[HN Gopher] Google Domains is out of beta
___________________________________________________________________
Google Domains is out of beta
Author : Garbage
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-03-15 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (domains.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (domains.google)
| hashamali wrote:
| I've found Google domains to be considerably more expensive than
| Namecheap. Anyone have a good reason to use it over other
| registrars?
| bradfa wrote:
| I used to be a Namecheap customer, I have been using Google
| Domains for a few years now. Namecheap isn't that much cheaper,
| maybe a dollar or two per year in my quick look just now. I've
| found Google Domains really easy to use for my personal
| domains, including for dynamic DNS. So far it's just worked and
| I've been happy with it.
|
| Not to say that Namecheap was hard to use, just that Google is
| pretty easy and the cost difference isn't enough to make me
| want to consider switching back to Namecheap.
|
| I do not recall why I stopped using Namecheap, it was a while
| ago.
| account-5 wrote:
| I feel sorry for anyone who actually use(s|d) this. Google have
| proven time and time again their services cannot be trusted. Why
| anyone would actually use this is beyond me.
|
| I'm sure there will be some play at vendor lock-in and definitely
| holding your data to ransome; but worse is the uncertainty this
| service will exist for any meaningful length of time. How long
| before you're mysteriously locked out with no way to log back in
| and no one to contact to sort it out?
| maartn wrote:
| Right around the moment Google Analytics is going to be
| prohibited in the EU...
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Could you elaborate?
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Google has a product out of beta? Time to shut it down.
| willmadden wrote:
| I'll take "Things I'll never use for $500, Alex."
| lizardactivist wrote:
| Just more things to tie to Google and thus risk losing when
| Google flippantly locks or closes your account.
| [deleted]
| jghn wrote:
| As someone leery of tying my domain to my Google account, I'm
| curious what people recommend for this use case. I have a vanity
| domain currently hosted on a web hosting platform. These days it
| only gets used to forward the email of a few people to their
| contemporary email accounts, all gmail based.
|
| As I no longer use the web hosting, storage, or anything else
| like that I'd love to find something cheaper that can just handle
| the email forwarding. I like the idea of using Google as for many
| things I trust them more than a smaller company. But there are
| too many stories out there of people having no idea what they did
| wrong and losing all access to their account, with no recourse.
| bxparks wrote:
| Cloudflare Domain Registrar. They sell at-cost, so $9.95/year
| for a .com/.net domain. But don't use your gmail account as the
| admin account.
|
| For email forwarding, Cloudflare Email Routing looks promising.
| I'm just about to give it a try. It's currently in beta though.
| srhngpr wrote:
| Happy customer of Cloudflare Email Routing - it works
| exceptionally well. I've paired it with Amazon SES for the
| occasional time I need to send emails from custom domain.
| dazc wrote:
| Agree, cloudflare is ideal for parent's use case although you
| have to join a waiting list of several weeks for forwarding
| to be activated (my experience anyways).
| sneak wrote:
| Now seems like a good time to point out that Google is fully
| aware of the linkages between all of your various Google accounts
| (work, personal 1, personal 2, side project, other domain, etc).
| Both mobile platforms allow multiple Google account login and if
| you use one account for work slack and one account for personal
| gmail then thanks to your phone OS's giant gaping per-app sandbox
| hole, big daddy G can see all of your credentials are being used
| on the same device and connect them together as a single user.
|
| This means that any itty bitty TOS violation on one account means
| you potentially lose _all_ your accounts. Accidentally contradict
| the WHO (who, for example, said not to wear masks) in a YouTube
| comment and get your personal video watching account TOSed for
| posting fake news? Accidentally mention an ITAR /SDN country by
| name in a comment field in a Google Wallet/Pay transaction? Send
| a zipped malware sample to a colleague for analysis from your
| gmail? Say goodbye to your Play Store apps published under your
| work account, AND your domain names registered under your side
| project account, AND your Google Voice number, AND all your cloud
| instances on your GCE account, AND all your YouTube uploads on
| the video account, AND all your files in Google Drive, et c.
|
| You also lose ability to reset all of your accounts that have
| your @gmail.com address as the login name, and you lose the
| ability to even log into any accounts for which you may have used
| that "Login with Google" button.
|
| Google is not trustworthy. Don't give them your money or data.
| Register a domain with someone who isn't Google, and point it
| somewhere that isn't Gmail. There are step-by-step instructions
| on how to do this on my website.
| [deleted]
| rinze wrote:
| All other domain registrars out there have probably started
| thinking about their "transfer back your domains from Google
| Domains" for when whoever at Google loses interest in this and
| shuts down.
| newhouseb wrote:
| PSA: If you use Google Domains to buy a domain for your company
| DO NOT USE IT TO ALSO BUY GOOGLE APPS (or whatever it's called
| this month).
|
| If you ever want to change your company's primary domain... you
| can't. We're stuck now with a legacy domain (configured with an
| alias so it's invisible to others) that we can't move off of
| without basically burning the whole thing down and starting
| fresh. It reeks of technical debt and poor engineering design
| that buying Google Apps through a reseller (where that reseller
| is _also_ Google) totally ties your hands for properly managing
| your deployment.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Given Google's habit of having some "AI" randomly kill someone's
| account, combined with a total lack of customer service, I can't
| think of a company I would trust less with my domains. It still
| makes me nervous that my email is hosted with them, but that's
| something I'll probably get sorted soon.
| snek_case wrote:
| Does that mean it's cancelled then? ;)
| henriquez wrote:
| It means your domains have been canceled by an algorithm that
| determined your account is in violation of Google's terms of
| service. Hopefully you know a Google engineer or have
| experience starting Twitter mobs.
