
Google Apps Botches Domain Renewals, Websites Go Dark - patio11
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.730915.0
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IsaacSchlueter
As others have said, never ever ever use google as your domain registrar. In
general, you usually don't want to buy a domain name "bundled" with other
services such as google apps or hosting. (Note: Dreamhost is a terrible host,
but a decent registrar.)

Always always keep control over your DNS. If this guy was hosting with
Slicehost or Linode, he would've had the option to point the MMX records
anywhere he liked, and problem solved (or at least, temporarily contained.)

Lastly, I can say from personal experience that Google's support is
_shockingly_ bad. It is a deep and twisted warren of blind alleys,
misinformation, and a million different paths that all end in "fuck you". You
will not contact a human. There _are_ no humans. Thousands of genius engineers
engineered teh googelz to be perfect and human free for your utopian pleasure,
and then they spent all day riding around on bikes and playing ping pong and
eating free food and getting massages and inventing world-changing things.
They're better than you. Google doesn't have problems. Ever. You must have
done something wrong.

Please wait 5 days, and try again. If you continue getting this error, please
contact support. Sorry, support is only available to Premium customers. Would
you like to purchase Premium service? To purchase Premium service, simply log
into your domain. Sorry, that domain is no longer active; if you have recently
changed that domain, please wait 5 days, and try again. Contact support if you
have any questions.

Their approach to customer service is to send their customers in circles until
they give up. It's evil. Very extremely cruel and evil.

I use google apps for two of my domains. What can I say, their software is
very well designed, and on the net balance, it's easier to manage than
postfix. But the lack of support is a major down side, certainly. I wouldn't
even consider paying a dime for any of their services without seeing some huge
changes in their approach.

~~~
Erwin
I do have paid premium and a good amount of users, and support also was
frustating when it came to a certain fairly technical problem to do with
DKIM/DomainKeys signed emails being silently discarded. It went on and on in
circles and even when escalated to "engineering" they failed to understand the
problem. Finally I ended up implementing a horrible hack to receive the email.

Mind you, we have a fairly esoteric mail forwarding setup, but still one that
their support documents describe as possible.

Haing said that I've been happy with how Gmail has been compared to a
traditional UNIX-based setup in administration and would not want any other
email interface.

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tdavis
Holy crap, you mean I shouldn't use a company that isn't a domain registrar as
my domain registrar?! This is like complaining when you get a dedicated server
from GoDaddy -- they're a fine registrar, but a completely horrible host and
many _employees_ will tell you not to order servers from them.

There's a reason that no company can truly "do it all" -- it's just too
difficult and quality starts to suffer. Google does e-mail pretty well, which
is really the only thing we use the Premier Apps for.

~~~
mattmcknight
Actually Google makes it pretty clear that they aren't a domain registrar, and
their sign-up process used to encourage you to get a domain before you get
started. I am curious as to why they don't serve as domain registrar. I
actually have my Google Apps domain through Yahoo, who used to host my
mail....

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paul
This must incredibly frustrating, but I don't think it has anything to do with
Gmail, Calendar, etc. It sounds as though it's a domain registration problem
due to Google acting as a domain reseller for eNom, or something. If anything,
the lesson is, "don't use Google as a registrar", though I suppose you could
argue that the bad support is an overall issue.

In general, I would avoid any of these reseller situations, since the error
could occur in multiple places and both parties would probably assume that
it's the other's fault.

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shutter
Counterargument: Obtaining the usually-excellent reliability and stability
that Google usually offers would be time-consuming, difficult, and a
distraction. Sure I could set up a server with Postfix et al, but there's no
way I'd be more reliable than Google without investing a substantial amount of
time, money, and energy.

I don't want to spend my time maintaining a mail server. Let someone else do
that.

~~~
patio11
I 100% agree with you, which is why I use them for email. But if they were to
drop my business off the Internet for days at a time _and_ make it impossible
for me to get in touch with them, I'd be a little more concerned with that
than with sporadic email downtime.

~~~
snewe
Agreed. I was in the process of moving our small set of users to Google Apps
Premier. The phone support and quick response time was crucial to convincing
my boss to allocate the funds. I think such a change:

[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?tid=37b64a9f87c8f406&hl=en)

is a dramatic change in the product. Hopefully they will give me a refund.

~~~
delackner
I'm confused. The links and text in the page you link to all say that Phone
support is still available, just you have to login to a support page and enter
some pin and then you get the number. Is this not true?

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thinkzig
I've been usign Google Apps for the past year or so for my email host. Though
I have my registration and DNS with GoDaddy, I'm terrified of Google shutting
me off one day and having no recourse other than to reroute everything and
suffer the downtime.

I realize this was a registration issue, but when I keep reading horror
stories about people being shut out of their accounts and having no one to
talk to at the Big G, I think it's time to look elsewhere.

Does anyone know of a good email-only host that has a good admin interface,
support, etc?

~~~
fuzzmeister
If you're worried about it, I'd upgrade to the paid version, which seems to
have at least a modicum of support.

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davidw
I have a bunch of domains registered with them - it's so easy, isn't full of
spammy ads like godaddy, and the extra stuff just makes it even better. Now
I'm getting nervous, though... I wanted to sell a domain, and the Google
'support' guy was completely clueless. Luckily it was nothing important, but I
am now looking for a way out:-/

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mtkd
If you're running a serious business you should really be using a dedicated
management company for your domains.

We use CSC (www.cscprotectsbrands.com) who bought the enterprise domain
management business from Register.com

I also recommend using a dedicated DNS company like UltraDNS.

You get what you pay for.

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jasonkester
Yeah, the bottom line is that things go wrong with Apps from time to time, and
there are no human beings working there that you can talk to without upgrading
your service.

I can't log in to the Apps account for one of my domains, and their error page
says that no domain exists by that name, even though they are hosting email
for it. It's a 30 second fix for anybody willing to look at it. But since I'm
not paying for the premium account, nobody will even respond to my support
mail.

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mattmaroon
We use a hosted exchange server, costs $8/mo per user. Gives free
Outlook/Entourage, has pretty solid web access (similar to hotmail) and best
of all, if something goes wrong, we can leave and take our MX records with us
with relatively little pain. Oh wait, I lied, best of all is free ActiveSync.

