How to Purchase a Domain on domains.google.com and Set the NameServers

In the past I have recommended purchasing domains from hover.com. Hover has a great purchasing experience and a helpful chat service. However, since the prices have moved up at Hover, I recently started recommending that students purchase from domains.google.com instead. Google being Google, there is no service provided. Moreover, they make an effort to upsell, so you need to be wary on that front. That being said, domains.google.com is the cheapest place to buy domains and they have free privacy services.

So how do you do it?

Well, the first step is do simply go to domains.google.com, click on Get a New Domain. This part is technically easy, but it can be hard to make a decision on a domain name. I have a separate blog post on that decision: Choosing a domain name.

The screen looks like this.

You need to type in your desired domain name, and once you pick it out, you purchase it.

After you purchase the domain, you need to confirm your email address. Until you do that, you will see this warning message.

Now we need to do the tricky part. This is much easier on hover.com, but works fairly well on domains.google.com. We need to tell your domain where to find its hosting by changing the nameservers. Click into your domain, and choose the DNS tab. DNS is short for Domain NameServers.

Now click into the Custom name servers tab at the top of the page. We need to set up custom name servers.

Next you need to enter the nameservers provided by your website host.

At this point, you would be done at most domain registrars. But a Google, there is an extra step:

Find the warning that looks like this and “Switch to these settings”.

Make sure that your name servers look like the screen below.

That was a lot, but now you are ready to start publishing to your new domain! If you need help with publishing, I have a training program in Module 14 on publishing.