Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

bloomberg.com

548 pointsbrycewray606 comments

I'm sad to see this, not b/c I like Google, but because domain names are otherwise a manipulative space, and Google was saving us from that.

Domain service - name registry - is a weird market because it includes cross-subsidizing businesses and the information has value (and people will pay for anonymity to avoid hassle), so buy decisions aren't just price/performance.

Google and Cloudflare can offer it near cost just to build goodwill in their clients (i.e., to save them from predation). Cloudflare promises for renewals to only pass through their costs, which makes sense (they make back their customer acquisition cost on the first purchase).

What's the business model of others like porkbun? By hypothesis, you have to pay more to go without the cross-subsidy. If cost is on par, then you might expect them to be marketing the information or to customers somehow. Perhaps just making it back on anonymity charges?

At a minimum, the company would need to have some real reputational concerns about maintaining good relations with customers. E.g., with porkbun, it's super-cute in an ostensibly-benign jurisdiction, but it's a completely hidden LLC who's privacy concerns seem limited only to WHOIS anonymity. What exactly prevents them (or any successor in interest) from misusing the information they have?

On the internet, associating real people with IP's will always be a key goal of governments and criminals, and yet domain name services are a free-for-all with no underlying privacy guarantees.

I agree Google had trust here and it was nice to have them in the game.

With this infrastructure move especially, it is hard to trust in Google. This can't have been losing money or been that costly. Google why?

Google Domains integrates well with Google Cloud and Google Workspace and other products. Even if it was a loss leader it had to be useful. Tell me how this makes sense.

This is what i find strange about this

Surely this was at worse profit neutral, or could have been with a modest price hike, I know I would have continued using them even if their domains were an extra $1/year vs competitors because I trusted them more

I have a conspiracy theory that a lot of domain registration companies like GoDaddy sell the domain name searches to squatters (sometimes themselves). The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal.

Oh I've confirmed this. Back in the NetworkSolutions days I saw multiple examples of their bot parking a domain I had searched for the previous day.

I was disturbed by learning squatters no longer just sell domains for big bucks, some of them started to offer them for rent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

>The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal.

somebody runs those whois servers. verisign runs .com and they like money just as much as the next guy - i wouldn't expect your lookups of unregistered domains to be unsold no matter how you do them.

I'm really sad that the list of trustworthy registrars is so small. I use Cloudflare for most of my domains and then Google for my .dev domains but now I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my .dev domains, probably keep them on square space. I'd love for CF to get more TLDs on their registrar because I'm very confident that registration isn't something they'd ever kill but there's a told of niche TLDs they don't have yet.

Was worried about this too, but CF released a blog post the other day saying they're aiming for mid-July for .dev and .app support. Going to transfer mine over as soon as they do.

I've heard Porkbun has weird Chinese ownership and apparently most of their operations are in China.

You must be thinking of someone else. Porkbun is based out of Oregon. The founder is American.

Where did you hear that?

sauce?

Yet another business Google bails on. Add that to the pile. Gee wonder why Google Cloud is getting smashed by AWS and Azure—maybe because nobody trusts Google to not flake out on that business or key products within it. They need some management changes!

They've killed off almost 300.

They have ~100 left.

https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/

What do you think will go next?

I'm sure some of these will bite the bullet this year.

1. Exposure Notifications (maybe in 2-3 years) 2. Google Arts and Culture <- this one has to be expensive to maintain 3. Keep 4. Scholar 5. Tilt Brush 6. Google Lens 7. Google Groups 8. Google Drawings

I don't think Keep will go away; its one of only 14 of Google's products that they classify as "Workspace/Enterprise"; alongside Gmail, Meet, Chat, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, AppsScript, CloudSearch, and Jamboard.

Tilt Brush has been dead for over two years.

> The open source archive of the Tilt Brush code can be found at: https://github.com/googlevr/tilt-brush. Please note that it is not an actively developed product, and no pull requests will be accepted.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/01/the-future-of-tilt...

It also forecloses an entire set of DNS related cloud products that could exist in the future like Cloudflare style DNS proxies, AWS like aliases and DNS load balancing.

I guess those products could work just using hosted zones etc but the DevEx is much worse.

That's where my domain comes from. Unless Squarespace suddenly turns them all over to the public or raises the price by 10x, this isn't quite the same as losing all your data in a cancelled product.

I work for a Fortune 100 company. Years ago we were trying to decide what cloud platform to go with. That is the number one reason Google cloud was the first one crossed off the list. No one trusted it to not be closed down tomorrow.

I’m still surprised why Fi has not been dropped even with many customer support issues.

This! Google has a history and present strategy of making reactive moves to please shareholders. I’m shocked the masses trust them with email. When can we go back to decentralized self-hosted?

This makes zero sense, you could previously buy a domain, email hosting, and a web host in a single shopping cart more or less.

Google seems to have bailed on Google Cloud. You should try and find something in the docs these days.

When I first started using GAE 10 years ago it really felt like somebody lovingly crafted a nice solution to a complex problem.

It's not that anymore.

