Monday, June 10, 2013

Renewing domain registration Google

NOTE: Before you go to the trouble of reading what's below, check out the June 22, 2014 post for a GOOD tip that could save you HOURS of angst. sg 6/22/14

I wish I could give exact instructions on how to renew a domain registration through Google. Unfortunately, I cannot, but I can tell you what I eventually did to renew mine.
First, here is the UNHELPFUL e-mail I received June 2, 2013 from Google Apps.

Per our records, your domain registration subscription for the domain beatstalkingtomyself.com has been set to NOT auto-renew. As a result, this domain WILL NOT auto-renew on June 25, 2013. If you do not enable auto-renew, your domain name registration will expire, your Google Apps account will no longer be associated with your domain name, and you may lose all data associated with your Google Apps account. Therefore, if you’d like to continue using Google Apps we recommend turning auto renewal ON. Please do not reply to this email, replies are not monitored.

All I had to do was to check the box for “automatic renewal” but there was no way to get to where that button was.

After about three hours of sitting at my computer that day—searching and searching for a way in to Google Apps, I began seeking outside help. That saga, extending over six days of fretful frustration, is covered in my June 3 post called “Google Hellp.” Eventually, I was able to restore an old file containing the original e-mail, which I saved in 2009 (the file having been overwritten when I downloaded a “new and improved” upgrade from my Internet Provider a year ago). Of course, I had no idea that was going to happen when I agreed to the upgrade.

The idea for looking for the link in the original e-mail was a solution reported online by others in the same boat. But WHY wasn’t the link contained in my June 2 e-mail? And why—on GOOGLE itself—wasn’t the Google Apps I needed crossed referenced so a search would find it easily?

 When I located the original e-mail sent out by Google when I first purchased my domain, I was able to just click the link provided in that e-mail and “Voila?”  It’s a unique link for my domain, however—and it isn’t going to work for anyone else. The beginning of it is:

http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/setup/beatstalkingtomyself/ followed by 34 characters in a mix and match of numbers, alphas, and symbols with lower and upper case particulars. When I received the original e-mail in July 2009, I was instructed to go to a help center identified as https://www.google.com/support/a which now appears to be a useless address.

Here are two addresses in my original e-mail that might  help someone who is in the same boat:


http://admin.google.com/yourdomainname.com/DomainSettings#DomainSettings/subtab=domains

My only advice is to SAVE YOUR ORIGINAL E-MAIL when you purchase your domain, as following Google’s instructions results in a BIG nothing! Good luck, and may you never ever have to repeat what I went through.

6 comments:

Steph said...

Thank you so much, this saved me a LOT of time this morning!

cloudsandsea said...

wow can't believe I found your post. I just went throughout the entire morning with useless Google Help.
I will look for the original purchase slip which i am sure I kept in a file.
Thank You
Google is hell

Bernadine said...

I'm going through the same thing right now. I've tried the urls you suggested but they only take me to the google sign in which hasn't worked at all. I tried calling phone number for assistance but it says I need a pin and I can't get access to that information anywhere and I can't move forward with getting assistance from an actual person without the pin! I feel like I'm drowning and my blog is slowly losing consciousness.

PredsOnTheGlass said...

This is maddening! This is supposed to be easy.

PJ Wetzel said...

Thank you *so* much. I got the same email, word-for-word that you quoted up top. I clicked the link to turn Automatic renewal on and the next page asked me to log in. When I did the next page told me I didn't have admin privileges and needed to log in to 'another' account (though I had no other account). So I did a search on my problem and your blog post came up (along with a bunch of completely useless Google Help pages).

But your advice worked exactly as you described. I dug up the 3 year old email verifying my purchase and clicked on the link provided there (the one with the 34 characters of gibberish) and, as you said, 'Voila!' It sent me to a Google Apps admin set-up page which informed me that the Google Checkout I'd been using for the past three years no longer is a valid way to make a payment. So I set up an admin account using using my-name@ as the contact email addy and in minutes I was set up and had activated automatic payment.

You made my day - Happy New Year!

Mahogany said...

Thank you sooooo much for your help! I was struggling to renew my blog domain! you are a life saver!