Last time I looked at their Terms of Service it appeared that losing your Google account would cause you to lose access to all services. It's not good to put all your eggs in one basket. With that being said, I've used Google Domains as well and haven't had any issues with it.

Using an independent registrar is basically your only insurance in order to keep control of your domains. So it's like putting your nuts in a vise with a RNG controlling the lever. Who wouln't like to save a few cents though ? =)

This. I lost access to an email address and when Google asked me to check email for accessing it from a new device, I could no longer get in. It asked me when I signed up but of course I couldn't answer it properly.

And it's another step to showing what you're related to, to Google. It would be better if you want Google to build up your online figure on behalf of you.

Aside from the price, one very good reason to be interested in CloudFlare as a registrar compared to Google Domains is that CloudFlare supports CNAME flattening [1] so that you can use a CNAME instead of an IP address for an A record (AKA "ALIAS" on DNSimple or Route53).

I'm using Google Domains right now, but have been using CloudFlare to host my DNS for ages for this reason alone. I'll think about transferring my domains to them when the time comes to take one service out of the equation.

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169056-C...

I second this. I have my domain instantfloppy.net hosted on GDomains and use Cloudflare for DNS but I'm going to transfer "mid-November" for sure. I wholeheartedly trust Cloudflare. They've shown their commitment to privacy and I don't understand what their endgame is but I want to believe they support a better Web.

I believe when 90% people feel it this way, they turn bad.

Yeah, it's naive, but it's the best solution there's been for quite a while. I just really hope this is good.

Note that if you're cnaming to some thing that is doing dns based load balancing or Geo targeting, introducing flattening in the middle may reduce the ability of your provider to do those things.

What is the alternative for a root domain A record? You are saying use a direct ip to the load balancer instead?

If you want dns based load balancing on the root domain, you really have to delegate that domain to your DNS based load balancing service.

Otherwise, set up a couple stable IPs to redirect to a subdomain and nothing else. (I'm comfortable putting two quality machines in different data centers for this, but you can use a load balancer it you have access to quality load balancer). If all of your published urls have www (or m) and all of your inbound links have it too, it's not really a big deal if the root domain is unreachable for some time in the event of a server/load balancer/datacenter failure.

Would it really be that hard to update DNS so that CNAMEs on non-leaf domains actually worked? Sure, IoT devices might never update, but I’m not sure that actually matters.

If you got the rfc changed today, I suspect you wouldn't be able to reliably use it for about 20 years. 5 years for everybody to pick it up in new software, 5 years for new hardware to not be shipped with the old software, and 10 years for all the old software and hardware to die out.

And all for what? So you can cname example.org instead of www.example.org? Doesn't seem worth it. Also, consider that in 20 years, we're likely to consider IPv6 only servers, and a host can more easily offer you a IPv6 ip that they can commit to serving your traffic for a long time on. It's a lot harder to be flexible with IPv4 addresses.

... but that would be misnomer? Because CNAME is Canonical Name, not Alias.

Google Domains is only available in 15 countries[1]. Also, I wouldn't use a personal Google account to register a domain name for a company.

[1] https://support.google.com/domains/answer/4639612?hl=en

FYI: You should never use any personal accounts for any company account. There have been horror stories about AWS accounts associated with Amazon retail accounts too.

That's exactly what I meant.

From a quick look at https://domains.google, it seems like all domains start at $12/year. That's definitely not wholesale.

Also free reliable email forwarding.