Google Domains Launches to All in U.S
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
~ Google Domains charges $12/year for .COM, .NET, .ORG.
~ NameCheap charges $10.69/year for .COM, $11.98/year for .NET, and $11.48/year for .ORG. Sometimes with an 18c/year fee tacked on.
~ GoDaddy charges $12.99-13.99 for a .COM but that might increase randomly because they're scumbags.
So my point is that this article claims that everyone is "rushing" to this new product, and while this product doesn't seem "bad" it also isn't exactly market changing. The prices are well within 10% of the market (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) and the features are pretty generic also.
Can someone explain why Google Domains is compelling and not a "me too!" product?
Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.
And yet other TLD registries are sensible enough to make privacy the default for private individuals. .EU isn't bad in this regard, and others like .SE even go so far as to hide your name (most only hide your postal, email, telephone)
Frankly I don't know why anyone who can avoid it would want to touch Verisign TLDs with a barge pole... they have the continued gall to keep putting their prices up despite more competition than ever, and fail to raise the bar on basics like whois protection. Even .UK domains can be had for $5/year with registry level whois protection for heavens sake.
When you register a domain, it's a requirements that you list contact information publicly. Companies usually don't mind doing this but many people don't want to list their home address and phone number for the world to see. Private registration lists a proxy company's information as the contact for the domain and they forward the information to you.
Note that this means you are technically not the owner of the domain, and you may be limited in your ability to transfer it, sell it, or do other things with it. Permissions are limited to what the registrar allows instead of what ICANN allows, although in most cases they give you nearly full control. You'll just have to read their terms if you want to know what you can do with it.
This is a myth. ICANN has published requirements on how private registrations must operate; ownership of the domain always goes to the paying owner, not the registrar.
If your registrar's privacy service is so bad that emails don't get through, transfers should be the least of your worries. Because of the new ICANN verification rules, you're at risk of losing your domain if emails don't get through to you.
For example https://who.is/whois/habinow.com is one of mine that is private
while https://who.is/whois/ycombinator.com is pubic and shows Nicholas Sivo as the admin and an address and phone number for y combinator
Do you remember RegisterFly?
(d) A vendor conducting business through the Internet or any other electronic means of communication shall do all of the following when the transaction involves a buyer located in this state:
(1) Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3), the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.
(2) If the disclosure of the vendor's legal name and address information required by this subdivision is made by on-screen notice, all of the following shall apply:
(A) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall appear on any of the following:
(i) the first screen displayed when the vendor's electronic site is accessed,
(ii) on the screen on which goods or services are first offered,
(iii) on the screen on which a buyer may place the order for goods or services,
(iv) on the screen on which the buyer may enter payment information, such as a credit card account number, or
(v) for nonbrowser-based technologies, in a manner that gives the user a reasonable opportunity to review that information. The communication of that disclosure shall not be structured to be smaller or less legible than the text of the offer of the goods or services.
(B) The disclosure of the legal name and address information shall be accompanied by an adjacent statement describing how the buyer may receive the information at the buyer's e-mail address. The vendor shall provide the disclosure information to the buyer at the buyer's e-mail address within five days of receiving the buyer's request.
(C) Until the vendor complies with subdivision (a) in connection with all buyers of the vendor's goods or services, the vendor shall make available to a buyer and any person or entity who may enforce this section pursuant to Section 17535 on-screen access to the information required to be disclosed under this subdivision.
The interface is ... almost ok. It's cluttered because it's used for more than just domain registration (think it's cPanel, actually) but the registration part is ok.
Edit: oh, and it's fast to update, especially if you use Google as DNS server as I do.
Oh, and if you renew for several years at a time, the cost per year goes down too.
Disclosure: Namecheap employee
Coupons are just a way of creating psychological anxiety about missing a good deal, an archetypal 'dark pattern'. That sort of thing actively drives people like me away from your business. I know I'm not a mainstream consumer, but IMHO neither is the average domain registrant.
Bear in mind the products we're mostly represent cost a low $10. If we had more wiggle room on pricing, we'd offer low pricing all the time. It's just not feasible for a business like ours to do 24/7.
I mean, Google is charging more than you, and it's not like they couldn't win a price war if they were so inclined - they could probably sell domains for $1/year without significant damage to their bottom line. Maybe it's time to get out of the 'cheap' box.
Sadly, there isn't anything like this.
