Around 3pm yesterday afternoon Google quietly launched an invite-only beta of a domain name registration service called Google Domains. Following up with the concepts of Google My Business, Google Domains plans to extend upon that initiative of getting small businesses online. Google’s goal during the beta of Google Domains is to collect some input on how they can make it even easier for webmasters to find, buy, transfer, and manage their domain names.
“We also want to make sure our customer support and infrastructure works flawlessly, and that we have the right additional services (like mobile website creation tools and hosting services from a range of providers, as well as domain management support). We’re working with some of the top website building providers like Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, and Wix.com to help make that happen.”
The messaging around helping small businesses get online is something that Google has used for years. It has hosted free workshops throughout the world to help businesses start their online presence, partnering with companies such as HostGator, BlueHost and Yola. Furthermore Google has been an ICANN-accredited registrar since 2005 now so we kind of had to see this coming.
So what exactly does Google Domains plan to offer us?
- Free Private Registrations
- 100 Email Forwarders
- 100 Subdomains
No specific price is stated, however a screenshot on the Features page does hint at a cost of $12/domain name. Furthermore the Features page also states support for new gTLDs in the coming years – however nothing is concrete about that yet so for now I would assume support for the usual .com, .net, .org, .biz domain names.