> In an unexpected announcement today, Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,” (…)

Google killing a product should no longer be a surprise to anyone. It’s the opposite of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition: everybody expects it.

https://killedbygoogle.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty...

I guess the only surprise here is that they're selling it.

The product isn't being sold, just the domain names. And you can't exactly just delete millions of domain names, it'd be an ICANN contract violation (as well as just being a horrible idea and causing endless amounts of harm to the Internet as a whole).

It's probably some contractual obligation as a registrar.

Microsoft has killed more products than Google.

Without a source mentioned, I assume you refer to this[1]?

A comparison shows most products that should be dead are on that list.

G, on the other hand, has products actively used and loved by users.

[1] https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

Microsoft kills products that were dead anyway. Google hypes you up, cuddles you, tells you that you're the best and then pushes you off the cliff when you're not looking because you farted in bed the other night.

Most of them still run, though. Either directly on modern Windows or with something like ReactOS. You can't keep using Inbox once it's shut down.

The difference is no one misses them.

Aren't they a bit older? Time let's these numbers stack. Maybe percent alive to dead is the metric?

Microsoft has also set more products in solid granite than Google.

I still mourn the loss of Google Reader.

This is the most hilarious meme on HN

Nothing ever came close. I simply stopped using RSS altogether.

Please stop it.

I watched the recent developments to Twitter, Google and Reddit, and loved it all.

One way for self-hosted service to catch up is to wait for the big companies to mess up, and they're messed up very well at this moment.

Google previously changed their account expiration policy, and decided to lock users out of their usernames instead of allowing the old owner to re-active it, making the expiration permanently destructive for the user.

This effectively told their users that use of Google services is not "maintenance-free", you have to constantly engage with Google to keep it alive. And funny enough... maintenance costs is one of the reasons why people choose to abandoned their soft-host services.

Now the pendulum swings another way, it's great.

(in the voice of David Attenborough) And thus starts the great domain migration of 2023. 10 million fledgling domains begin their search for safety in new homes, far away from the coming impending onslaught of upsells and limited time offer emails. Some will find refuge in Cloudflare, others, not so.

I moved a domain away from Cloudflare a month or so ago, only to be faced with this. Just my luck.

How does something like this work with the rules on moving domains around quickly. Isn't there like a 6 month time out between moves?

Is there something wrong with Cloudflare?

Thanks! I just realized "describe <blah> in the voice of David Attenborough" is a great prompt.

eventually, all of our conversations will read like prompts to an LLM of some sort

I just bought my domain from Google weeks ago. I genuinely considered killedbygoogle.com while making my purchase, and I was like, "Surely domains.google isn't going anywhere, right? I mean, they even have their own TLD!"

Apparently, I was so wrong. We'll have to see if Squarespace goes for any exorbitant price hikes.

There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, “Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.”

I don't think there is any reason they won't charge the same as they do their own customers, $20 a year, So a 66.6% increase on Google's price. Very annoying as moving registrars is a hassle.

Not just one TLD, I think they have over 40! They must be in the top 3 by number of TLDs owned.

You don’t need to be a registrar to own a TLD, but in their case it seemed pretty essential to their strategy.

I literally dont understand why they did this. Their product was fine as is so didn't need more features, maintenance burden minimal. Isn't google domains just a UI for their GCP domains product? Will that get shut down? Will all my domains suddenly have a pointless premium on them?

Cloudflare, please gain tld parity asap!

It wasn't a "google scale" product. That's how FANG thinks

Or the project didn't have a high enough ranking evangelist

Interesting how you left an "A" out..

At least we now know that Google really can't commit to anything. What was even the point of restructuring into Alphabet if they're never going to do anything other than ads, search, videos, and email.

Ads are being dismantled by the EU, search by chatGPT, videos run on the same ads.

I guess that leaves email.

I just recently setup a zpaq + insync flow to backup my drive data, I'll setup zpaq +imap for mails. Just recently migrated my mail adress to my own domain (sight Google domains).

I'm ready to degoogle.

A terrible email experience that doesn't allow you create tabs such as school, bills, shipping orders with status, etc...

Avoiding regulatory action? (though TBF it was ineffective at that too).

This is so disappointing. I never had an issue with Google Domains. It offered free WHOIS protection, easy to buy a domain and set it up. Nothing fancy. No BS fees. Shame

I've been happy with service from Hover.com. It's from "old internet infrastructure company" Tucows and seems incentivized to deliver a good service because it is an infrastructure tool from an infrastructure company.

The "free WHOIS protection" is something they have to offer, if they[or anyone else] wants to do business in Europe and be GDPR compliant.

I like porkbun.com for the same experience.

Most registrars offer free privacy settings now, even Epik. Maybe Godaddy doesn’t.

Yet https://domains.google/ is has no mention of it and still invites people to move their domain to Google....

I suppose that's ok if the move to Squarespace goes smoothly.

The comms around this has been weird —- I haven’t been able to find any mention of it from official Google channels. You’d think if they were planning to announce this they’d have a blog post and email to customers ready to go.

