When you have over 300 domains you're in charge of, domain management can be a headache, but we've recently found a tool that helps make our lives easier! In this episode, Lauren and Brian talk about Cloudflare and the process that led the team to move our hundreds of domains to a new service.
Links:
https://dogwoodmediasolutions.com/effective-domain-management-moving-from-google-domains-to-cloudflare/
https://dogwoodmediasolutions.com/staff/brian-harris/
https://dogwoodmediasolutions.com/staff/lauren-cumbie/
Learn more about Dogwood at DogwoodMediaSolutions.com. At our site, you can learn more about our staff, and the services we offer. Don't forget to check out our blog full of information while you are there. You'll also find links where you can follow us on social media and become an insider to really see what it's like at Dogwood.
When you have over 300 domains you're in charge of, domain management can be a headache, but we've recently found a tool that helps make our lives easier! In this episode, Lauren and Brian talk about Cloudflare and the process that led the team to move our hundreds of domains to a new service.
Links:
https://dogwoodmediasolutions.com/effective-domain-management-moving-from-google-domains-to-cloudflare/
https://dogwoodmediasolutions.com/staff/brian-harris/
https://dogwoodmediasolutions.com/staff/lauren-cumbie/
Learn more about Dogwood at DogwoodMediaSolutions.com. At our site, you can learn more about our staff, and the services we offer. Don't forget to check out our blog full of information while you are there. You'll also find links where you can follow us on social media and become an insider to really see what it's like at Dogwood.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thanks for tuning into the Dogwood Media Solutions podcast. I'm your host, Lauren Cumbie, and today Brian and I are going to be talking about effective domain management.
Welcome back to the Dogwood Media Solutions Podcast. I'm Lauren Cumbie and I'll be your host today. And on the other mic we have our CEO and owner Brian Harris. How many of these have we done together at this point Brian?
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well, how many podcasts is this? Is this 21?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
This is 20, I think
Speaker 2 (00:29):
20. So probably about 15. Yeah. I don't know if it's quite that many. We've had a lot of great guests, but there's been several of 'em where me and you have been talking about a lot of our different subjects because we're the most tenured people here. This is
Speaker 1 (00:44):
True. And the writers
Speaker 2 (00:46):
True. We do write most of the blog posts between us and Beth and Beth would be in a lot more of these podcasts if she didn't get taken away by her golf pro right after Florence.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
I know we need Beth back in Pike Road.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Everyone needs Beth back in Pike Road. Yep. She just brings peace.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yes, she does. Well, today we are talking about effective domain management, and this kind of came out of necessity because we had to move all how many of our domains,
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It was almost 400 of them.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
So we had to move all 400 ish of our domains over to a new system, and that was a lot of fun. So as usual, our blog posts typically come from things that we're actually going through or things that we've dealt with clients, et cetera, so we
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Figured we're going through it. Someone else is probably going through it also too,
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Probably. So first of all, why did we have to move domain services, Brian? Because
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Google decided to go and sell all their domains to Squarespace. Well, isn't that nice? Why did they do that? I don't know. We had Google Domains, I don't know how many years now, but when I found them, I remember thinking, oh, this is great. It's with Google. It simplifies so many things because of Google Workspaces and Gmail and being able to have our domains there. It was super simple to organize it. I could share access into the domains. That was a huge thing, and it was a flat fee of $12 a month. That's super easy when it comes to budgeting because with other places it might be $22 or it might be 18 or it might be seven. It was just all over the board. But with Google Domains, it was a consistent $12 a month, and it's like that's so much easier for budgeting.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And so that was our cost, and then we charge a little bit more than that for people for us to basically take care of it and making sure it's renewed when they call in, have D n s entry changes, we go in and change it or we can give 'em access to it. That was just a beautiful thing about Google Domains. It's not a high profit maker for us, but it's more of a convenience thing that someone doesn't have to worry about it when we manage it. They don't have to go, oh, is my domain going to get renewed? All of our stuff is all in the same credit card. It's all in the same account. We make sure all of it gets taken care of. And that was the beauty of having Google Domains. And then that shared access part was a huge piece because you'd run into times where you have an IT person who needed to go in and they better making the change, here you go, tell me your Gmail address, we'll add you in there, and they could go in and make those changes and then we could go back and take 'em out.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
That was the beauty about it. But yeah, Squarespace came in, made them, I guess, an offer they couldn't refuse or a Google domain salt someone, I'm not sure of the backend part of that, but in the end, Google sold it off and Squarespace bought it.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
So Google Domains is getting added to the long list of Google products that has gotten sunsetted over
Speaker 2 (03:27):
