Should I use Google Domains or Amazon as my registrar?

Should I use Google Domains or Amazon as my registrar?  That’s the question I have been asking myself.  Right now it looks like Google is the better deal because you can use it’s DNS service for free while Amazon charges for their Route 53 service (50 cents per month per domain).  When it comes to heavy usage I have no idea which company would be better but I’d assume they would be very similar on reliability.

Both services have several things in common from pricing to private registration to security.  When talking about their pricing being the same neither company is very competitive.  While we are only talking about a couple of dollars versus a base rate on a competitive registrar those couple of dollars can add up when you are paying for several dozen names a year.  That’s what makes it even harder for me to recommend domain registration through Route 53.  I would have to pay the annual $12 for a .com AND $7 on top of that for DNS.

I use Amazon’s AWS services almost exclusively because they were one of the first and they have a strong community to lean on for support.  I would like to see both services increase the competition in the registrar field.  It’s due for some innovation.

Google Domains Beta

As you can see from the screenshot it’s a very simple interface for changing a domain’s settings.  All I did was transfer one my own domains to google to see how it would work.  Certainly it is still in beta but I can’t see why they wouldn’t roll this out soon.

Amazon lowered their AWS prices today

Great day for cloud lovers!  I received this email this morning:

Excerpt:

  1. Price reduction for Amazon EC2
    We are reducing Linux On Demand prices for First Generation Standard (M1) instances, Second Generation Standard (M3) instances, High Memory (M2) instances and High CPU (C1) instances in all regions. All prices are effective from February 1, 2013. These reductions vary by instance type and region, but typically average 10-20% price drops. For complete pricing details, please visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.
  2. Reduced Data Transfer Pricing
    We are reducing prices for data transfer between AWS locations. Our new lower pricing applies to data transfer between all 9 global AWS regions, and from AWS regions to all global CloudFront edge locations. Previously, we have charged normal internet bandwidth prices for data transfer, but are now lowering these charges significantly — allowing you to even more cost effectively move data between regions for serving customers in local geographies, for disaster recovery, and for many other use cases. The new prices are effective February 1, 2013, and you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of these new prices. To learn more, please visit the Amazon S3 pricing page.

After taking a look at the prices the data transfer prices are at zero for a lot of instances and the On Demand prices have dropped below $.01 per hour for Linux micro instances.  I have been thinking of ways to take advantage of some of this pricing.  If you consider that I pay $.48 per hour in electricity costs ALONE you can understand why I am so pro-cloud.

Enjoy the new pricing!  I know I will.