| dtparr wrote:
| 'Have experience starting Twitter mobs' is something I'm
| excited to start seeing on resumes soon. Followed by the
| discussion over whether that shows key
| leadership/organization abilities or not, a la the "Wow
| Raiding Guild Leader" debates of the late 2000's.
| aluminussoma wrote:
| Since complaining on Hacker News is the only way to effectively
| reach Google employees, I'll say that as a customer I am confused
| at the offerings of Google Domains and GCP Cloud Domains (via
| Cloud DNS). I recently registered a domain via Cloud Domains and
| it shows up under Google Domains.
| qmarchi wrote:
| They're backed by the same registrar, so it makes sense.
|
| Disc. Googler, not in Domains.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Since complaining on Hacker News is the only way to
| effectively reach Google employees,
|
| That's an exaggeration. You can find a bunch of them on Twitter
| or LinkedIn. Joking aside, B2B services have support, and
| consumers can pay for it via Google One.
| arunharidas wrote:
| no thanks! If you go against the popular narratives, you'll be
| banned from using your domains.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| have bought few domains with them, seems pretty basic but works
| JacobHenner wrote:
| Over/under for how long it'll be before it's shut down?
| munk-a wrote:
| Considering it _just_ left beta... I 'd give it three weeks.
| andyfleming wrote:
| Semi-related: What alternative is your registrar of choice and
| why?
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Porkbun has been good to me, but I can't get it to work for
| iCloud custom domains.
| imilk wrote:
| porkbun.com is great
| mminer237 wrote:
| I use Porkbun because they're typically the cheapest, tbh. They
| have a really nice interface too, but my registrar isn't
| something I interact with more than once a year typically. As
| long as they aren't shady like GoDaddy, it doesn't matter that
| much. There's tons of good options.
| imilk wrote:
| Also have quite a few great easter eggs on their site. Always
| nice when a company has a bit of personality.
| alligatorplum wrote:
| +1 to Porkbun. I think cloudlfare sells domains at-cost so if
| you want something cheaper than they might be worth looking
| into.
|
| But I have been a happy porkbun customer for a few years and
| they are my go to recommendation to anyone who asks.
| sneak wrote:
| Additionally: Are there any good registrars that support
| U2F/FIDO/WebAuthn (aka hardware tokens) for 2FA? Mine only does
| TOTP and I would like the security provided by hardware.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Namecheap does: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgeba
| se/article.aspx...
| anderspitman wrote:
| https://TakingNames.io obviously. Disclaimer: I run it.
| DomainEater247 wrote:
| I'm curious what goes into running one? Do you need to have
| stable NameServer's with static IPs that have 100% uptime?
| Why create one?
| anderspitman wrote:
| It's very easy to get started, and easy to progressively
| add services.
|
| The most important distinction is between a domain
| registrar and a domain reseller. As far as I know, most
| start out as resellers (Namecheap started as an Enom
| reseller. AWS still resells Gandi). Being a legit registrar
| is actually fairly expensive.
|
| Reselling complexity depends on the upstream registrar.
| Most of the big ones have reseller programs, including
| white label services. TakingNames.io uses Name.com, which
| doesn't require anything official. I just sell domains
| using Stripe for payments then use the Name.com API to buy
| the domain. Then I forward DNS changes using their API as
| well.
|
| Currently I default to using Name.com's nameservers, but
| users can set custom nameservers and I may run my own
| eventually.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Hopefully incidents like [1] will never happen outside of the
| beta.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417046
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Any domain consigned to the tender mercies of Google is as good
| as lost.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| They're also giving a 20% discount for getting domains from them.
| Keep in mind the Google domains is not available in all
| countries:
| https://support.google.com/domains/answer/4639612?hl=en
| Jason_Protell wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: Google Domains is easy to use, has great
| customer support, and offers competitive prices.
|
| I've used Google Domains for years and I don't have any
| complaints.
| munk-a wrote:
| Google delivers services that work wonderfully for 95% of
| customers until the day they arbitrarily decide to shutter the
| service with no warning. I use a whole bunch of google services
| these days but they're all the services that have clear exit
| strategies - unless Google pulls the plug without warning we've
| got migration strategies to get off them without too much
| damage.
| Jason_Protell wrote:
| I know that Google is notorious for shuttering services, but
| I can't imagine they would shutdown Google Domains without
| giving customers an opportunity to transfer domain ownership
| to another registrar.
| munk-a wrote:
| What is ample time for a company that hired a webdev one
| time to build them a static website and never checks
| webmaster@domain emails? What is ample time when you've got
| ops scripts set up to automatically do domain stuff but
| don't employ that person anymore?
|
| What is a reasonable money expenditure to migrate off a
| platform when you could look at the company record and see
| that you're much better off just choosing a different
| platform? Is a week or a month of dev hours worth putting
| your faith in a company notorious for randomly shuttering
| products?
|
| I feel like Google marketing has no idea the absolute
| monster of a problem they've created by allowing their
| business to get a reputation for being extremely unreliable
| in the B2B space.
| throwaway_se099 wrote:
| Yes they have a reputation for merciless shuttering of
| services, but come on.
|
| _What is ample time for a company that hired a webdev
| one time to build them a static website and never checks
| webmaster@domain emails?_
|
| That kind of outfit is much more likely to be a victim of
| missed renewal or a myriad other technical screwups than
| a Google-initiated exit of the registrar business.