Interestingly the support page has a banner notice.

https://support.google.com/domains

[edit] And a dedicated support topic https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?sjid=1375...

Even if the move goes smoothly, shouldn't they let customers know what they're signing up for?

Me with 100+ domains with Google:

chuckles I'm in danger!

I should have known. I started a transition for most of my stuff to cloudflare anyway. I kind of figured this would come eventually.

I worked for Squarespace 2010-2012 and the focus from management was mainly on keeping customers happy. It's not like it's ad focused and there's a need to extract maximum value from the userbase. It's possible that's changed in the last decade but Anthony (CEO) was really into having a premium product and a quick glance at the about page shows that most of the senior leadership hasn't changed so I don't see why they'd change direction.

You believe things will go better with cloudflare?

Maybe go some places that make money because they’re a registra instead of a feature of a big product.

what do you mean by "in danger"?

So disappointing. Google domains is such a clean interface for buying domains, I really thought it was one of the few Google products that would last. They’re really not afraid to burn their customers over there at Google

I'm a long-term, several domains user of Google Domains and disappointed to learn of this sale.

Several others have suggested porkbun and I'm interested to see that it provides an API (https://porkbun.com/api/json/v3/documentation).

Do folks have experience with this API?

I have a hacky a solution to update Google Domains Dynamic DNS record but would value a more functional API to update DNS records. Had I known about this before today, I may have migrated my domains to porkbun for this reason alone.

We previously built probably an equally hacky DDNS client using Python, an archive of it is hosted on GitHub under PorkbunDomains. Unfortunately we haven't been able to keep up with dev for it.

I know there's support for our API on the current GitHub hosted version of ddclient, however I haven't had a chance to get it working and a tutorial out, but it's an option.

For no frills dns and dynamic dns update via api, try hurricane electrics dns service: dns.he.net. Not a registrar but free dns hosting. Happy customer for more than a decade now.

This is bullshit... i use Google domains, particularly the easy email redirect. Google domains is a PAID product... for xxxx sake, I already didn't trust google, but this is the nail in their coffin for me.

Same (I also paid for it because of the numerous easy email aliases).

Like, it's a domain name registrar! What was their objective and plan and where did this go wrong? Out of the 2,650+ active registrars, it's the fourth most popular one!

It obviously was never going to be a massive money maker, but even if they had to raise prices, between their easy email aliases and clean interface, even though there were cheaper options, this easily could have been a small but profitable service for them. Also, it kept me in the Google ecosystem (I use Gmail with their email aliases.)

I don't know how this product realistically could have been more successful for what it is, and I don't know why you'd bother killing a service that could pay for itself, especially now that I (and the many individuals and businesses affected by this) don't even trust Google's paid services. There are over 10 million registered domains through Google Domains! That's a ton of paying customers who will be reluctant to pay for anything Google's selling in the future. Doesn't matter how good of a service Google provides if they're just going to kill it.

At this point, you should assume any Google service is purely temporary. If you're relying on any Google product, start migrating now on your own timeline before they give up and make you migrate on their timeline.

Is Google headed down the same path as IBM where the business eventually atrophies into a few select products kept alive by contract inertia rather than market trends?

I've been using Google Domains for a few years (previously used Namecheap); but, a few months ago, I took a domain I don't actively use and transferred it to Porkbun after reading so many positive comments on HN about that registrar. I was thinking, "Well, you never know about Google, so I may as well see how it goes, just in case." Have, indeed, been very pleased with Porkbun. The article says it'll be some months before this deal goes through, but...

*Later edit*: Decided to go ahead and transfer the other domains there, too. Done.

I just registered a porkbun account -- I had used google domains because I trust their security.

Re: porkbun: A+ work for allowing multiple yubikeys. If anyone else is looking for a registrar that has their security shit together, they seem promising.

Porkbun is an excellent choice, I love their support! I wish they supported .ca domains (the only reason I'm using NameSilo) but when I asked in the past, they said they have no future plans to.

When you transfer a domain to Porkbun, do any pre-paid years of registration travel across with the domain transfer, or are you starting "from scratch" in that regard?

hows their mail forwarding though?

I guess we know Google isn’t serious about Google Cloud any longer… I feel like this product is table stakes for a cloud.

Does this mark a new transition for google leadership? Will google start to sell their unwanted businesses instead of just killing them?

Google's enterprise-grade DNS is "Google Cloud DNS" [1]. It's not going anywhere. Google Domains is a consumer-grade product, in the sense that it is lacking most of the features (access control, bulk management) that a large company needs, though it was not lacking in stability / availability. And you could easily hook Google Domains up to Google Workspace to light up email for a small business.

Feels like a good fit for Squarespace - lots of overlap with their target market.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/dns

Isn't it like ops 101 to never have your DNS hosted by the same people you registered your domain with (as if you are shut out of the DNS for any reason you will need access to the registrar to quickly migrate to a different provider, while, in the other direction, full registrar access isn't actually ops critical until you need to change your DNS hosting company)?

