US residents can now purchase and manage Internet domains through Google
Google is now officially a domain registrar, at least in the U.S. About six months after launching as an invite-only service, Google Domains offers the same sort of domain acquisition and management services available at most domain registrars like Dotster, GoDaddy, and NameCheap, at similar prices.
Google Domains comes with a dashboard to help users maintain their website, along with Blogger integration to help sync company blog posts. The service will offer templates and a site builder price comparison tool, which includes partners like Shopify, Squarespace, Wix and Weebly.
Domain registration starts at $12 per year, and offers several of the basic registration services you’d find at other, more established registrars:
- new domain registration
- transfers of existing names into Google’s service
- private domain registration (for free)
- email forwarding
- website/URL forwarding
- integration with website builder services
With Google Domains, you’ll be able to buy and sell domains through the service, as well as create up to 100 email addresses under one domain. The service also offers to keep your registration private for no extra cost, and runs on Google’s DNS server to help your site load swiftly.
In a blog post, Jade Wang, community manager at Google, said that Google has improved its domain search system to make it easier to find appealing domain names, has added more than 60 new domain gTLDs, and has implemented a management dashboard.
Google says it is adding new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) regularly. Currently, the available options include .coffee, .academy, .company, .us and .ninja. You can find the full list of domain names here. International support for Google Domains is not currently available – to be notified, sign up for an alert from Google.
