They probably wanted to add Google domains to their ever growing product graveyard so I guess selling it is better than forcing everyone to fix their DNS.
Sucks though. Was really easy to use and for the most part just worked.
This is a surprising move by Google, one would think there would be no benefit them selling the domains business?
Squarespace hopes to convert some of these people into customers of its site building and other tools
No thanks
Squarespace will honor Google Domains renewal prices for current customers for at least 12 months
This quote has me slightly worried, especially considering some Google domains already cost almost triple of a regular ‘.com’
Well this sux. After 12 months then what. Gonna have to jump ship probably
Lol, they’re 100% going to lose me as a customer. The only reason I used them as a registrar was because it was quick and easy to integrate into Google Workspaces and manage everything like DNS from one site. This is honestly a pretty annoying move.
Same! Guess I’m moving to cloudflare for my registrar. IIRC it’s cheaper too
Just looked at their offering, it looks promising. They also have email forwarding with catch-all which will be useful for people relying on that with Google domains
Welp just transfered my domains and it was super easy. I’m already using Tutanota for my email and clouflare for DNS so I don’t have to change anything it seems. Just went to the transfer website, unlocked the domains on Google, got a transfer pin, gave it to cloudflare, paid, verified the transfer via emails from google, and done
What the heck? that’s an unexpected one.
Guess I’ll be looking at migrating my domains within the next 12 months, I don’t really like the way squarespace runs their business. I also sincerely hope this doesn’t affect gmail aliasing in any way, I rely on that as my main email address.
Sorry guys, it’s because I just bought another domain today. This really sucks, Google Domains was easy to use and cheap.
Namecheap has been my goto for a while now
I’m happy with Porkbun as my domains’ registrar. 🙅🏼♀️ Cool for Squarespace, I guess.
Porkbun sounds good, will consider transfer domain to it (currently using a local registrar).
same, I will definitely check it out, thanks bird
Off to cloudflare I go, was already planned but I’ve been lazy about it.
I just did it last night had no idea lol
Wow that’s interesting. For me as a consumer that would negate the value of the registrar - I would probably be wrong, but as a consumer maybe would have assumed that domains bought there have some easier integration into the Google ecosystem, with some convenience benefit even if small.
Will they still? I don’t use Squarespace (but a lot of people must be, for them to have that much pull, damn) but would they still have such benefit? I guess the benefit is Squarespace integration.
This includes Google’s special TLDs they own and administer? Article didn’t say.
Well they have a nice integration with things like Cloud Run, etc. that made using your custom domain with GCP hosted stuff pretty simple compared to using externally hosted registrars. That may change going forward I guess.
Aw damn… I really like how bare basic their interface is and how they’re not constantly trying to upsell me shit I don’t need. Anyone have any good recommendations for alternatives that fit this bill? Google is just giving me the worst possible options.
I’m really happy with Porkbun!
same, +1 for Porkbun, been good for me for a long while. Have also used Name.com for a long while and it’s decent. I think I like Porkbun more now, though.
I use cloudflare. They sell their domains at-cost, which is nice. Plus all their other features are nice for a (very) small sys/webadmin
Njalla is pretty nice.
That was my reaction too!
Huh, that’s weird. You would think that business had pretty good returns, given that registrars have famously high markup when selling domains.
How does smaller company buy bigger companies stuff! That’s not the normal flow
It happens all the time. Bigger companies often decide that one of their products is not profitable enough or doesn’t fit their overall strategy and then the options are to either close the service (which is what Google is famous for), spin it off as a new business if it’s profitable enough, or try to see if someone is willing to buy that business unit (which is what happened to most of IBM for example).
That’s one way to kill a product! 😂
My guess is that they tried to monetise it but couldn’t figure out a good way. So made some good money off it.
Well fuck me I guess. I only used this due to the ease of access and nice UI.