|
| _I feel like Google marketing has no idea the absolute
| monster of a problem they 've created by allowing their
| business to get a reputation for being extremely
| unreliable in the B2B space._
|
| They can certainly count on a spate of hyperventilating
| HN posts whenever they announce any kind of service-
| related news.
|
| More seriously, their most celebrated servicides are
| consumer-oriented, like Google Reader. "Extremely
| unreliable in the B2B space" sounds like an exaggeration
| to me.
| munk-a wrote:
| I mean my company, which isn't small, jumped ship from
| G-suite based SSO for Okta a few years back out of
| business concern - so while single anecdotes don't make
| for proofs it's definitely not non-existent.
|
| I'd also suggest just bringing your tone down, this isn't
| a fight and calling people on the other side of the
| argument "hyperventilating" doesn't really do anything to
| promote meaningful discussion.
| bxparks wrote:
| I agree, very easy to use. Prices are pretty good, but not the
| cheapest. But the most important question is: What happens when
| they ban your account? You will lose your domains.
|
| Congrats to the Google engineers who made this happen. But I
| transferred my domains out a few months ago because I will
| never win against the Google AI.
| Jason_Protell wrote:
| "What happens when they ban your account?"
|
| Not when, but if. Either way, being banned by Google would be
| catastrophic.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Less so if you don't also throw domains into that basket.
| blindseer wrote:
| lol no thanks. Congrats to all the engineers that have worked on
| this and getting this out the door, but I don't think anyone
| should use or recommend these Google services, especially when
| they have been SO inconsistent about the life, longevity and
| future of their products.
|
| I'm curious to be proven otherwise (and open to criticism of my
| claims), especially when other services have existed for a while
| that provide the same functionality, or offer better tie in with
| alternative products (hosting, pages, workers, lambdas, compute
| etc).
| mmastrac wrote:
| I got burned by the apps domain fiasco this year and it was the
| final nail in the coffin for me. I'm minimizing my reliance on
| Google now.
| larrymyers wrote:
| I believe this is in reference to the legacy Google Apps for
| your Domain being sunset and the free accounts being moved
| over to paid accounts on Google Workspaces.
|
| I did the same after having one of the free legacy accounts
| for about a decade. Migrated over to Fastmail and de-googled
| myself.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Why not something self-hosted?
| larrymyers wrote:
| Because it's easier to pay Fastmail $50/year for good, if
| not better service than Google. I also welcome real
| customer support.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| > apps domain fiasco
|
| What happened?
| chimprich wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432
|
| A service that was supposedly free forever has been shut
| off with only a few months notice, an aggressive price
| structure, and no help to migrate data. Poorly communicated
| and badly executed - par for the course for Google these
| days.
| davchana wrote:
| Google Apps for Domains, basically GMail & other services
| for your own domain. It was free intially, in 2012 I
| believe they stopped the free version but grandfathered the
| existing free accounts. Now in 2022 Feb they announced that
| those free ones are going to cease to exist.
| robbiep wrote:
| What was the apps domain fiasco? I have a .app domain. How
| worried should I be
| greycol wrote:
| Not the .app domain but the google apps service(now called
| google workspace (I think... they change the name at the
| drop of a hat)).
|
| They basically removed a free tier that they explicitly
| guaranteed would be free "forever". Because of this people
| set up friends and family as users using the service.
| Google then told people no you have to pay ridiculous
| amounts per month for them to keep any apps they have
| already bought tied to your account and there's no way to
| seperate your account once it's tied in. They did this with
| a 2 month notice period.
|
| They have since walked back some of that due to backlash.
| They're now saying that you have a 6 month notice period
| (July 1st) and that at some inderterminate time before july
| 1st they'll let you transfer your account to a normal free
| google account. You will however lose your email address as
| part of the process.
| robbiep wrote:
| Ahh gotcha. Thanks
| colesantiago wrote:
| > I don't think anyone should use or recommend these Google
| services, especially when they have been SO inconsistent about
| the life, longevity and future of their products.
|
| Can we also say the same thing for GKE and Google Cloud since
| it is also a Google service?
| mdoms wrote:
| Yes. Obviously.
| ghusto wrote:
| I think so, yes. I remember reading that the future of Google
| Cloud was to be determined from how well they did this year.
|
| Of course, I'm too lazy to find the source now, but I
| remember it was here in Hacker News.
| mrep wrote:
| Google cloud is at about 20 billion in revenue per year and
| growing 45% YOY [0] and you think they might just shutter
| it based on a HN comment?
|
| [0]: https://www.fiercetelecom.com/platforms/google-cloud-
| revenue...
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I would expect that projects that are rapidly growing and
| profitable to be relatively safe from Google's we-
| don't-wanna-do-this-anymore hammer.
| verve_rat wrote:
| But not safe from their account based shenanigans.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Google's behavior has convinced me that it's perfectly OK to
| use their services, as long as you don't rely on them. They
| may terminate your account at no notice, or announce that a
| service is shutting down or adopting an unworkable pricing
| scheme at what would be reasonable notice to an individual,
| but is not acceptable to a business.
|
| The worst things seem to happen randomly. They happen to a
| small percentage, perhaps even a small absolute number of
| their customers -- but they do happen, and there is no
| recourse.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Google Cloud is a whole different game. If they have shut
| down any service there I can't remember.
|
| But it's generally a bad idea to rely in any capacity on
| products marketed to consumers (not B2B) by Google, even
| Workspace I feel iffy on using, as you can be locked out on
| everything at any time.