The years. There's actually a whole website about Google products that have been sunsetted that were just great products and they just disappeared. I'm guessing in the end that it wasn't profitable or it was just enough profitable where someone else wanted the business. And I think that was kind of a mixture of what happened here is that there was a lot of domains there. And so Squarespace being a website building company that they are saw the opportunity, well, if we can get their domains, then maybe we can convert them into websites, right? Yeah. So they're looking at it, I think as a customer list of people that they've already, so even if they break even on it, it's just a list of people who own domains. So they're most likely going to need our products as in website building. And so they'll get 'em on that 49, $50 a month for DISC plan and they'll actually make more money by doing it that way. So it makes sense for Squarespace. It doesn't make sense for us as an agency and someone who manages a lot of domains and not wanting to be trapped inside of another system like Squarespace.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Is there a reason for somebody to keep their domain with Squarespace as it's moving over or
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Because you have a Squarespace site? I
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Figured
Speaker 2 (04:34):
That's literally about the only reason why you would want to consider staying is if you were already on Squarespace, your life just got easier because now your domain is in the same spot that your website's at. I don't always suggest that I like keeping 'em separate, but in this case, that would probably be the only reason I could ever imagine of why you want to stay, especially with the rest of this blog post that we're talking about here, that we wrote the other facts, that there's other things out there. I think when you hear the reasoning why we chose what we chose to go to, I think it'll make a lot of sense or other people, even if our solution isn't the right solution for them, there's other solutions out there also too that would probably be better than staying with Squarespace.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
So what was the process that we had to go through to figure out what to do after we found out we needed to move everything?
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Well for us, of course, I talked about so many times about being able to share access. That was a huge piece. There's no way I could go back to that. There had to be a way to be able to share access of our clients. I wanted it all to be in a simple to use thing. And one of the worst parts about Google Domains was the inability to be able to go make system-wide changes over domains. And it was one of the things we just worked through it because it's very not that often. That was really a big issue When we moved from downtown out to Pike Road, that was an issue when we had to go change out the address for 382 or whatever it was at that time, that was a long tedious process. It took two or three days to go through and do because you couldn't do a bulk edit.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
We had to go to each one of 'em changing out the address, or in the case of employee leaves or an employee gets added, we had to go through and change out those things. And so we looked at those points of what are the pain points we had with Google Domains, just like we do for website or anything else. We look at what are the pain points, what are the things we like about it, and let's go find the platform that can help us solve these pain points and also keep the features that we like the most. And that's how we landed where we landed and we landed at CloudFlare. And so who would've thought that? So CloudFlare is like a, they're more known for a D N S flattening, which is when you get into web terms, it sounds so technical, all the different things they do.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
We've used them before for D n s hosting and D N S is basically the instructions on the web that your domain gives to be able to find the host where your server's at. And so CloudFlare is a great little free service that does this for people. We've used it for what's called C name flattening so that we don't have to use an IP address so that if the IP address ever gets changed, the CNAs and Flattened, it keeps the website getting directed from the domain to where the actual files are being hosted. Very technical terms. I don't expect most people listening to our podcast to even care one little bit about that. It's a great service. It's a free service. We've used it before. They have paid options. None of them have ever been applicable to us or things that we need it for our clients.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
There may be something in there one day, but they actually had a great marketing thing because we already had those pieces with them. They knew that we were with Google Domains because they would see our instructions for a name service with Google names, and they sent me an email, them and several other people, Hey, won't tell you about our service, but you didn't know we hosted domains. And so I put them on the list of people to check out. So I checked out places like Name Cheap and name.com and GoDaddy, of course, that's the super popular one out there looking at all these different things. And GoDaddy had great things for agencies, but they were inconsistent and they didn't always work name cheap, did not fit agencies at all. It's just a place that you could just put domains at and that's all it's really good for.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