Google Cloud includes a service called Google Cloud Domains. They're really screwing up on communication here, because it's totally unclear if that's included in the sale.

Seems slightly more acceptable than killing, but one step better would be having the purchaser maintain the existing product so that users are less impacted by Google's attention deficit disorder.

Does anyone know whether or not this ties in with Google Registry (a.k.a. Charleston Road Registry)? That's the entity that owns GTLDs like .app and .dev. I'm going to guess Google is hanging on to that part of it.

Google Registry is unaffected so far.

So I have a Google Workspace attached to my domain. How will this work when the domain is managed by another company? When I move my domains off Squarespace, how will my Workspace work? I’m confused if they are saying my Workspace services will migrate to Squarespace too?

> Squarespace will also provide billing and support services to Google Workspace customers

I have to admit, I’m at a total loss, this makes zero sense.

I've got a long-grandfathered "free" workspace for a domain that never had Google as the registrar. I don't think there's much concern here -- Squarespace will be (unless they delegate that out) your new registrar and will likely migrate WHOIS and set up the appropriate MX/TXT/... records to keep things working.

Otherwise, Google has documentation for that:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/48090?hl=en

Squarespace already acted as a reseller/billing provider for Google Workspace, you could buy it through them if you were using Squarespace hosting.

The support doc is saying that if you bought Google Workspace through the Google Domains frontend, paying with the same method you used to buy domains, Squarespace will take over the billing of it in the future.

If you went directly to Google Workspace, signed up, and then linked your domain manually, with separate billing, then Google Workspace will continue to bill you directly.

Google Workspace has a reseller program. They likely mean that. I believe they already do it; I know Wix does — you can register your domain and with it get a mailbox, drive etc and all of it is managed by google workspace but admin is via wix.

Probably not much differently. You may have to set DNS servers to Google’s or add a CNAME or MX records, but it’s likely not overly complicated.

When you move, keep your authoritative dns's @ MX pointed to *asmx.google.com or whatever your current MX setup is.

How long until the "don't trust Google to not kill a product" feeling becomes so widespread it begins to hurt them? I don't know any historical precedents...

After being an enthusastic early advocate for Google (Gmail since invite in 2004), I've been slowly migrating away from Google for years.

The turning point for me was when they killed Google Music, which I had been using for a decade, forcing me to move my large catalog of songs elsewhere. I self host via Plex now. Strike 1.

Then they killed the "free domain email", which became freeish (grandfathered) "google workgroups", which became pay up or we kill it. I spent many hours back and forthing with their email support trying to get admin access to my account to no avail. They claimed I needed to reach out to my domain admin. Uhhh sorry I own it and I'm the only guy thats on it or ever used it. There's no one else but me (I never had an admin, as I was just somehow transitioned during the grandfathering). No luck. I (nervously) let Google auto-kill the account, after quickly migrating everything to Fastmail via IMAP (and hand moving my calendar!). Strike 2.

Then (long story short) my Google Fi and Google Pixel experience was fine, until it suddenly wasn't. No human to complain to. Top of the line Pixel phone died like 14 months from purchase, no recourse. Buy a new phone or else. Strike 3.

The pattern is clear, Google services are fine up until the moment they aren't. At that point you're up a creek, as there are (by design) no humans to complain to.

All that is left now is my domain on Google Domains (well that and a free gmail account which I forward), which I figured was safe-ish (as they can't possibly pull the rug out from underneath domain owners can they?). But secretly been monitoring for signs I need to drop that as well. Looks like the time is now.

So.... any thoughts on whether Squarespace will be an improvement? Or should I start looking for another domain name registrar?

It seems to me it already has. I spent ~ a decade being pretty immersed in the Google ecosystem, and after going through the ringer dozens of times and finally realizing being one of their users will never stop being an unpaid, unrespected beta tester, I gave up on them. Bought an iPhone and moved services from Google where possible.

I remember this[1] article from a few years ago on the subject of Google's shutdowns hurting its brand. It's even funnier to read now with it being written shortly after Stadia's launch. The author and everyone else were pointing out that they have little expectation for the service to be around in a few years. And it turned out we were right!

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-pro...

It's now a self fulfilling prophecy.

No one used Google Stadia because Google kills things with little warning, which subsequently caused Google to kill Stadia.

Google will never be able to launch another product.

already happened for me, I've transitioned away from Google almost entirely.

The only place I interact with google these days is my Google TV. Here's to hoping they don't drop support for that as well.

Probably not until they sunset free Gmail, at which point there will be millions of voices screaming out in terror.

It has been like that for a long time, but it seemed like a lot of people thought they wouldn't kill GCP. But this makes sense, they might partition GCP instead of just killing it.

It's already happening for years now. Just look at Stadia.

Precisely as long as it takes YouTube to fail, which is their last remaining meaningful cash cow (besides advertising).

Isn't it already? The list of products killed is so long that most people have probably got burnt at least once by Google.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

It already has. There is a reason that GCP has struggled to find their calling.

For what I know it already does. I know people considering migrating some infrastructure to the cloud and if they're not already aware of Google's reliability I'll tell them.

