Google Domains horror story time! now that the service is shutting down/being sold At a previous place I worked, Google Domains was used for the main (and only) business domain. It handled emails and website The previous person who set that up domain made the unfortunate decision to use an email on that domain for the domain's own contact information They also left without handing over responsibility for maintaining the domain and its renewals. When I joined, I had no idea who managed the domains, and had assumed (wrongly) that it was taken care of and that was the reason nobody had told me about it. (Needless to say, since that episode, I don't make that assumption any more if I'm to join a business in a capacity where I might be the one managing the domains) So, the (in hindsight) predictable happens - the domain expires and nobody is prepared for it because the contact information on the account is all wrong and nobody received the notification emails. The domain goes dark: our emails stop working, our website stops working, our entire platform that serves all of our paying customers just goes offline. Dead in the water What followed was almost two weeks of us wrestling with Google Domains support, going through ID and business validation processes to allow us to take back control of the domain. As it turns out, you don't get 24/7 human support (at least not back then). You get assigned a case handler, and then you're at their mercy. If they go home for the evening, you get nobody to talk to. If for some reason they choose to only handle your case near the end of their work day, it doesn't matter how quickly you respond, they can easily say something to the effect of "I'm clocking out now, will check tomorrow". I don't know if it was our case handler, or just how things were over there, but day after day, when our entire company was hemorrhaging customer goodwill and money due to compensation for service outage (hard lessons learned there), the case was moving forward at a glacial pace. it felt like every day we would move one step through a multi-step process because whoever was dealing with our case would respond to us only at the end of their day and simply clock off until the next day, even if we responded within minutes with whatever piece of information they needed next. We couldn't get the situation escalated, we couldn't move the thing forward any faster than the case handler would respond to us. We had everyone we can think of hammering at their door - our GCP reps, our advisors and contacts who either worked at google or were close to. Nothing seemed to make it go any faster. Even getting hold of the person responsible for the domain would help (they were, understandably annoyed to have received several irate phonecalls from me, I wasn't feeling so friendly at the time). Eventually after 10 days, we get access to our domain again, and things go live again. Moral of story: - Never use an email on the domain as the contact detail. I should note Google domains (and I think most registrars) stops you from doing this. I don't know how it happened before, perhaps they didn't have the warning for it - Multiple responsible people in the business should have access to the domains in case someone isn't available. This is why when I look for a replacement for Google Domains, I'm going to need to find one with sharing/access control and ideally SSO so that I can share access to the domain with others - The business should have more than one way for customers to reach it, and not just via email and website. In our case, both our emails and our website/web platform which had a couple methods of reaching us went down due to the domain outage - If you join a company, and nobody can tell you who's in charge of the domains, it might be you. you should check before things go awry