8 ms·
Tell HN: Transfer your Google domain to other registrar before it locks you out
I have been running imagetoexcel.com registered with Google Domain. The service is live since May 2019 with 1000 DAUs. I have auto-renewal turned on, so every year it renews for one year charging my credit card linked in the account. I lost my cards in February, so I had to block my cards with the bank. Apparently, in May, Google Services tried to take the payment and hit a bad response from the Payment. I received an email stating the same, so when I tried to add a new card(s) it threw an error `OR-HDT-09`. Understandably they had to verify me and asked me to submit my ID, which I did. Two weeks to date no response from the Google Pay services, even on the follow-up. Now the site is down.
As a precautionary step, I've transferred my 4 other domains to the porkbun, which was super easy. I just thought of informing fellow hacker news followers to keep them out in such a situation.
- renewiltord 4y agoAh ha, they wouldn't let you pay and then they blocked you for not paying? Bad scene, man. Part of the whole problem with the Google thing is that they unify payments across all properties but they're rubbish about doing it. They have a good interface for buying domains, but thanks for this warning.
- yessirwhatever 4y agoSorry to hear, and good warning for anyone still relying on Google for anything critical really (business or personal). The moral here I'd say is transfer any service you have with a company that doesn't even have the possibility of customer-service, with everything running with crappy ml models (that get them probably around 40% accuracy and product managers are fighting about how/who can fix it, or even if they should). Leave any company that has automated customer service with AI.
- jonshariat 4y ago+1 hate when your companies HR tools use this crappy AI stuff and you are stuck trying to figure how in the hell to get help, spending hours and hours finding out how to get help because your issue wasn't one of the 3 things the AI was made to answer (and AI is such a generous term, its more like a dialogue game)
- scrose 4y agoAnything registered with Google seems like such a risk nowadays. A friend’s business site which I help with got removed from Google Business without warning or any known reason 2 weeks ago(they’ve been listed for over 2 years with no changes to the listing in that time). The company already lost over 50% of their regular leads during their normal peak time(it’s a junk hauling business) since their business page accounted for most of their organic searches. Even though Google states an appeal response normally takes 3 days, they haven’t heard anything for going on 2 weeks now. This whole ordeal led me to begin forwarding all my existing emails to my own custom domain on Fastmail since seeing the result of these arbitrary bans firsthand really drove home the risk you take when using Google services. Unfortunately for my friend’s business, they really have no other options to get as much exposure for their business as a Google business listing provides.
- na85 4y agoI'm sure fastmail are great folks but if everyone who feels nervous because of Google's shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn't really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.
- scrose 4y agoDefinitely. I’m sure there’s other great email providers and would recommend people do their research :) I just already use Fastmail and while I was already forwarding some emails there, this just expedited the full migration.
- julianlam 4y agoThis keeps being bandied around as a reason to NOT switch to Fastmail, but the truth of the matter is: if I need to get in touch with Fastmail support, I can. Easily. That itself makes up the difference. Admittedly, the more important part is maintaining your own custom domain, so you can switch email providers with a simple DNS update.
- I_dev_outdoors 4y agoThis is the difference. There was something fastmail was doing that I didn't like and someone followed up with me to find out what's going on and try to solve my problem for me. It was also someone with real knowledge and power to get something done as well.
- mattbaker 4y agoAre there any alternatives that people are fond of? I’ve been on Google domains so long I’m not sure what the playing field looks like these days.
- aksss 4y agoGoDaddy just for domain registrar and DNS (no other services). It has performed solidly for many, many years, Can reach helpful humans in support.
- renewiltord 4y agoI've found name cheap rather good. But the problem is the long tail situation. Most of us won't encounter these problems so it's more a question of which registrar deals with problems well.
- shmoe 4y agoporkbun is great.
- 8jy89hui 4y agoI’ve had a pretty good experience with Route53 on AWS. However, as with all things on the AWS console, it is very configurable and thus can be a bit confusing and over complicated. I’d be interested in hearing about other smaller services that work well.
- clarkevans 4y agogandi.net has been around for a very long time
- fooey 4y agoCloudflare has full registrar services now, along with email forwarding. I've been moving everything off Enom to them as renewals come up
- InGoodFaith 4y agoWhile I use and enjoy their other services, I would advice taking this incident into consideration about their registrar services that "prevents transfer-out of domains, sets to 'pendingdelete'" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31576353
- tut-urut-utut 4y agoDon't ever trust your business, hobby, important services to a company without a working customer support. Mistakes do happen, and when they happen, you need someone to react quickly. Since I moved my custom domain mail hosting out of Google, I don't have to worry anymore. I finally put my Google password in a password manager, since I don't use it that often. Nowadays, I would recommend using Google account only for a throwaway stuff, like setting up a new Android phone, E-Mail used for spam, etc, ... for anything real, thanks but no thanks.
- napsterbr 4y agoI currently host my custom domain email at Google, and am thinking of switching for this very reason. Do you recommend any specific email providers with reliable customer service?