Another headstone in the google graveyard. This one doesn't make any sense to me, either, unless there are weird regulatory issues they want to avoid since it seemed like a very popular registrar. Or maybe they just didn't want to staff any limited customer support team.

> This one doesn't make any sense to me

I'm also confused, it's a paid product! If it wasn't making enough money, why didn't they just raise the price? It already wasn't the cheapest name registrar, so I don't think people were selecting it solely based on cost (I went with it because of the free 100 email aliases included, but others liked the clean layout and simplicity compared to some other options.)

I get why they kill free things that don't make them money, but it seems very strange with a paid product, especially when, as others have said, they have GCP, which will presumably require a third party registrar in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346941

At least they're not just ending service and telling people to find a new registrar and transfer their stuff.

Financial metrics were probably meh.

I knew better than to trust Google, and yet... I switched everything to Google Domains because the UI was very clean and the attempted upsells were minimal.

I had moved from GoDaddy to Name.com years prior for similar reasons but Name burned my good will.

Is there a service that replaces Google Domains in simplicity and not pushing add-ons?

I use porkbun.com. Their site is simple. When you click the "Checkout" button you're taken to a confirmation page with a "Continue to Billing" button. There are discreet links you can click to add email/web hosting, but no interstitials to click through.

Edit: fixed autocorrect of domain name

Cloudflare is minimal. There are arguments to be made about their centralized control of much of the internet infra, but it's minimal and low cost.

Try hover.com. They have never sent me spam and upsell attempts are very minimal during purchase (mostly for their email service, I think).

We put a few of our accessory domains on Google Domains because it was super accessible. Really annoying.

> Is there a service that replaces Google Domains in simplicity and not pushing add-ons?

AWS

Google simply has no incentive to serve the customer who uses them for domain management. They make so much money from ads that they're far more concerned about their ad revenue than they are about money from paying customers.

As a GCP customer this actually is really concerning, it makes me wonder if some day they are just going to up and sell BigQuery to Salesforce or something.

Amazon makes so much money of e-commerce yet manage to support their cloud computing business which includes domain management. Their CEO is just incompetent and can’t run a business that has multiple major revenue streams.

True, but then why even go into the business? Could they not model out that this would never be a giant revenue stream and customers all the grief.

Domain parking is valuable ad space. Surprised they are selling.

Now would be a good time for Cloudflare to announce they've (finally) added .app and .dev support.

Nonetheless, Squarespace isn't bad but I found their domain pricing to be overpriced to target the specific market that doesn't really care about domain pricing they just want their domain and Squarespace set up at once. I can't see myself sticking around post the grace period mentioned.

I like Squarespace’s domain hosting. The only problem is indeed that they will be a couple of bucks more than competitors.

That being said, they seem the most stable of the companies in this space that is not otherwise egregiously bad in some way or the other, so I’ve been willing to pay those few bucks more. For the key domains I own it adds up to around $20-$30 more a year which isn’t bad for the greater piece of mind IMO.

I briefly transferred one of my domains from Google Domains to Cloudflare, but at least at that time CF required the domain to use its DNS. While that's generally not an issue with me because I use other CF services, I felt it might limit me too much down the line so I transferred the domain back to Google after the 60-day waiting period. Ah, well.

The thing I take biggest offense to is the fact that I hear about this from Bloomberg before Google making any outreach. Also no mention of if Google Cloud Domains is impacted.

It's materially significant information being made public. Of course it'll be released first in a press release.

Update Google Cloud Domains likely impacted: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1669726481130434563

There is a banner on the support site: https://support.google.com/domains

Yep, I still don't see anything about this on domains.google or domains.google.com (as I frantically start searching for alternate registrars.)

It says they’ll only honor existing prices for 12 months after the transaction closes.

Any recommendations on where/how to transfer to get a) similar price, b) mail forwarding, and c) self-service subdomains? (Maybe the last two are standard—I have no idea since I’ve always used Google Domains)

I use Gandi which has all the TLDs, with Cloudflare as my nameserver.

This setup means I get reasonable prices with a single point of purchase for all my domains, but also get a decent UI and API to manage the DNS.

Cloudflare email makes mail forwarding incredibly easy too. You get this as well in this setup.

EasyDNS (easydns.com) has been good for us. They're also not one of the places that easily rolls over to fake legal notices, which reduces one potential stress vector as well.

This is exactly what I am here looking for. I have 18 domains. 14 have mail forwarding, 2 have dedicated emails through Google workspaces and 2 are forwards to another domain. I’m not paying an extra 144$ a year for the domains PLUS whatever additional fees I’ll run into after this to follow this to Squarespace.

I know email forwarding isn’t the standard because Hover charges you 5$ per year per domain just for email forwarding. So frustrating.

Cloudflare is even cheaper than Google AFAIK. I already use them for my main domains and will probably move all my other Google domains over there as well.

I’ve used namecheap for many years and have started using porkbun recently. Both have given me no problems, have reasonable prices and have those features.

you can use cloudflare for all three.