And so basically through a process of elimination, I landed on CloudFlare and it's not the most intuitive interface, which that wasn't even on my list. I can get through a not intuitive interface to be able to do the things I needed to do, which was bulk editing, which was being able to change out users on the accounts, being able to change out the address for our settings all in one spot. It could do both of those things. I can create groups of domains inside of it and say that if we have a client who has multiple domains and they have an IT person, I can go create a group of all those domains together, put 'em into whatever the name of their is, and then add that user in. And whatever sites are in that group, no matter if they add or subtract, that guy's always going to have access to 'em. And same with our folks, our employees here at Dogwood. We can go through and set up groups if we want them to have access to all the things or none of the things or some of the things. We can go in and control that access based on whatever we want 'em to have. And so we're able to set up all those groups and different user accesses. That was a huge piece.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, that's really nice.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
And so they knocked out all these little things, being able to move it and the price, which not even, again, going back to that wasn't even my biggest factor. I'm willing to pay for a service if it's worth it. They're selling them at cost, so whatever it costs to buy a domain through the ICAN services. So whereas Google Domains is doing a flat $12, they're just trying to break even a CloudFlare is actually charging you the exact same thing they're paying. So again, they're just trying to not lose money. So most of our domains are $10 and 10 cents or $10 and 11 cents. It's weird numbers. They average it out over the different domains, but it's such a saved money. So we're actually able to be a little bit more profitable in that area. In the Google domain management, in the domain management, it gave us the ability to control all the domains at one time. It gave us the ability to break out the domain so people could have access to the ones they wanted to have access to it. So I mean, that was the big things that we really wanted to accomplish and it did it.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah. That's awesome. I know one of the things that I was really excited about was like you said, the groups. Because I remember in my earlier days at Dogwood, one of my tasks at one point was to go in and add one of our clients needed somebody to get added into every single one of their domains, and they have 40 domains, maybe more than that. And that was one of my jobs one day was to go through and just on each one add in that email address,
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Not to do that now. Now we just go in and add a user. That group already exists, and so you just add 'em into that user group and so they're boom, they're ready to go. And so that was part of the big part of it was doing that. There's also several other things that LER did that we didn't even know about when we started doing this. They have basically this whole little toolkit that helps you to protect your email. And when I say protect your email, like protecting it from people hijacking it or from using it to send spam or anything else like that, because that's the thing that people will do is they'll try to steal your email address and send emails on your behalf. And so this function that's built in, it's basically a step-by-step guide on how to go through each domain.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
And so we've gone through and done that for every one of our clients now where each one of them has this set up where it's protecting their email. We have a couple of the different security features set up in there too, helping to manage websites from malicious attacks, the dial serves, threats, data breaches, all that kind of stuff that CloudFlare added in there that were just extra pieces of that. CloudFlare is able to handle a lot of traffic, whereas, I mean, Google Domains I believe could have handled it too. It's just a piece that CloudFlare is also promoting. Is there just scalability of being able to handle the traffic that's coming through that domain and making sure that it's getting to the right place? It's just some of the little things we've gone through and done a lot of add-ons for each of our domains, and that's been a big piece and we're still working through a couple of those just because we have so many domains as part of this.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
Mr. Bob has been amazing. Mr. Bob, this has been his project for about two months now. He had to move over every domain from Google Domains one by one, bless him. And so it is not an easy process. You have to have a security code. You have to unlock the domain, move it over, approve the transfer, make sure it's in there, then assign it to the groups, make sure all the users are in there. He's been doing all those little things step by step and going through a spreadsheet and making sure each one of those is done. And so some of our clients get a notification every once in a while something's happened, but for the most part, this has been a thing that's been happening for our clients without them ever knowing it was even happening. D n s management, another great little thing that has in there too, just because we have all that in one spot now and it's even gone through, and CloudFlare has sent me notifications that we had an issue on the d n s management piece where we had maybe two text records for an email piece that was both doing the same thing.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
And it's like, you don't need this duplicate record. Here's how you merge 'em together. And they're like, well, that's really cool. Yeah, that's nice. And so it basically helped us to avert an era where someone could have been getting spam email by going through and just making this one little setting change. And so it is been a great move moving over to CloudFlare. I highly recommend it. It's definitely like we've talked about, there's so many different options out there, but this CloudFlare piece has just, it's been amazing for us at Dogwood, so much so that I'm willing to get on the bandwagon and like, Hey, if you're looking for something, you've been affected by the Google domains thing, CloudFlare is a great option to consider
Speaker 1 (13:59):
For sure. So if somebody is listening and they know that they currently use Google domains and all of that just sounds like a headache to them, how can we help?