If you want privacy protection on your whois lookups, then Google would be cheaper than the other providers, as they sell it as an add-on.
I also trust Google to have speedy DNS servers, if you're leaving the defaults in place. GoDaddy's DNS can be quite slow.
Perhaps not a "mind-blowing" product, but one I'd consider using.
Godaddy also sells this as an addon, actually, every domain seller does, I don't know what is so special about Google's offert.
name.com has had that for years. Click a button and it configures all the MX records for you and a few CNAMES on top (so you can do stuff like mail.yourdomain.com and calendar.yourdomain.com).
I whish I could make a poll on this subject: Do you think you can trust a website if it is hidding its whois information ?
Would you trust a bank where all employees were wearing a mask ?
They no longer have to send people across the street for this critical part of hosting and can also easily integrate it with their other services, such as gmail forwarding.
it's a classic google "me too" project. i always get the feeling a lot of google projects come up because someone somewhere is going to be in a high level meeting with execs, and one exec sees something interesting and asks "why aren't we doing this?" and then someone gets to chime in "we already are!" and then they check the box for DONE and never look back.
Let's Encrypt is going to be doing that later this year anyway.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/certificate-authority-...
That doesn't make it non-weird. Obligatory Godwin, "meh, Hitler was no more horrible than Stalin or Pol Pot."
Edit: enjoyed your godwin ref though ;)
It doesn't have to be anything more than a "me to" product.
Noting that if you google "domains" they now come up as the 2nd organic link. Nice to be king, eh?
Edit: I own a registrar and we compete with them (if you want to call it that). Obviously I am just referring to the fact that they can instantly rank high with what amounts to a beta product hence the "king" comment. Of course they need to be more than "me to" but that ranking goes a long way in getting them business even if they do very little.
They come up as the 2nd for you. Google Search results are personalized. It's 6th in mine, behind Hostgator.
I'd encourage people to try it out with a domain and form your own views. As for me, I'm moving all of my domains over to Google (as they get close to renewal.)
As far as our dashboard, we're building a better user experience, so that's nothing to fret about. I bet you'd agree when it's live that the experience is far more stellar than anything you'd find anywhere else.
I also find it frustrating that the domain dashboard has no clear path to my host record settings, which is 90% of the use case for me. I always have to click four or five times to find it.
Otherwise I love the product and pricing, and I will probably continue to use Namecheap in the future.
The dashboard is, frankly, out of date compared to the UI experience people would expect from us in 2015. We're building that right now.
And we plan to support TOTP 2FA, so you don't necessarily have to rely on SMS at all.
But noted. Just wait -- we've got some pretty cool things in store for you.
As a sysadmin who deals with your website a lot, I actually like the current management UI.
Yes, it could use a few tweaks here and there, but overall I quite like it. I hate websites that update their user interface and hurt my ability to get things done.
I use another registrar for some of my .de domains, and their web interface is horrible. I have ongoing issues with their interface not saving changes to my zone because the button says the zone was saved when it wasn't.
tl;dr - The current interface doesn't look nice but it works damn well and I can find everything. Please don't ruin usability in the new version. I care more about functionality than looks.
1. a "power user" interface, stripped down, that allows for the fastest ways to do XYZ (key bindings, fast client-side validation, batch uploads, etc).
2. a "first timer" interface, with explanatory info, slower pace so people don't feel like they're getting overwhelmed or pushed in to something, etc.
I've yet to see any registrar do this. Many do offer APIs, which, for developer power users, might be sufficient. I'd suggest to this company that they perhaps keep the current version as a fallback to the existing power users that already know how to 'get things done' with it; maybe not forever, but for a while so they can learn the new interface on their own schedule at the very least.
It's a minor quip (and just one off the top of my head), granted, and otherwise I'm a happy customer, but am very tempted to migrate as well as my domains come up for renewal.
Any screenshots or other indications of where you might be going?
NameCheap is better than most, though. The only reason I don't keep a lot of domains with you is price. Your renewal fee's are significantly higher than budget registrars like Dynadot. And when you own a lot of domains, that extra 10% adds up fast.
Like others have said, it's mainly that the interface looks and feels like something circa 2001. I inevitably click into the wrong menu/interface/page for something I want to do, and it just feels inefficient whenever I want to get something done.
The old interface within the redesign is jarring and, as you know, that old interface is pretty ugly! I love how it will show me the first 10 in a listing and then offer paging rather than showing 100 or all by default. Will be happy to have that fixed.