In my conversations with Google employees, no one actually wants to work there. There is little to no respect for the company. Turnover has been massive. Even folks that have been there for 5 years have 80% seniority.

The problem is not leadership or management. It is the owners. It is Larry and Sergey.

Does this impact Google apps (or whatever their grandfathered personal email hosting/google drive is called now)? I hope it's just the registration component, but I think I should plan the move to another email/file sharing provider.

EDIT: Looks it is answered here. We become customers of squarespace for that too, so I doubt it will be free after this. Time to plan the move. https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670

I've been paying a tiny amount to use Google Cloud because the handful of domains I control were registered with Google Domains, in turn because I trusted Google to run a good registrar.

Maybe there was no special reason to use Google Cloud DNS, or the other Google Cloud services I use, with Google Domains. It's been so long since I set this all up that I honestly can't remember. But I wouldn't be revisiting any of that but for this announcement that Google Domains is turning down. Now, in the process of finding a new registrar, I'm revisiting all of it.

I'm a tiny customer, less than a rounding error for Google. But this still seems like a strategic error to me. How much can it cost to run a domain registrar? How does this weigh against the goodwill and trust gained from maintaining an important service you've implicitly promised that you would maintain?

I missed this story earlier today. I appreciate it popping up even if it is a dupe.

Guess I'll have to transfer a bunch of domains now.

This is so disappointing, shame, Google Domains was an epic super simple product..

for .com

Google Domains - $12/yr (includes private whois)

Squarespace - $20/yr (includes private whois)

Yeah, total rip off. There are plenty of Registrars that are at $12 (AWS), or less (Porkbun $9.73).

Google is double screwing it's users. First by selling them off, then by selling them to a price gouger.

I had a sinking feeling when I read this in TFA:

> Squarespace said it will honor Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months following the close of the deal.

... knowing it meant Renewal Sticker Shock, eventually, for those who stay.

Cloudflare $9.15/ year

Everyone hates them but they're providing the a competitive deal because the domains are a lead for the read of their business.

Ugh, this makes me sad. Google Domains was hands down the simplest, most reliable, fastest domain service I ever used. I originally was on GoDaddy, then migrated everything to Namecheap, then migrated everything to Google Domains.

I hope they don't change anything for as long as possible. I hate having to deal with DNS busy work.

I have 97 domains with Google Domains. 20 of them are in active use. ~10 I manage for family and friends. ~10 are redirects. I'm embarrassed to say I have ~57 side project ideas (GitHub pages + Google Domains is a bad habit—looks like I would brainstorm about 1 per week). Maybe the fact that Google Domains made it so easy to buy and manage many domains was actually a bad thing for me, as I picked up too many. So maybe I should be less sad :).

Ouch! I only have a handful of domains I've hung on to and I also went from GoDaddy to Namecheap, but I've been contemplating moving them to Google recently since I already use enough of their other services. Glad I waited?

Anyone knows how domain name pricing works? Why some domains are cheaper in first year and then 10 times expensive the next year? Can a domain registrar exploit the situation where they know you have a good business around that domain so now the domain price per year is let's say 5,000 dollars?

I work in the domain industry and there are a few answers.

A company can be a registry for a tld, like how Google owns the .app tld. That is different than a registrar, like godaddy, who resells the names in namespaces provided by registries. The registries set the price for that tld and other things like requiring .app namespace to be secure, so you need HTTPS and an SSL certificate for your website to load on most browsers. Due to these SSL requirements, domain forwarding isnt supported. another example of requirements set by a registry is the .AI namespace which is more expensive by default (over $125 a year last i looked)and requires a minimum of 2 years when you register.

Registries also charge more for names they think are worth more. So if you see a premium .app name that cost $2,000 per year, that is because the registry (Google in the case of .app) decided the name was valuable (probably because its a short common noun) and they want a lot more per year for it. Ive never heard of this happening after someone already had it for cheaper, so no rug pull type situations.

As for why some names renew for more than when you first get them, its a strategy for registrars (not registries) to attract new customers. Companies give items away at a discount or loss to get you into their ecosystem and then make profits at renewals. It’s like getting a free smartphone from a phone company and then paying more for the service than if you had owned the phone and not got it free.

I'm not an expert here by any means, but my understanding is that some TLDs are just more expensive, but for the first year they're sold at a discount to get you in the door.

Wow, I really can't trust and rely on Google for anything can I? This is absurd. I have so many domains I'll have to move over.

The UX at Squarespace is just terrible and I want nothing to do with it.

Does Google have no strategy, like at all? Just last year, it was announced that "Google Domains is out of beta"

Google announce things are out of Beta when they're looking to attract business customers.

Apparently it didn't work. Or they were juicing up their customer base for the sale.

Does this sale include Google Cloud's "Cloud Domains" feature? https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs

SS will be an "exclusive domain provider" for three years and stay connected in some way to Google services I guess.

I was a Google die hard, everything except Reader that they killed made sense. At this point it seems like the CFO is in charge and no good product is safe.

