "DNSSEC Validator" (also does DANE) - https://www.dnssec-validator.cz/ - So if somebody managed to MITM my connection and insert a different, but still trusted, cert in the way, I'd notice.

DNSSEC/DANE would probably see a lot more adoption if one or more of the main browsers did this sort of validation by default.

gkg.net supports a restful api to update DNSSEC DS records https://www.gkg.net/ws/ds.html FYI

Was this reply destined to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7934758

(Slightly confused by this board.)

That registrar list is way out of date. Sadly, none of the entities involved nor historical list maintainers have made it easy to find an updated one, but if they did, Joker would be on it.

https://joker.com/faq/content/6/461/en/dnssec-support.html

It was one of the few lists I found. Although the url redirects to an url containing 'deployment-2012-02-25-en' the page actually states 'Last updated: 27 May 2014', so it's not so out of date.

    If your registrar currently accepts DS records, please 
    send an email with subject "DNSSEC REGISTRAR UPDATE" 
    and body containing company name, country location, URL,
    what TLDs you accept DS records for, whether your Web
    interface supports DS records, whether you provide 
    DNSSEC signing services to dnssec@icann.org and the 
    Security team will add your registrar to this DNSSEC
    page.

I haven't had a bad experience with Google's technical support either, but their technical support tends to work like this:

1. Hunt for solutions to your problem on forums.

2. Discover the magic link where you can submit a form with a message regarding your problem.

3. Sit back and wait for 24 hours.

4. Your problem is resolved, and you may or may not receive an email stating that the issue was resolved.

Communication is completely one way for most products.

Google people are too busy driving their segways thinking of the next breakthrough to answer the phone or have passable customer service.

You have a strange definition of "support"

I had this experience when trying to verify my Google Wallet account and my Google Music membership due to their failures with Google Wallet. I had no way to pay for Google services for over a year. I also had problems upgrading my Google Drive disk space at some point, and it was again a matter of throwing an email into a hole and waiting for the problem to be fixed with very little feedback.

Others with the same issues:

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=google+wallet+account+v...

>I would far rather deal with Google than GoDaddy

Would you rather deal with Google as opposed to Namecheap? A great company with superb support that specializes in nothing but domain names and dedicated hosting?

I wouldn't.

If you register a domain with Google Sites you have have a choice: Enom or Godaddy.

Perhaps that has changed.

NameCheap still doesn't even have DNSSEC.

People have been asking for, what, five years now?

Support

With Google Domains, you get phone and email support (M-F, 9am to 9pm EST).

And if it goes down at 9:01pm?

No thanks. I'd rather have 24/7 support.

So your complaint is that a support line for businesses is only available during business hours.

I get calls at 3am for outages. Remind me what business hours are again?

Plenty of domain & DNS providers offer 24/7 x 365 support.

And... you think your call is going to make an outage get resolved quicker, or what do you want to call them for?

The callcenter agent will type your inquiry into the exact same ticket system that your email would have ended up in.

It isn't always a total outage. Sometimes it is just someone fat fingered something.

Or a badly seated network cable that managed to vibrate loose. Had that one happen to me, and there's absolutely nothing that can fix it other than feet on the ground.

Yes, when they type the ticket in it pages someone who can action it. They don't wait till 9am next morning to service the ticket. They get it done as humanly as possible.

EDIT: its not just for total system outages, it can be things which are localised to your cluster, or whatever - who knows. This is why these services are offered. To give those who need the piece of mind that if shit goes wrong, the company you're paying will deal with immediately.

If Google is positive that their services will be uninterrupted or error prone between 9pm and 9am then they should advertise so. Things happen. Things do go wrong, they should think about expanding their support teams in other international offices to have a good coverage for the world clock.

Yes, when they type the ticket in it pages someone who can action it. They don't wait till 9am next morning to service the ticket. They get it done as humanly as possible.

I'm not sure where you get that idea from but companies the size of google don't page engineers because of customer tickets, regardless of whether they're opened by a callcenter agent or e-mail.

Their callcenters process thousands of calls per hour. Yours is, quite literally, a drop in the bucket.

They have monitoring in place where one of the metrics is is elevated support inquiries. However, you only appear in that bucket after someone, and usually not the callcenter agent, has triaged your ticket.

> I'm not sure where you get that idea from but companies the size of google don't page engineers because of customer tickets, regardless of whether they're opened by a callcenter agent or e-mail.

Maybe not for a $12 domain registration but Amazon does in some cases.

I'm also pretty sure that is what Google's Cloud Platform Platinum offers if you are willing to pay enough. [This part is just a guess]

I give up. Some people here seem to really want to believe their calls are making a difference. I guess they do on an emotional level...

There are plenty of SaaS/infrastructure providers that don't provide phone support until you're spending $5K/month with them, even for outages.

Yes, but it also includes email support.

There are plenty I can get Live Chat and/or 15min email responses out of. That is all I really require to do business with an infrastructure provider.

SaaS, I'd be fine with business hour support. SaaS failures don't directly cost me money and/or reputation.

How many people use AWS without paying for support?

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/pricing/

Because you don't get any support whatsoever past forums without paying for it directly.

The people at the business may only work during business hours, but people purchase items and interact with websites 24/7 meaning that if you get a text saying your domain is down at 03:00, then by 03:02 you want to be in touch with someone figuring out why.

It'd be awesome if there was an automation service for this. I'm sure tons of people would gladly pay to say "fuck waking up, it's already being handled."

I'm pretty sure that is PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and VictorOps

Sweet - I had no idea. Thanks. It just seemed like that was a fairly common opinion being voiced that they were tired of getting woken up at 3 am haha.

Eh, if you do a rotation...you'll only get woken up at 3am once at most.

To be fair, I think the last time I was woken up to deal with something was like a year ago. ;)

While that implies Domains support will be offered in US business hours only, most Google enterprise products offer 9-5 support worldwide, which effectively translates to 24/6. (Yes, 6, there's still a gap between Friday 5 PM PST and Monday morning in Asia.)

https://support.google.com/enterprisehelp/answer/142244?rd=1

Are you being sarcastic? Although it might not be well-known, Google actually does have excellent customer service. Google Places, Google AdWords and Google Analytics all have excellent customer support. My only complaint is that Google Analytics isn't as clearly listed if you're not an AdWords user.

Oh, come now… At least they'll be careful about your privacy.

Exactly my thoughts. It may be acceptable-ish for a personal home page, but using this for anything that's remotely useful and/or has more than one user, no way in hell.

Already tried that with email (Google Apps for Business), and the punishment was swift like the new Apple programming language.

Hahaha, can't say I'm sure about your point (don't disagree, just reserving judgement for now) but I've gotta upvote the comment for your swift pun :)

>and the punishment was swift like the new Apple programming language What happened exactly?

Some Google Apps users got banned (allegedly for TOU violation, but no one cared to even tell wtf was wrong), a number of emails weren't delivered, no support whatsoever was provided for a paid product — long story short, it was pretty bad.

I've never needed support from any registrar as long as the AUTH Code retrieval and unlock process works...

Sadly, it's not that different to most other domain registrars.

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