- tedivm 4y agoFastmail has been great since I've switched to them, and others seem to agree. I know a lot of people also like ProtonMail but I don't have much personal experience with them.
- tut-urut-utut 4y agoI went with https://mailfence.com https://mailfence.com a small Belgian provider called. I needed to contact their support only once, and they were prompt and helpful. The only shortcoming compared to Gmail is their web interface is a bit minimalistic, but fully functional and incredibly fast, also on mobile. Other mentioned Fastmail, which is also fine as a provider, but I somehow trust EU / Belgian regulations more than Australian. EDIT: Replied to the wrong post, I wanted to actually reply to the parent post.
- aojdwhsd 4y agoI've been a ProtonMail paid subscriber with a custom domain for several years. Very happy customer, wouldn't go anywhere else. I haven't needed to contact customer support often, but service was good the few times I did.
- _jal 4y agoPaying Google for things was a massive pain in the ass for us at times too, until we were "big enough". I don't know exactly how we earned the privilege of easy payments, and there may have been some decision other than a mechanical threshold. That's for work. On a personal level, I block their ASes at my router.
- yieldcrv 4y agoI wonder if consumer protection agencies can do anything. State level ones may exist, but maybe we can convince the CFPB to strongarm corporations into the desired compliance over matters like this
- doliveira 4y agoThis scares me. I have a .dev domain, though managed through Cloudflare. I feel like I should get another from another gTLD not owned by Google... What do you all think, are the .dev domains safe enough?
- rstat1 4y agoSafe enough. These sort of issues are rare enough that I don't think you have anything to worry about.
- doliveira 4y agoThe issues themselves may be rare, but abysmal customer support is quite typical from Google. And if there's one thing you can't just pack up and leave is DNS. I'd rather not have to worry about some algorithm deciding to throw a fit and locking me out without any chance of recourse other than hoping a Googler reads my woes on Twitter or Hacker News. So I guess I wonder about some requirements from ICANN or some guarantees in this regard from Google
- Spunkie 4y agoWait, you are using cloudflare as your .dev registrar or just DNS? My CF dash still shows my .dev domains as unsupported for transfer in.
- doliveira 4y agoSorry, I mean just the DNS itself, the nameservers point to Cloudflare
- Spunkie 4y agoIn that case you should def transfer your domains out of google registrar, I would recommend porkbun. At work we had an entire .dev domain nuked at the registrar level by google because a developer generated some traffic google didn't like on a subdomain. They replaced the ENTIRE domain with a google phishing warning page with no way to bypass to get to the actual site. It took multiple days to resolve the phishing false positive and restore the domain, if it had been our main domain it would have a major emergency at work.
- ulfw 4y agoGoogle keeps shooting itself in the foot. Trying to save a lousy dollar here and there they're destroying billions of dollars of goodwill that'll be hard, slow and expensive to rebuild.
- junon 4y agoYeah I'm on the edge too about domains. Will be switching to Gandi I think. I honestly don't know any good registrars at the moment.
- BryanBryce 4y agoClassic Google support...there are no humans
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoI had a google ads account and I misconfigured the payment details. Something in my configuration google didnt like, and it banned me for life from using Google Ads until I "resolve the issue". The domains I was trying to advertise on are also banned from being used on Google Ads. There's no one to contact, no response, just rejections and no answers.
- jimnotgym 4y agoThat is why monopolies need a regulator to arbitrate these kind of problems
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoThe annoying part is I am trying to give them my money. But they wont even say whats wrong, just that something is wrong. Tons of posts on reddit and elsewhere with the same issue
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 0des 4y agoThat arbitrator used to be the government, then google became a surveillance tool, and one hand washes the other. Microsoft should have played ball earlier with the agencies, and maybe we'd not be having to deal with IE deprecation this week.
- ldiracdelta 4y agoOr just anti-trust actions.
- discardedrefuse 4y agoI started moving everything off of Google last year. Two months ago I finally moved the last piece, which was my domain. There's just too many of these Google horror stories. To lose access to your most important account, with no recourse, because of an innocent slip up (or even something completely out of your control) is unacceptable. Its amazing how Google transformed itself from "a convenient place to centralize my digital life", to "I've made a huge mistake" this quickly.
- mrj 4y agoSomething's wrong at Google. I was trying to setup my new startup with a project on GCP and had a very similar problem. I was told to go to a page, upload my ID and wait. Four weeks went by without an answer. Finally, I opened a customer support ticket and got a response 3 days later that said they'd asked the other group to validate my account. Another day passed and I was approved to give them money. Lol, no. I had long since taken my business elsewhere.
- phphphphp 4y agoI do consulting and use GCP on behalf of clients so I’ve been through this process of creating a new account about half a dozen times now, and your experience is mine, every time. Blocked, submit information to verify identity, hear nothing back, chase, eventually get chastised for chasing in the wrong way / submitting to the wrong people, and eventually manage to get approved. Google are famous for bad support so it’s not surprising but it’s perplexing that it is so consistently bad. I continue to use GCP though and know I’ll someday be paying for trusting Google despite constant reminders not to.
