It’s always good to have a one-stop-shop when you try to host a website or application online. But, that might not be the best bang for your buck. So, you will end up hosting the application with a vendor, having your domain managed by a different one, and maybe you’re using G-suite or O-365 as your email system; and this is my case to pick and choose the best options depending on business requirements and potential growth. So, I’ve decided to use https://domains.google to be my domain registrar for a client that I worked with. Though, it comes with challenges sometimes.
Google domains provide cheap, lightning-fast, and intuitive service as compared to other service providers. It cost me $12 a year per domain. You get all features offered by other registrars plus 2-factor authentication to protect your dashboard.
One of the challenges would be the need to create manually MX records based on your service provider, create A records for your domain as well as sub-domains. When you create a sub-domain from cPanel, you need to create a record to point to the newly created folder (sub-domain). To do so, follow the steps below:
- Login to https://domains.google
- Go to DNS
- Scroll down until you get Custom records
- In the first box type the name of the sub-domain (in my case, the sub-domain is “test.mysite.com” so you should type test)
- In the second box select the record type which is (A record)
- In the third box, you can leave the default value (1H)
- In the fourth box, type in the IP address of the server (this should be the same as the IP address in www and @)
- Now, save and test by going to the link from a browser (http://test.mysite.com). It should work like a charm!