| TurningCanadian wrote:
| They have raised prices a number of times though. That can
| be its own challenge, and something you don't experience
| with AWS.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/fdgblk/google_
| g...
|
| https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce
| londons_explore wrote:
| What I need from Google before using their service for
| something important is a promise along these lines:
|
| > We will keep running this product, with existing
| functionality substantially unmodified and backwards
| compatible, for at least 10 years, with pricing not increasing
| by more than inflation. Or, if we discontinue the product, we
| will refund 10x the amount you have paid for the product, plus
| $1000.
| tjoff wrote:
| That wouldn't be enough, since you'd still have no recourse
| if you were banned.
|
| Just don't use it. It isn't hard to not use google.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This. The dreaded "Oh we've decided your business violates
| our vaguely worded terms of service and so we've turned off
| your account."
| abdusco wrote:
| And you can't contact us. Unless you use that one trick
| we don't want you to know: post it on twitter and go
| viral. Then it'll all be fixed within the day.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah IMO this is the kicker. A block-first process is
| obnoxious but livable with if there's a clear
| understanding of why you were blocked and a quick way to
| fix and notify of remediation actions. Without that the
| policy is just stupid and anger-inducing.
| dark-star wrote:
| I don't see a problem. It's a domain. You can always transfer
| it somewhere else. It's not like other Google services that
| hold your data and which you might not be able to get out
| anymore
| starwatch wrote:
| The difficulty is that if your account gets suspended, you
| are unable to do anything - including transfer domains out.
| thiht wrote:
| A registrar cannot prevent you from transferring for
| something that's not directly related to a domain dispute,
| that's an ICANN rule, and a rule of most ccTLDs registries.
| No registrar can hold you hostage, or that could backfire
| horribly for them. Meaning they could get their ICANN
| accreditation revoked and basically get shutdown, and/or
| paying huge fees.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This is my feeling as well. When I left in 2010 I shared in my
| exit interview that they should seriously consider embracing
| actually investing in customer support and leaning into the
| idea of a "normal margins[1]" kinds of businesses. I speculated
| that as their advertising margin continued to deteriorate (it
| was already going down fairly rapidly by then) that without
| these sorts of 'base load' businesses to carry the operational
| costs Google would begin to struggle to maintain goodwill with
| their "free" services and "lavish" workplace perks.
|
| To be fair though I was a lot more pessimistic (which is why I
| exercised and sold off all of my ISO options and RSU options)
| so left some money on the table. :-) That said, having gone on
| to be responsible for operations at Blekko I felt I got a
| pretty good understanding of the moving pieces associated with
| the operational costs of providing "web 2.0" services. And that
| informed a better sense of what level of margin was required.
| Certainly Amazon does that calculation all the time in pricing
| their AWS services.
|
| So I read this announcement and wished the people who signed up
| a good experience that didn't leave them high and dry with no
| where to turn. I've got high hopes and low expectations.
|
| [1] Search ads generating a billion dollars a quarter in free
| cash flow that can be run by a company 1/10th the size of
| Google is how profitable they were at the time.
| Permit wrote:
| > When I left in 2010 I shared in my exit interview that they
| should seriously consider embracing actually investing in
| customer support and leaning into the idea of a "normal
| margins[1]" kinds of businesses. I speculated that as their
| advertising margin continued to deteriorate (it was already
| going down fairly rapidly by then) that without these sorts
| of 'base load' businesses to carry the operational costs
| Google would begin to struggle to maintain goodwill with
| their "free" services and "lavish" workplace perks.
|
| What would it have looked like if you were right about this?
| What would it look like if you were wrong?
|
| I ask because later you mention that you left some money on
| the table, but it looks more like you left most of it (85%+)
| on the table (which is fine and impossible to know ahead of
| time!). It just seems to me like you made some predictions
| but every metric points to those predictions being incorrect.
| Have perks been removed? Has compensation fallen?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| > What would it have looked like if you were right about
| this? What would it look like if you were wrong?
|
| Google's per ad click revenue (CPC) started falling like a
| rock off a cliff during the mortgage crisis and has
| continued to fall since. Google also sold ads through third
| party sites (AdSense for Content) where they shared a
| meaningful and proportional chunk of that revenue with the
| site provider. As part of their employee onboarding I had
| added AdSense ads to my personal web site to get a feel for
| how that part of the business worked.
|
| I also have a number of friends who ran web sites with
| AdSense ads and we all saw exactly the same pattern, for
| the same number of page views the "revenue" generated by
| the ads was tracking the decline in CPC.
|
| What that said to me was that if Google maintained the
| level of advertising on its own sites and continued to
| share the same revenue with third party sites, then in
| roughly 5 years it wouldn't be enough money to cover costs.
| At that rate in 2013 or 2014 Google would have its first
| layoff, and then by now it would be a much smaller company
| or perhaps bought by someone (Apple comes to mind). (I did
| say I was pretty pessimistic right? :-))
|
| But "making more inventory" (putting more ads on a given
| page) has zero marginal cost and if you add more inventory
| than the cost per ad decreases, statistically you increase
| your revenue.
|
| Also if you're the #1 search engine you automatically get
| the best possible ad prices because you have the biggest
| audience. But what is #1? Well its the search engine with
| the most traffic going through it, and if you're not
| organically getting enough traffic you can pay people to
| send you traffic. When I started at Google they paid less
| and $100M a year to third parties to direct traffic to
| Google search, by 2015 they were paying a billion dollars a
| quarter for that traffic. Why? Because if they didn't pay
| that the traffic would go to other equally good search
| experiences (notably Bing).