- mrj 4y agoAnd yet they wonder why they've failed to surpass AWS and have fallen to #3 in the cloud space. This whole thing and the stories from others have made me so nervous that I'm moving my personal stuff off of Google, too. Future tech decisions I make will likely exclude Google. They don't seem to understand how devastating this will be for them.
- renewiltord 4y agoThis is hilarious to me because that means GCP is worse than Alibaba Cloud. AWS -> near instant Alibaba Cloud -> some shenanigans with the business cert but done in two days GCP -> apparently four weeks?! LOL!
- BryanBryce 4y agoJust called Porkbun and got a human on the first try, sounds like a good place to move to.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 4y agoThe problem with Google is that not only are they too big to fail but their main business is advertising - paid Google services are peanuts in comparison that doesn't even make it worthwhile for them to care about paid customers.
- endisneigh 4y agoKind of funny to see this site sort of become a Google complaint forum, haha.
- swozey 4y agoGoogle marked my Google Payments account as fraud for some unknown reason last year and it won't allow me to put in a credit card. They have a form I've filled out 2-3 times that requires my Drivers License, etc. I've never received a response and I still can't add a credit card. This broke my Gmail account (I was over the free limit) and I had to migrate everything to fastmail and delete a ridiculous amount of mail. This also broke my domains DNS resolution, I had no idea my custom domain didn't have mail flowing until people told me they were getting bouncebacks. This broke all of my app subscriptions. Since then I've de-googled everything, including my phone. The only thing I can't get off is SSO but I use email as much as possible now. If they nuke my SSO login I will be screwed.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoLiteral same issue. I messed up the payments, got marked as some type of fraud, and have had no luck in resolving it
- jvanderbot 4y agoITT we can recommend your favorite alternative registrars. I'm invested: I have a lot of domains on Google and would rather not lose them!
- vezycash 4y agoMy mum's phone was stolen last week, got her a new phone two days later but couldn't login to her gmail account while setting up the new phone. I created the email myself, so I retrieved her password from bitwarden but couldn't login. Confused, I tried the same password multiple times, then tried the 'forgot password' feature, entered her phone number and got another shock when google asked me to get a code from my samsung galaxy S20 app - I don't use galaxy. Google refused to send a reset code to her phone number even when I provided the original password. Turns out she needed some contacts the previous day and asked my siblings for help. They used the forgot password feature, got a code through the retrieved SIM card, changed the password and logged in through an app on a samsung galaxy phone. It's crazy, someone who didn't know the password could change it. But I who had both the original password and the SIM card but couldn't. We'd have lost her contacts if it was thief who changed her password before we retrieved her SIM card.
- kkfx 4y agoMy personal policy is: only relay on national enterprises, possibly NOT much big, who happen to have a phone line with some humans on the other side. That's is. A secondary policy is NOT relaying (as possible) on a single company. For domains that means use different companies on different domains and advertise up front your other domains on all of them as possible so third parties can know what to do if something goes wrong. Not complex, not complicated, not much expensive.
- timwis 4y agoI’d love to transfer my remaining domains to iwantmyname, but their 2fa uses SMS, so it’s subject to trivial SIM-swap attacks :( Considering my domain is used for my email address, that’s a huge issue.
- xtracto 4y agoSomething tangentially related happened to me: After my wife's card was cloned and used, I decided to block all my cards. My banks allow me to use their app to block and unblock my cards at will. So I decided to block all of them and then only unblock them when I am going to use them. I got a surprise that *most companies, including Google!! do not support this*. Apparently, Tidal, Google (all Google related billing including Youtube, Google Domains, etc), DigitalOcean, among others attempt to bill you at some random time during the night/early-morning. Of course when they tried to charge my card the payment was rejected as it was blocked. I contacted all those services asking them the process to actively perform the payment (like, me clicking a button so that they could charge me), but they DON'T have that option. AWS surprised me, because they DO have an option to charge on demand. How is it possible that something so simple like that is not commonplace? So now, I have to leave one card unblocked, exposed to being stolen, so that all these half cooked services can bill me (I got several warnings from Google Domains saying that my payment could not be processed). At the end, I left a card with $500 USD limit permanently unlocked... but I shouldn't have to.
- neurostimulant 4y agoDigitalOcean do support paying on demand in the form of depositing a balance via paypal. Just add more balance when it's almost run out.
- saradhi 4y agoI cant edit the post, hence posting an update I guess this has brought the attention at the Google. The verification is done. I was able to renew immediately. The site is up and running now. I am going to transfer this domain too under porkbun.
- madmax108 4y agoCongrats. On a lighter note, another anecdote to validate the need for "Complain on HN as a service" (COHNaaS) (or COSMaaS for more generic service posting complaints to twitter/fb as well) which seems to be the only way to get any sort of customer service these days! ;)
- nagasadhu 4y agoAnyone using aws workmail ? How has been the experience ? i think Aws uses gandi for domain registration.