Reader probably made “sense” too for the axe-wielding CFO, in that I can’t imagine it generated any meaningful revenue. But I also can’t imagine it consumed much in the way of resources either…

I still use Gmail, but that’s it for me among Google’s offerings. (I can’t easily transition away from that due to using my email address for several hundred login credentials, though I suppose I really should begin that project.) But certainly for anything new, I have no confidence in any Google products, paid or unpaid.

I’ve been a (paying) customer of Google Domains for quite a number of years now. Better options have arisen for my needs over the years (largely family name domain parking and email aliases/forwarding), but it honestly hasn’t been worth my time to bother rejiggering everything and transferring it all out.

I guess now it is? How bad is Squarespace for this sort of “set it and forget it” kinda thing?

What does this mean for Google's registry business? It's new gTLDs, some of which still haven't even launched

Registering new gTLDs was never exclusive to domains.google.com (and I think such is disallowed by ICANN), so it sounds like registry is untouched.

I am wondering this too. I waited years hoping the .ing gTLD would be released, and it never happened.

At least when it started Google was a reseller for Go Daddy. Did that ever change?

Any recommendations on registrars? I may have to move a couple of domains off Google Domains / Squarespace.

Edit: I am located in the US.

Porkbun has been excellent for me.

Namecheap is great.

UPD: Yeah I wasn't avare they been bought out recently. That's really unfortunate to hear.

Gandi served me well for last 10 years:

* Plenty of zones supported with reasonable prices.

* Have team account access for companies.

* In case of emergency there is an option to renew domains registered with Gandi even without being owner.

nearlyfreespeech

AWS

To the various people saying they’ll transfer their domains away, why is this bad that they transfer to another registrar company? Is there something concerning about Squarespace?

Price and features. Squarespace charges $20/year for a .com vs $12 on google and less than that elsewhere.

I haven’t used squarespace but I also imagine they don’t have as much of a power-user appeal, given that DNS is not their main product.

1: Price (66% increase in price for no additional value)

2: Uncertainty around Squarespace's technical ability. Are they going to be a rock solid DNS provider? When DNS is down it is no fun. I left a smaller registrar because they couldn't handle large DDoS attacks (we weren't targets, but were affected).

Registrars in general have many failure modes. Customer service nightmares (stakes being high if you lose an important domain, either through error or social engineering), malicious behavior (NetworkSolutions sniffing searches to buy domains[1], WhoIs privacy shell companies used to steal domain ownership, Unregistry increasing some of their new gTLDs by 500+%[2]), stability problems are all non-rare occurances.

It's hard to trust a new registrar when it's so easy to fuck over customers

[1]: They're mentioned in this article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

[2]: Can't find the article anymore, it was like, 2015.

I tried finding pricing info on Squarespace's site and it just wasn't as easy to find compared to some other sites. I also tried finding how they were doing previously by searching for "domain name registrar market share", and they don't seem to rank pretty highly there either[1]. So that wasn't particularly reassuring.

Squarespace feels like an unknown to me because I don't know why they were selected and when the domain will move, so I transferred my domain away just now. This way, the registrar and transfer date are both within my control.

[1] On the other hand, Google Domains appears to consistently rank in the top 10 for market share and they still want to give it up, so maybe market share doesn't mean anything.

I purchase all my domains from AWS Route53 to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

I wonder what the rationale for doing this is? I just assumed cloud providers offered domain registration as a loss leader keep you in their ecosystem.

Can AWS offer support for “.dev” domains so I can transfer it there?

If AWS ever decides to suspend your root account, good luck with that. They never, ever, ever give it back. I had a root account I used for free tier stuff on my primary e-mail address that I never got back because I had $2 charges I didn't pay for 4 months because I didn't realize they were even trying to charge me.

.dev is a Google Registry domain, so they'll have to negotiate with Google to get it in their platform.

Of all the services I expected them to keep, Google Domains was in the top 3.

Now I genuinely think they could sell search soon.

I guess at least this time they didn't outright kill it, and is transferring customers to another registrar...

... and the new registrar (Squarespace) is increasing pricing for seemingly no additional features.

>Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers' renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670

Google Domains - $12/yr

Squarespace - $20/yr

I think this one officially concludes “don’t trust Google for anything”.

Maybe I’m not familiar enough with GCP, but why is this not just rolled into GCP? Is it even possible to buy a domain on GCP when this rolls off?

As a user of GCP it reads as a huge red flag to me that they offloaded this instead of rolling it into GCP.

Domains are a pretty core part of cloud infrastructure. The fact that they could have brought domains under GCP and didn’t makes me wonder what they know about the future of GCP that isn’t public yet.

GCP has Cloud Domains. It's unclear to me what the future of that is.

This is interesting. Part of the fact that Google owned Domains was that GCP domain validation was smooth when doing this. Now, we probably have to do the slow motion validation. Bit annoying, honestly.

But, ah well.

I use email forwarding and won’t be switching to Porkbun because they do t offer wildcard email forwarding. Does anyone know any other provider that does offer it?

This is something I would also like to find alternative to.