Other than that, I have at times found the split between the old (customer) and new (sales) interfaces confusing. I'll often be clicking through SSL info in the sales interface when I'm trying to remember where to get my client SSL lists.
Apart from that, I've been happy with the pricing and when I've needed support via live chat it's been really polite and quick. I recommend Namecheap despite that interface issue.
So, if Google is so interested in seeing universal HTTPS, what sort of SSL cert carrot will they provide to their registered domains to go along with the Page Rank stick?
That's quite the Google way, they are not looking for the one-time immediate profit, but for customers that will somehow generate income in the long term. It seems it's not working bad for them.
$12 is really expensive...
It seems to me that Google is just trying to throw their enormous weight into every space now and it sickens me. This is how we end up with mediocre goods and services... No thanks Google.
They are much, much more than a monopoly at this point.
Not to mention, with Namecheap, GoDaddy or really any other company, you can probably get ahold of tech support 24/7. Good luck getting that from Google... Not that I've tried yet, but my experience with them in the past has been that it's mission impossible to talk to a human being in charge of something there, unless you're trying to hangout with the devs on Google+ or something for smalltalk, which seems to always be available.
I recently had an issue with Google Apps, and contacted them via email for support.
I received a phone call almost immediately and the issue was resolved in minutes. I live in Fiji.
I once had to transfer a domain for a client that Google had registered with Godaddy. Google blamed Godaddy and Godaddy blamed Google. What a nightmare.
The Google Domains Support Team is available every day from 6am to 9pm PT.
Chat with us Email us Call us Generate PIN
No kidding. The integration with Google Hangouts has been a disaster, and me moving to iOS has made it even worse. Of course, there are no good competitors, so I'm stuck in the holding pattern just hoping some of the ridiculous issues get fixed.
GVoice used to have ATROCIOUS call quality that seems to have been ameliorated by Hangouts. Calls within the US and Canada are still free, voicemail service is second to none, and I'm extremely happy with the texting integration with Hangouts. What else do we want?
EDIT: Also, the OSX Hangouts app crashes about every 2 hours with no error message. This is a "known issue" of varying types on Google's site, but customer service with them, well, you know how that is.
It's not necessarily intuitive unless you know to look for it, and it might not work if your Google Contacts are incomplete (as in, you don't associate your Hangouts friend with his phone number). But it works really well for me.
Oh finally, Bob Robot comes up. I click it. It says "Bob Robot isn't on Hangouts right now..." Well I don't want that. I want to send an SMS.
OK let's look for a green chat icon. Nope, just a smile button to put emojis in there.
This is OSX's Chrome plugin as stated.
Why would a company as rich as Google want to be in the domain business? It can't ever be material to them. I wouldn't be surprised if Google abandoned this business and transferred domains to, say, Godaddy.
- if you are paying google on an ongoing basis for something (adwords for example) they are very pro active with support.
- if you are using a free product, expect 0 or less support
- if you are receiving money from google, expect active hostility.
If I was a developer bringing in several thousand a year on the Play Store, I'd happily shell out $99/year for better support. I imagine I am not alone in that.
... you would be automatically paying Google with $300 for every thousand of sales. $99 would be redundant.
Recently, I had to contact support for a failed payment (obscure domain extension, some address verification error), and the experience was great. I got it fixed in less than 5 minutes by contacting their live support.
Will keep using them. Their name doesn't do them justice, they are an A player in the domain space.
Backstory: I have five .io domains, three that I registered with Gandi, and two with Namecheap. When the expiration period for the Gandi ones was coming up, I got an email saying "the domains expire on xx/xx/xxxx, renew by then if you want them to stay active. If you don't renew, you can renew then any time up to 90 days after the expiration date".
As it happens, I let the three with Gandi expire, and then logged into their dashboard, renewed them about 60 days after the expiration date, end of story.
Compare: I accidentally let the two I had registered with Namecheap expire. "OK" I figured, "not a big deal, they probably have some kind of grace period as well." No. I got an email saying "these domains expired and you cannot renew them through your Namecheap account. You can contact support and they might be able to help you renew them." So, I contact support and they write back and say "we'll try, but it's going to cost $XXX.XX (somewhere around $250, if memory serves) to renew".
