GoDaddy may be the runaway leader in domain name registration, but there's a new player it has to watch out for - Google Domains.
Google tacitly announced early on Tuesday that it is inviting an undisclosed number of businesses to jump onboard for the invite-only beta version of its new domain registration service, which the company is promoting as a simple tool for managing addresses on the Web.
"We're beginning to invite a small number of people to kick the tires on Google Domains, a domain registration service we're in the process of building," announced Google on its Google+ Your Business page. "Businesses will be able to search, find, purchase and transfer the best domain for their business - whether it's .com, .biz, .org or any of the wide range of new domains that are being released to the Web."
Google established Google Domains after conducting research that shows not even half of all businesses have their own website, which is, of course, unthinkable to Google in this day and age. It makes sense for the company to want to bring the remaining 55% of brick-and-mortar businesses online. The more business websites on the Internet, the more will people turn to Google to search for these businesses. Everybody gets faster, easier access to information and Google has more ways to ramp up its advertising business.
The new Google Domains will have features such as domain forwarding, which lets website owners point a new domain to an existing website, 100 customizable sub-domains to let businesses create customized pages such as blog.website.com, and branded email addresses that can be programed to forward emails to the user's Gmail account. And for businesses who are tired of the usual .com, .biz and .net TLDs, Google Domains provides hundreds of new options, such as .photography, .reviews and the very popular .guru. Google is also working with website builders, such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Shopify to integrate their building tools into the domain registration service for faster setup.
Although Google says registering a domain with its new service will not affect a website's position in the search engines, Google Domains will naturally use Google's DNS servers and will include up to 10 million resolutions per year for each domain registered with the service, meaning faster loading times for domains registered with Google.
Google has not announced official prices, but the Google Domains page shows a photo that a one-year subscription starts at $12. This is slightly more expensive than GoDaddy's discounted $8 domains, but the latter charges an additional $7.99 for private registration and $4.99 for email services, both of which Google Domains offers for free.
More than 57 million domains, or 30% of the entire domain market, are registered with GoDaddy, which has filed for its initial public offering of $100 million. Earlier this month, GoDaddy announced that it had a net loss of almost $200 million on $1.13 billion in revenue last year.
