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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Google has history of banning company accounts because they have a contractor who has previously been banned by Google.

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.

Have you tried cloudflare? They take 0% profit, and should be better than Google.

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.

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

I would be careful of having your email and dns at the same provider regardless of how trustable and dependable that provider is.

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.

and they have viable customer support

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-...

As far as I understand, this is usually the job of your mail server (I've done it with Exchange and GSuite). You add the domain to your mail server and then create aliases (or wildcards) in there and add them to your account, and then when you reply you can reply from the alias.

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.

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.

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