Posted by Kromey at 7:31pm Oct 19 '14So, Google's got a domain registration service now.
Long ago I used... I don't even remember what it was called. A cow was involved somehow, I think. Resold via Yahoo! or something.
Anyway, later I grew up and moved on to GoDaddy. Then I learned about their business practices, and elected to no longer give them my business.
From there I transferred all my domains to Gandi, a French-based company that boasts a remarkable 523 TLDs -- and the cheapest prices I could find (from a company that supports all the TLDs I have domains under, the most difficult to find being .us).
Now comes Google Domains. Gandi's website was always slow, and often flaky. Which wasn't a big deal because outside of renewing them I pretty much don't touch 'em. But Google Domains has a very responsive website -- not surprising, given that it's, y'know, Google! :-P
And, they're cheaper than Gandi, and support all of my TLDs!
The problem, though, is that I use email forwarding to have emails under my domains simply forward to my Gmail account. I also use Cloudflare to provide CDN and security and (now) SSL for all of my websites. Google Domains, however, won't let you forward email unless you host your DNS with them; on the other hand, Cloudflare won't work unless you host your DNS with them!
For now I'm using Mailgun to forward email, but that's... not exactly ideal. For starters, they've already disabled my domain once simply because I received a spam email that was then forwarded to my Gmail! Ugh!
If anyone knows of a good away around this limitation, I'd love to hear your ideas -- I'd like to migrate my domains to Google Domains, but without email forwarding (and with Mailgun being such a substandard alternative) I really can't do that.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to try out Google Domains themselves, PM me your email address -- I've got 4 invites. (Sorry, [private], it's US-only. "For now", they say.)
Google Domains - Kromey