Speaker 2 (14:11):
We always tell people, we love to manage your domains. It's a pretty easy process for us to move over. It does take a little time we put in here, then you don't have to worry about 'em anymore. You'll get a bill from us once a year for the actual cost of the domains. We charge $25 and that's all we charge to take care of the domain every year. You literally heard my cost, it's about $10 11 cents. So we make $14, you send us d n s changes, we take care of it. We don't go in and charge for those little things like just little maintenance items. And then we also give you the assurance that you don't have to worry about it anymore. And that right there, I feel like is the part that is worth the extra $14 of you not having to worry, did my domain get paid for because I don't charge $14 to go help you recover your domain,
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah. And that's happened before where we've had to go help people find out one where their domain is, who has it, having to go through all the steps of reclaiming their domain, and then if it even hits the market, someone else is most likely going to buy that domain before anyone else, and they're going to put it at a premium price because the traffic was going into it. And so very bare minimum, you're going to pay $300 to get your domain back, or you can pay $14 a year to make sure that never happens. And we take care of it, bare minimum, $300. I've seen domains hit the market and be at three, five, $10,000. Oh yeah. I've talked to domain people wanting a hundred thousand dollars for a domain because it's like real estate and you've got a valuable piece of real estate that's getting traffic that's worth ad revenue.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And so they could go stick a landing page on that on your old domain that you worked hard to develop and get all the traffic to and then stick ads on it for who knows what, and start making that money off of it, and you're not getting a dime for it. In fact, you're going to have to pay to get that one back. The same thing that they just bought in an auction after you didn't pay your bill. So why do all that? Let us handle it. And then someone doesn't have to worry about their domain anymore. They just know it's taken care of and they've trusted us that we know what we're doing.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is a conversation for another podcast, but we recently had somebody reach out to us that they found out that they're, the people that we're currently running their site we're going away, and they were like, okay, can we just transfer over to y'all? And because it wasn't a personal connection, they didn't really know these people. It was just a big entity head kind of situation. They found out that their site was totally gone. And I think that's the importance of working with people like us that we're here, we're local, we're in your town. You can come talk to us, meet with us, and we're taking care of your stuff. We're not some random voice in the clouds.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
You have to go through some department to find out where your domain is. And I don't know if it always will be this way, but I'm the main person that manages the domain at Dogwood, and it is kind of because it's my passion truthfully. I love domain management. I love the whole theory of why you purchased other domains for protection and for future proofing yourself, and also just for, if you had this idea, you want to make sure someone else doesn't get it. And so I love the idea of taking care of domains. I love going through and making sure domains are being rerouted to the correct places. So when you buy a.com knowing that you also should probably go ahead and buy the.net and.org or even when you're looking for a.com address, go ahead and buy the.net and.org or make sure they're available. Also at the same time, because it's so often that people use it.net.org, so go ahead and grab those.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
And so I love taking care of these things. I love making sure the settings are done correctly. Other people in our office has connections to 'em, but this project's been something that I've personally worked a lot of making sure I was the person who did the research on which one we're going to. Definitely involved John and Lauren both in those conversations. I don't generally make big decisions like this about going through the team. These guys that I trust, I brought 'em on here because I trust them. And so we'd go and to have these conversations. And so it was something we were all unanimous on that everything, looking at all the things that we looked at and all the different options that CloudFlare was the best option together. So yeah, I love taking care of domains. It's just a thing that we like to do here, and it's just another service we offer as part of our full package of outsourced marketing.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Well, this has been a fun time, a about domains.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
I didn't know how passionate I was about domains until we started talking about it, and I was like, I do have more knowledge about this than I want to admit, I guess.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
Yeah. I started out and was like, I think this will be a short one. Brian And Brian's like, Nope,
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Watch. No, I was like, hold my tea. That's all. I drink Sweet tea lately at least.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
Well, thank y'all for listening. We appreciate you being here. If you like what you're hearing, just head on over to our website. You can check out the podcast there and see all the different episodes that we have done so far. You can find those podcasts anywhere that you listen to podcasts, but if you don't know where to go, just go to our website and that's where you can find pretty much everything about us. You can find out about our staff, our services, you can find our social media so that you can connect with us. There's a million different ways you can connect with us over there, and if you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast. That really helps us out a lot to be able to share this with the people who need to know it. Next time. You'll be hearing from Brian and Beth to talk about SS e o strategy and what it looks like for her working here. Beth's job has changed a lot over the years, and so that'll be a really fun one. Beth is always super passionate about SSS e o.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Do we ever make it through a podcast about talking about Beth ever? I don't know. I mean, I think if we went back and listened to all the different podcasts, no matter what if it's about her or not, she always manages to sneak into it because she has so much knowledge about SS e o and writing, and it goes through so many different things we do here at Dogwood that she manages to get a mention. It feels like almost every time. So it's going to be a great episode. I'm looking forward to talking to Beth about this.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yep, Beth's great. We really should do that. That should be like a trivia question. How many times has Beth been mentioned in a podcast,
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Or at least how many podcasts has Beth been mentioned in?
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Yeah. Yeah. There you go. See Slayton if you're listening for our next, what's it called? Our next Trivia
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Night. Trivia Night, yes.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
That's a good one.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
How can we make that a Family Feud question coming up next? That is
Speaker 1 (20:24):
What's coming up next,
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Say, who's been mentioned in the most podcast, what staff members have been mentioned in the most podcast episodes, and then we can do the top when you have the answers on that.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Yeah, good times. Well, thanks for tuning in to the Dogwood Media Solutions podcast, and until next time, happy marketing.