|
| I've watched Bing too and seen their CPC values go _up_
| while Google 's were going down. The most likely
| explanation of that is their increase in market share and
| the fact that a lot of Windows people didn't bother to
| change search engines and of course they offered fairly
| cheap API access for third parties who wanted to create a
| custom search experience but didn't want to invest in
| owning and operating a web crawler, indexer, and ranker.
|
| So if I had been right, Google would right now be a
| division of Apple or maybe Microsoft. Meta (nee Facebook)
| could have made an excellent play here and wiped out Google
| by integrating a search engine into the Facebook
| experience. They chose not to, largely because Mark just
| didn't "get it." He did not appear to understand search
| _is_ social, after all when you 're going to buy a new car
| who do you ask for recommendations? Your social network of
| friends. Blekko demonstrated a really killer implementation
| where we could return search results ranked by what you and
| your friends liked vs what random people like (which is
| what Google/Bing do) and it was pretty amazing (not great
| for privacy and had a bunch of other implications like
| finding out one of your friends likes web sites selling
| BDSM gear when you search for mask :-))
|
| So as the search revenue declined, Google has compensated
| by adding inventory (using search for things like products
| is nearly all ads), buying ever more traffic through deals
| with folks like Apple and Mozilla, and cutting costs by
| killing off projects/products. Sometimes directly and
| sometimes by forking the people responsible into another
| group under Alphabet and then quietly selling or closing
| down that group. The mean time to live once you've been
| spun out into an Alphabet "other bet" seems to be pretty
| short these days.
|
| I've got lots of ideas and anecdotes about how they got
| there, but basically their behavior has now put them into a
| very difficult position.
|
| Starting a new service costs money, the market doesn't
| trust you'll stand behind your service, so adoption (during
| which you lose money on the service) is slower. As a result
| you lose more money than you might have with rapid traction
| and growth and this hesitancy masks the "is it good?"
| signal. So you run with the service, which is losing money,
| unable to distinguish between it losing money because
| nobody likes it, and losing money because people like it
| but are afraid to adopt it. If you then cancel the service
| from a lack of adoption, you increase the hesitancy and you
| don't really know if the offering would have been
| successful had it not carried the 'baggage' of people not
| trusting you.
|
| Obviously, even though I was wrong about Google "being
| dead" within 10 years I'm still not bullish on their future
| prospects.
| ithkuil wrote:
| True true. Also, this is a story about the curse of
| success. Many of their cancelled products were really
| things that nobody cared about, but since google itself
| was so high profile, that a relatively few disgruntled
| users had such a high resonance because reporting and
| echoing their woes generated clicks elsewhere.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Wow, what a great insight. Thanks for sharing
| Permit wrote:
| Fantastic response, thanks for taking the time to break
| it down!
| kelnos wrote:
| I think a larger worry would be running afoul of one of
| Google's capricious, difficult-to-reverse account suspensions.
| I wouldn't want my domain to end up expiring or becoming
| otherwise inaccessible because Google's algorithms decided to
| suspend my account over something innocuous I posted on YouTube
| or put in Google Drive.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Now that it's out of beta I should probably move my domain to
| somewhere more trustworthy.
| Tostino wrote:
| Could be sunset any day now. It's "legacy".
| s0rce wrote:
| Thats exactly what I did. Didn't feel like paying $6/mo for
| gmail. Moved to zoho.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I'm on fastmail, happy to pay for reliable service.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| Another option is Gandi.net, which offers free email with
| domains.
| reset-password wrote:
| Judging by my own initial thoughts to this and the confirming
| commentary, I'd say that Google sure has built quite a
| reputation.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Query your non-hn friends about Google. I swear there are
| people who just ctrl-f for Google on hn and post the same
| "when's it going to be cancelled?"
|
| I would wager that almost all of these posters just happen to
| have philosophical/political problems with Google too.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| Just because non-hn crowd isn't aware of it, doesn't mean it
| isn't a big problem
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Reputation is almost entirely wrapped up in awareness. Is
| it possible for something to have a bad reputation, but no
| one knows it?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Absolutely, HN's echo chamber is not reflective of normal
| people. But there is a growing worldwide discontent with
| FAANG's domineering influence. Google is hammered almost as
| much as Meta by political/regulatory bodies, and news of that
| influences how regular people see those companies. The ever-
| encroaching ads also push people towards competitors. Wait a
| few years and most users will be looking for alternatives.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| That's the point of brands! I don't understand how they don't
| understand the damage they've done to themselves in certain
| circles. Clearly their brand is still valuable to a wider
| audience.
|
| I've long wondered why companies don't put their more
| experimental stuff under a different brand ("X by Google"-- no
| not that X), and promote them to full brand-name once they've
| gone reliable. Probably they want such experiments to get a
| boost from being associated with the better brand, and they
| figure the brand stain of stopping those experiments isn't so
| bad. But these things build up over time, and each individual
| product manager probably don't think they're the last straw...
|
| Another thought is that Google comes from an era of much more
| experimental web. Now the Internet is a much more established
| market, and platform stability is more a premium. Google is
| having trouble transitioning from their wilder younger days (of
| just a few years ago) to a more reliable company.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > I've long wondered why companies don't put their more
| experimental stuff under a different brand ("X by Google"--
| no not that X), and promote them to full brand-name once
| they've gone reliable.
|
| They still have most of the Alphabet to do this too. I'm
| still surprised they didn't already do it years ago.
| bushbaba wrote:
| To be fair they just raised GCP prices this week.
