Google has made a major revamp to Google Domains, its domain name registration service launched in beta in the United States in 2014. The upgraded service now includes a trio of improvements that Google hopes will help it match up to the competition.
Google Vice President and Chief Information Officer Ben Fried made the announcement in a blog post, saying that the new features are targeted toward enterprise customers who are looking to establish or strengthen their online presence.
Among these improvements, the most prominent is the addition of support for 90 new top-level domains which belong to Donuts, the world's leading provider of TLDs, going beyond the usual .com, .net and .biz endings. Interesting new domain name endings include .accountants, .credit and .energy, which all cost $120 a year to register. Other notable, but far more affordable new TLDs include .pizza, .gift, .recipes, .photography and .cool, among several others.
"New domain name endings offer more choice and flexibility as you pick a memorable address for your business website," says Fried.
Additionally, Google is expanding its service to offer custom email addresses, such as nicole@techtimes.com. Custom email addresses, as opposed to free email addresses one can easily sign up for via email providers such as Gmail or Hotmail, give businesses a more professional air.
To set up custom email addresses, customers will have to pay an additional $5 per month for every email address they set up on their domain. While this service isn't new – since major domain registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy have offered custom email addresses for a long time – Google's service has one advantage by being integrated with Google Apps for Work.
This means users who sign up for custom email addresses will also gain full access to the entire productivity suite, which includes 30 GB of Google Drive storage, online collaborative file editing tools, video conferences, shared calendars and more.
Google is also now offering domain ownership transfer, which lets users push a domain to different accounts.
Lastly, we may soon see Google's domain registration service transfer to its new home domains.google, which it just purchased earlier this month, making it one of its first web properties to be registered under its new .google TLD.