OK, to be fair, I did let the domains expire, so I guess I deserve what I get. But the experience renewing an expired domain with Gandi was so much better than what it was with Namecheap, that I've basically written Namecheap off as a registrar to use in the future.
It would be nice if I could refer to a parent company with a more appealing name.
I've been using Namecheap for a few years, and have (for the most part) been pretty happy. Their SSL certificate service is super clunky, but the domain stuff is decent.
We did eventually go with NameCheap and had no issues. But the name definitely does them more harm than good for business users.
When Google first launched and I tried referring friends to use it, as a superior search service to AltaVista et al., friends would give me a look of "what the hell?" due to the name. Back then it wasn't uncommon to see media stories referencing Google's childish / baby sounding name, and how it was a ridiculous name for a service, and that the logo made it come across even worse.
I don't care for the name NameCheap either. On the other hand it's been easy to remember.
The brand grew from there. That's why Namecheap is still called Namecheap.
Disclosure: Namecheap employee/personal experience
Domains haven't been $70 each since around 1996 or so.
Namecheap takes great care of me at $10/year though, so I'm not very compelled to switch.
The domain renewal with whois privacy/guard at NameCheap ends up being a little more than Google Domains.
I keep hoping NameCheap will overhaul their control panel design like they did with their main site.
I will probably end up moving to AWS Route53 or Google Domains or to use their DNS and a clean/modern interface and simpler pricing (include whois privacy).
It's been how many years now? And all they say is "we're working on it" and have no ETA. So we moved most things to Gandi.
Feels good having no GoDaddy, however.
<insert-standard-many-hundred-line-exchange-between-you-and-I-that-has-happened-in-other-HN-threads-here>
DANE can work perfectly fine with the existing CA system to provide another way of verifying that the correct TLS certificate (or CA) is being used. Or... it can be used with a completely different trust anchor or TLS certificate that you control. Your choice.
But you and I will just have to disagree on this topic. Your dislike of DNSSEC is well-known, as is my support for it.
1. I sign my domains and generate a DS record.
2. I upload the DS record to my registrar who passes the DS record up to the .COM registry.
Now, when someone does DNSSEC validation on my DNS records, they wind up doing this process:
1. Going through the DNS process to get my DNS records as well as the DNSKEY and RRSIGs.
2. Following the chain of DS records up to the .COM registry and on up to the root of DNS... being able to validate along the way the integrity of the records.
Where do world governments get to interfere here?
If a govt were able to manipulate the TLD registry the best they could do would be to point my domain to some other name servers that weren't mine... is THAT the attack you see? I seriously would like to understand.
This is not, of course, the only problem with DNSSEC. It's also an archaic 1990s cryptosystem built around 1024-bit PKCS1v15 RSA, which by default makes every DNS record in the system public, trivially dramatically amplifies DNS traffic, and does all this without actually securing DNS lookups from browsers, which still run the old insecure DNS protocol to talk to DNSSEC-enabled caches.
It's a silly system, has been since the USG paid TIS to design it in the 1990s, is nearing two decades delayed, and isn't going to happen. Look at what Chris Palmer from Google has to say about it. Whatever the opposite of "betting on it" is, that's what Chromium is doing with DNSSEC. We should get to work designing a modern alternative.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/europes-answer-to-terror-attack...
Welcome to the new world.
I did move a couple of domains to Google Domains. While they do not provide DNSSEC in their DNS hosting, they do support DNSSEC records (DS) if you host your domains somewhere else that supports DNSSEC signing.
But really all registrars boil down to two "types" the sub-$20/year ones (which are like 90% of the market) and then the $1K+/year ones which bundle in all kinds of brand protection products and domain protection stuff (e.g. Mark Monitor).
Neither Google or Name Cheap are different enough for price to be a deciding factor, but NameCheap has a better track record than Google in this specific space. GoDaddy is someone I wouldn't touch even if they were cheaper, I hate their bullshit (e.g. upsell, misleading checkout, misleading prices, etc).
If you could pay $5 extra a year and get better service, if it was a business website I'd definitely consider it, but for personal shit I wouldn't, and in general there is no way to spend just $5 or similar more a year and get any marked improvement.
The only thing which might be an upgrade is $12/year for the registrar and then $6~7 for Route53 on top. That's a nice improvement for an extra few bucks.
* Use code WGSPECIAL for a discounted whoisguard. :)
* Renewals for several years at a time offer a baked-in savings.