| stickfigure wrote:
| I don't know about your initial thoughts, but I'm wondering how
| long until Google Domains has its own chat app.
| jyu wrote:
| I was using a Google Cloud database last year on a production
| system. It shut off without any emails or notifications or
| messages or phone calls. I won't be fooled a second time.
| Doches wrote:
| But...why? I mean, I get it -- domain registrars aren't exactly
| at the top of my list for easy-to-use, reliable, trustworthy
| partners that I want to build a core part of my business or
| identity on top of. But I'm damned sure that Google isn't either,
| after 15+ years of launching or acquiring fantastic tools and
| swiftly burying them in the Google Graveyard [1]. Say what you
| want about Namecheap or GoDaddy; at least being a registrar is
| core to their business and not just a lark.
|
| [1] - https://killedbygoogle.com/
| Spivak wrote:
| Not Route53? I've pretty much just bought my domains and
| completely forgotten they existed for years secure that they'll
| just autorenew.
| rendall wrote:
| Gandi ftw!
| mminer237 wrote:
| Namecheap and Porkbun are actually very easy-to-use, reliable,
| and trustworthy. I don't think Google is trying to actually be
| better than other solutions. They're not competitive on price
| or support. I think their whole plan is to capture people using
| GCP since they're already there anyway, a la Route53 or
| GoDaddy. Why add complexity to your system with multiple
| providers to save a few bucks a year or help with theoretical
| issues?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Porkbun is amazing. I had a problem with my FIDO2 key (there
| was no password reset path for you if you still had your
| FIDO2 key), so I let support know. Less than a day later
| their engineers got back to me letting me know they had added
| the feature and deployed it. Everyone there is super nice as
| well :)
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Namecheap recently suspended an account because of a tweet
| thread speculating that a domain was _maybe related_ to
| abusive behavior. Turns out it wasn 't at all. It was so
| arbitrary even the people who were speculating were surprised
| by that decision.
|
| Even Google isn't sk arbitrary as to base their ban decisions
| on random Twitter discussion
|
| https://twitter.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284
| tommiegannert wrote:
| > Google Domains is available to anyone whose billing address is
| in one of our supported countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil,
| Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico,
| Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States,
| Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, Philippines, Poland,
| Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Sweden. We're working hard
| to expand our availability.
|
| https://domains.google/support/
| MikeDelta wrote:
| What if Google suddenly blocks your domains because the algo said
| so, and no way to talk to a human?
|
| I am having difficulties putting trust back into this
| relationship.
| wohfab wrote:
| Do you know GoDaddy?
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| This is being downvoted but I think it's an interesting
| question.
|
| If your life was on the line and you had to choose--would you
| do business with Google, or GoDaddy?
| ProAm wrote:
| I would choose not to play.
| munk-a wrote:
| Yea - they're an absolutely terrible service that has lost a
| lot of ground to more relevant comparisons in recent years.
| Personally I've had no issue with webnames.ca but I assume
| that's just a Canada thing.
| pasiaj wrote:
| I started using Google Apps for Domains pretty much the day it
| came out. 3 of my companies are using Gsuite right now.
|
| But all my domains tied to a Google Account that could get
| cancelled with no recourse?
|
| No, I think I'll pass.
| ProAm wrote:
| I would never trust google with a product that isn't ads for long
| term use.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| Google's "customer support" is so bad, I think it would be a huge
| mistake to let them control your domains. Dealing with Google's
| "support" has been a nightmare over and over on many unrelated
| issues.
|
| They also abandon many projects or hold you hostage in extremely
| inconvenient ways.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.androidauthority.com/gsuite-legacy-free-
| edition-...
| chaostheory wrote:
| People have been complaining about this for years. Besides
| Google Cloud, have they addressed this or do they keep ignoring
| it? Does anyone know if Google Cloud has customer service
| that's equivalent to AWS?
| a5aAqU wrote:
| It isn't just Google Cloud. I've had absolutely terrible
| experiences with several Google support departments. It's
| often impossible or difficult to resolve the problems.
|
| A domain isn't the kind of thing that you can quickly move
| somewhere else when things go wrong.
| sofixa wrote:
| They have addressed it with Google One.
|
| GCP does have support, but the things I've heard about it
| from are meh ( still better than Azure or OVH though).
| sofixa wrote:
| Which customer support? I've heard nothing but good things for
| the actual customer support you pay for ( Google One) as a
| consumer, and a mixed bag for the not-enterprise GCP support
| you kinda pay for.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I could be convinced to put up with the lack of customer
| support if the price is right, but the price is higher than
| competitors. I'll stick with Cloudflare Registrar.
| MrWiffles wrote:
| How long until Google kills this one? TAKING ALL BETS!
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Interesting when I clicked the link they offered a 20% discount.
| Two minutes later I get an email offering a 30% discount.
|
| I used Network Solutions before moving to Google Domains and I
| will take no customer support over bad customer support any day.
| With network solutions, domains were over priced. To get the real
| price, you had to call customer service and ask for a lower
| price.
| mkl95 wrote:
| What do they offer vs some powerful competitor like Namecheap?
| ugjka wrote:
| 24/7 surveillance by AI algorithms for any infringement of TOS
| anderspitman wrote:
| Domains are incredibly cheap for what you get, but they're harder
| to use than they need to be. Someone shouldn't have to understand
| DNS records, IP addresses, ports, NAT, TLS certs, VPSes, the
| command line, etc in order to securely connect their domain to an
| app like Plex/Jellyfin/Nextcloud running on their own hardware.