* Our control panel overhaul is underway. It's a huge project for us, but we're ecstatic.
If it's an issue of not wanting to deal with certain country top-levels then so be it and simply offer the ones you've implemented already and add in more top levels in the future.
The latest debacle: I can't renew my domain. They started sending me notifications a few months ago that my domain was expiring because my credit card is out of date. I can't sign in because of a redirect bug. There's no support to reach out to, and requests for help on forums have gone unanswered.
Alternatively, dnsimple has been nothing but charming to work with.
This is my biggest fear when using anything Google-related.
They are notoriously difficult to get in touch with, and as such I probably wouldn't even considering signing up for this service.
Getting access to a real person when there is a problem with one of my domains is very valuable to me.
I haven't actually tried following through with it, since I don't have any support queries myself, but that certainly /looks/ like a way to directly talk to support.
- Unlike other domain sellers, Google Domains is NOT trying to sell me anything other than domains.
- Canceling is easy! I don't have to wait in calls with 1&1!
- Customer support was great. They get back to me after an hour if I email and if I call, responses are very fast.
- User interface is clean and clear.
- Simple integration if you are on Google apps (I am grandfathered, using their, old, standard, free Gapps.
- Customer support was superb and instant, via chat, and it was great. The person knew what he was doing.
Definitely a keeper.
Easily buy a domain, have it automatically hooked into the Google Apps suite of products, and easily hook it up with a select number of third party vendors like Wix or Shopify.
That's what this is about. The ability to create something cool, run a business, without having to worry as much about the technical bullshit.
Great product, and for the ease of use it is well worth $12/year. And yea, I know, $2 more a year than namecheap... but $2/year is well worth the time it takes to setup a domain (even if it is only a 2 minute ordeal).
https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6069226?hl=en
I'd expect that the integrations with things like Google Apps will improve before it goes GA rather than open beta -- one of the key reasons to have this service has to be to support one-stop shopping for Google Apps and/or Google Cloud setups.
Agree though - clear instructions are missing.
Soon enough you will store your website entirely on SERPs. Instant load times will mean better user experience. A to Z solution will ease up developers life.
No Canadian support yet.
Soon, eh!
The world needs to resist ceeding every last bit Internet governance to these people.
Centralization is death!
If so, buying your domain here could be worth it for the DNS alone, as they are anycast, DNSSEC enabled, and fairly fast[2].
The nameservers are ns-cloud-d$.googledomains.com (1-4) resolving to 216.239.3$.109 (32, 34, 36, 38)
Am I missing something...? I didn't realise this was a problem - I've never used a domain provider that doesn't let you do this. I currently use Namecheap, which certainly do.
Very few of those services have a good way of dealing with "No, that wasn't their email address they signed up with, it was an alias of mine". And while for some of these, I could presumably click the "forgot password" link and go into their account, I'm not sure that would be legitimate and wouldn't know what their correct email was to change it.
And customer support is something Google doesn't believe in.
Who shat in your cocopops?
On the marketplace, your display name is the same as the username. What a security risk.
And most of all: why charge at all for the domain name privacy option? As if this is such a costly tech thing to accomplish.
So much for being an early adopter :|
You, like me, was an early adopter which provided the platform with traction when it was new.
Now the platform is proven, established and popular.
From an economic point of view we're now merely free-loading leeches, and I honestly don't find it reasonable to expect that we should be given the best treatment at the expense of others.
Google now has a shitload of paying customers, and they are getting prioritized. And I'm completely fine with that. Our reward is that unlike others, we're allowed to go free-loading!
I've noticed too that I'm not getting features and upgrades paying customers get. That's Google trying to give me an incentive to convert to a paid account, because obviously Google wants to convert us free-loaders to paying customers too. And I'm fine with that as well.
Just don't act entitled because you were the first one to sign up for a free product. You don't deserve anything in return for that.
As usual with Google, technical details are scant.
https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6147083?authuser=1
So, not RFC 2136. No standard protocol for you.
Also, fwiw they're fantastic.
Hmm, what does that mean for an average website?
100 readers * 365 days * ~273 (html+css+js+gif/png/jpg) ?
I guess some browsers cache the DNS requests too..
Adding support for more .bullshit TLD's that no one cares about?
Connecting to Blogger?
Yawn...
(edit: actually, they'd never voluntarily transfer your domain; they'd force you to transfer it, at some kind of discount. suffice to say i am less than confident)