|
| You should be able to install a Nextcloud app on an old unused
| Android phone, go through a quick OAuth flow to connect it to a
| subdomain, plug the phone into power in a corner and be done with
| it.
|
| Cloudflare is currently the closest to this ideal with their
| domains + Cloudflare Tunnel, but cloudflared is still CLI-only
| and all their products are built for developers. Plus they'll
| never offer end-to-end encryption.
|
| I also maintain a list of more DIY tunneling services[0], but
| again CLI knowledge is currently a requirement. My main side
| project at the moment is seeing how far I can lower the barrier
| of entry.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling
| albertopv wrote:
| Here only to read all (deserved) negative comments on Google
| products management. I wasn't expecting less.
| hedgehog wrote:
| My recent experience with Domains was trying to delete a Google
| Workspace account that used to have an attached domain. It took
| several weeks of back and forth with their support due to
| problems on their end, with them asking me various things like to
| help them debug the admin console front end, to pay them to re-
| register the domain so they could cancel the account, etc, etc.
| Lots of pass the buck "oh that is a different department" but no
| follow-through on connecting me to the right one. It was bizarre.
| rectang wrote:
| Tying your domain to a Google account -- or any centralized
| megaprovider account -- seems fraught with risk. What happens
| when Google bans your account for some misstep, or even a mistake
| on Google's part, in some other service? Does the domain just
| expire because you can't access your account?
|
| At least if you separate your email provider and your domain, if
| the email provider decides to ban you you can move the domain to
| a different email provider and maintain continuity. But if the
| domain registrar bans you, what then?
|
| It seems as though the wisest move is to keep your domains
| hitched to the most minimal account you can -- avoiding
| centralized service providers such as Google, Amazon, etc.
| paxys wrote:
| I use Google Domains with an isolated single-purpose Google
| account. Emails from it are forwarded to my main account. It is
| easily the best domain registrar out there IMO.
| remram wrote:
| A few weeks back I couldn't add/edit/remove domain names that
| start with a _ and contained an accent. That's when I found
| out how good their support really is, even for a bug on their
| side.
|
| Probably best to use a service from a company primarily in
| the business of offering paid services.
| rectang wrote:
| I'm skeptical that accounts with megaproviders can
| effectively be isolated. If one account gets banned, and
| Google determines that another account is owned by the same
| person, they may well ban the other account too.
|
| The solution is to register your domain (at least) with a
| provider that doesn't have so much insight into their users.
|
| Again, this applies not only to Google, but also to Amazon
| and others. It's really a problem with centralized
| reputation.
| tjoff wrote:
| Nothing about that setup is normal, feels quite risky...
| Every login you make, perhaps years apart, will be wildly
| different from the norm and could easily be flagged.
| Navarr wrote:
| I only use Google Domains for any domains I can't get on
| CloudFlare. I definitely used to agree that they were the
| best, but CloudFlare is basically wholesale pricing and have
| the best DNS management, so I've moved over there for pretty
| much everything
| dazc wrote:
| I would be careful of having your email and dns at the same
| provider regardless of how trustable and dependable that
| provider is.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Have you tried cloudflare? They take 0% profit, and should be
| better than Google.
| kd913 wrote:
| How is it better?
|
| Cloudflare offers everything they do. It's cloudflare's core
| business and I don't have to deal with Google's tiny
| attention span.
| ProAm wrote:
| and they have viable customer support
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe you could share your experience with email that
| Cloudflare forwards?
|
| I understand that they don't offer email hosting but do let
| you configure email forwarding. If I do that and forward my
| me@example.com email to something like GMail, Apple Mail,
| Hotmail, etc..., do my replies look like they come from
| me@example.com or do they come from the account the email
| was forwarded to?
|
| Edit: I think I found the answer[1]. Replies come from the
| account the email was forwarded to, not me@example.com.
| That seems pretty useless for anything but receive-only
| accounts.
|
| [1]: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/replying-from-new-
| custom-...
| tyingq wrote:
| You can add users, identified by their email, that have
| permission to manage the domain, and the email doesn't have to
| be a google one.
|
| https://support.google.com/domains/answer/7179397?authuser=1...
|
| Though I don't know what happens if/when one of the users gets
| banned for some reason.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why jump through these extra hoops and deal with the risk?
| There are tons of reputable domain registrars out there, and
| I don't see Google Domains as providing some kind of killer
| feature to make it worth it.
| pyrale wrote:
| I clicked on the link half-expecting that "out of beta" was the
| jargon to say that Google closed another product.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Out of the Google beta frying pan and into the Google dumpster
| fire.
| adamors wrote:
| This whole thread has tickled my funny bone in ways I didn't
| expect.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Ooh! Another Google product I will never use because they'll get
| bored of it in 2 years and leave me stranded!
| sharno wrote:
| I've started using Cloudflare's domains and getting away from
| Google. Their reputation of shutting down services and accounts
| is well established
| cletus wrote:
| Until Google comes out and segregates actual and false positive
| ToS violations such that it doesn't kill your entire Google
| account, I can't in good conscience use any additional Google
| services.
|
| This began TEN YEARS AGO when Google+ "real name" violations
| disabled your entire Google account. Gmail, Google Photos,
| AdWords, everything. This is completely unacceptable and has
| never been addressed or rectified.
|
| If you use Gmail then your Google account is simply too large of
| a single point of failure to risk further exposure.
|
| What happens when a false positive disables my account? Can I
| still transfer my domains out? I'm not convinced that's true so
| thanks but no thanks.
| blakesterz wrote:
| "We launched Google Domains in 2015 to be the easiest place to
| find, buy, and manage a domain."
|
| I'm sure we're all painfully aware of the longevity of many
| Google services that are considered "in production", there's a
| long list of things shut down.
|
| BUT is it common for something to be in BETA for 7 years? That
| seems like a REALLY long time for something to be beta anywhere.
| Is that common at Google?
| zerocrates wrote:
| Gmail was famously "beta" for a very long time but I don't know
| how long exactly. A quick search seems to say 5 years?
| andrewguenther wrote:
| Pretty common for Google. Gmail was in beta for five years,
| Google Docs and Calendar I believe were also in beta for
| similar lengths of time.
| joeconway wrote:
| If you're buying a domain, you should consider http://gandi.net/
|
| No affiliation, I just love it and see people in this thread
| rightly lamenting godaddy, and surprisingly no mention of this
| gem of a company
| srhngpr wrote:
| I've used Name.com for many years and have been very happy, but
| recently switched basic shared hosting from another provider to
| Gandi.net and got exposed to their backend and tools. I am now
| considering transferring my domains over as they come up for
| renewal; been very impressed!
| a5aAqU wrote:
| Another vote for Gandi. Each domain also comes with 2 email
| accounts and extra forwarders.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Gandi still offers services in Russia and Belarus [1] while
| Namecheap discontinued its services to them [2].
|
| No affiliation with Namecheap, just a happy customer of a
| company that is not supporting a dictatorial regime.
|
| [1] https://news.gandi.net/en/2022/03/for-all-the-people-and-
| one...
|
| [2] https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/1/22956581/russia-ukraine-
| na...
| bartvk wrote:
| > Gandi still offers services in Russia
|
| What does that tell you?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| That they don't answer to Uncle Sam?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Providing services to Russians =/= supporting a dictatorial
| regime. That's very reductionist in my view. Many Russians
| simply cannot up and leave their country at once, or worse,
| maybe they are running a website that broadcasts against the
| Russian government, and Namecheap was one of their only
| options. I don't think it's as clear cut as "provide them
| service" but it's more nuanced than that/
| shiomiru wrote:
| Meaning Namecheap treats those living under dictatorial
| regimes as second class people. As a citizen of a country
| headed in a similar direction, this only makes me less
| inclined to deal with the company.
| pupppet wrote:
| I used to host with them but found their interface painfully
| slow. I see the admin UI has updated since then, maybe they
| fixed the issues..
| Jayschwa wrote:
| I've been a Gandi customer since 2014 and my opinion of them is
| not as favorable, especially since they rolled out a new and
| buggy dashboard a few years ago. Historical problems I've had:
|
| 1. When attempting to update the email address on my domains
| and accounts in 2018, the form to do so was broken. Support
| merely linked me to the broken forms and did not comprehend the
| problem. After re-explaining the problem, they changed my
| address to something completely wrong, which was alarming
| because it wasn't an address I controlled. It was eventually
| resolved, but it was not an experience that inspired
| confidence.
|
| 2. After getting married and having my legal name changed in
| 2019, there was no easy process for updating Gandi's records.
| Support walked me through some convoluted and time-consuming
| process that involved creating a new account and transferring
| all my domains to it. I recognize this use case isn't as
| common, but it shouldn't have been as difficult as it was.
|
| 3. Because of the combined shenanigans of (1) and (2), I now
| get five duplicate emails from Gandi for everything. I have
| notified support of this a few times over the last couple
| years, but it's always met with, "sorry, it's a known bug", and
| I guess it will never be fixed.
|
| The only reason I haven't moved off of them at this point is
| because of inertia and I don't know what other registrar would
| be better.
| nullwarp wrote:
| Gandi and Porkbun are my two go to registars. I dunno if I'd
| ever trust google with that TBH
| anderspitman wrote:
| Fun fact: Gandi is what AWS uses under the hood when you buy a
| domain from them.
| acdha wrote:
| In an amusing bit of naming similarity, discontinuing "Google
| Apps for Domains" is why I migrated my last service _off_ of
| Google. Not going back.
| wohfab wrote:
| Oh man, this comments...
|
| The number of products, Google actually "killed" and not just
| rename, merge into another product, or develop further under a
| new name, is quite low. And frankly, most people, complaining
| about product lifetime, probably never even used any of those
| products at all.
|
| Yes, killedbygoogle.com is fun, but come on...
| rendall wrote:
| > _The number of products, Google actually "killed"... is quite
| low._
|
| That is an extraordinary claim, but I'm listening.
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com has 264 listings. Are you saying
| that if we excluded those that were actually renamed or folded
| into other products, that it would reduce 264 products to some
| number that is "quite low"?
| rurp wrote:
| So you're saying all I have to worry about is my account being
| nuked by an opaque algorithm or the price suddenly being jacked
| up 20x, like say the Maps API?! Great, sign me up!
| sigmonsays wrote:
| but it's true...
| munk-a wrote:
| Hey - I'm still personally sore over iGoogle. They killed off
| an absolutely trivial to use RSS reader - I made heavy use of
| iGoogle while it still existed... and they killed it off to try
| and save Google+ which they then proceeded to also abandon.
|
| I've definitely felt the burn of Google just randomly killing
| off a useful thing for some opaque marketing decision that
| turned out to be extremely ill-advised.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| I'm not worried about them killing the service, I am worried
| about them blocking the domains of my business, for some vague
| reason, and me having no ability to talk to anyone to have it
| solved.
|
| I am sure it doesn't happen often, but if it does it sure is
| not going to be to me.
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