I never really even thought about using Google domains, from the first time I heard of it I assumed it would last a few years and they would shut it down.

Thank god my dependency on Google services keeps going down with every year that passes

Google is one of the only DynDNS providers that do one secret per hostname rather than a shared secret. I wonder if that’s going to get killed too.

Afraid.org does, too. https://freedns.afraid.org/

Does this mean GCP users will have to use a third party registrar now? What a joke.

Considering that Google can't even do search right anymore. It's probably a good idea for them to offload things.

Bold to assume any savings from this will go into 'improving' search.

Amazing. Even a low-effort paid stream for Google meets the graveyard.

This is so disappointing

Oh well, Cloudflare Registrar here I come. And when I next choose a CDN etc. service it won't be from Google.

This may be the last straw for me trusting Google. I say this as a paying Google photos user and owner of a pixel 6.

If they kill THIS nothing is off the table.

Time to find alternatives and even switch phones. No more all-in-ones platforms.

For a solid alternative I recommend Porkbun. They do just domains and nothing else, with a clean no bullshit UI.

Any good alternatives to Google Photos?

God damn it. Google Domains was my registrar of choice because I figured I wouldn't have to ever think about logistics and their lookup rules. Ah well. I guess I'll see what Squarespace does to the experience. I'd transfer them to Cloudflare, but have similar concerns.

Hmm.

I’m wondering how Search Console properties that were verified by domain purchase in Google Domains will be affected.

A little over a year ago, they came out of beta: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30688552

There are so many comments in that thread advising not to use Google Domains (including my comment).

They still offer domain registration but within Google Cloud rather than a consumer facing product:

https://cloud.google.com/dns (Cloud Domains)

Ostensibly to compete with AWS Route 53.

I recently moved my domains over to Google because it was the least sketchy option out of all the sketchy domain hosts.

I also figured hosting domains had to be pretty much zero effort and thus passive profit.

Can’t wait for all the Squarespace spam to hit!

It seems Domain is part of Cloud in Alphabet's revenue breakdown, which recently turned profit with just $191m in 23Q1. Not sure the exact term and accounting operation, but this sale of $180m may just double that line of income?

Would it make sense to renew now for multiple years before squarespace takes over?

I don't think that domain registration would generate enough revenue for Google to care about it as a core business unit, especially because part of Google Domains' pitch was that they had all these obscure domains that were cheaper. My inference is that Google cared about domains because they were complementary to another, core business unit. The obvious one to me is Google Workspace: You come to Google, get your domain, set up your business email, and you're well on your way to having an online business presence. The big missing piece is a website.

What? Crap, my router has built-in support for Google domains for dynamic IPs so that's why I'm on them -- wanted my kids to have a nice name for a local Minecraft server. I assume that's going away.

I have 6 domains with google, thinking, why would they ever shutter this? It seems so low effort, and it's been up for 7ish years

Who do you use as a registrar? Why do you like them? Do you recommend them?

At least Google allowed me to pay in BRL, porkbun and others use just USD, with taxes and converting I'll pay a lot more for domains now... Well, stick with Brazilian domains now, that's a shame.

Hopefully a good place to ask:

My family name .com is still available. That should be very rare in 2023. The name has only 4 letters.

It is also a word that is hard to pronounce in the english speaking world and I hope to get a reasonable price with that argument. Chances for a company with that name are slim and I also have no company or business in that name (normal employed software dev that I am)

The squatter in question has a form up asking for contact details and initial offer.

How would I go about doing that and what should I expect price wise?

Try getting someone that doesn't have that name to buy it for you so it's not obvious why you want it. It's hard to say on the price, but I would guess $500 absolute minimum.

Pick a different TLD and don’t fund squatters.

How will this affect websites which are using the static Firebase hosting bundled into the google domains deal?

As part of the Google Domains deal, I get free static hosting on Firebase…

You've got to be kidding me. I just transitioned to Google Domains. I'm really curious why Google decided to do this. Does anyone have insight?

Never sure why you would to manage your domains at the same place as you have your hosting done. I prefer to separate those out myself.

>The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2023

Well, there's at least 2 weeks notice. Unlocking to prepare for a transfer...

This is incredibly annoying. I migrated all my domains from Badger to Google Domains. I'm really losing any remaining faith I have in Google, they kill any products that are remotely usable.

Ugh. I hate Google, but for years I've been recommending Google Domains. It's time to transfer my 19 domains elsewhere.

very interesting to sell it off when you still got a cloud division. at least with the recent AIaaS paradigm, they are not going to wind that down.

now is a good time as any for cloudflare to "amazon lightsail" their domain offerings.

but personally, i am still on the lookout for a good EU registrar with fair pricing and no risk of future acquisition.

The next closest thing to cancellation.

Why is the CEO still there at Google?

One day Google will really need developers and the developers won’t be there.

Sundar is trying to be the next Steve Ballmer. Alienate the tech community by just focusing on cost cutting. I do wonder if he would have cut YouTube back when it was bleeding cash if we was the CEO back then.

Didn't they just introduce the .zip TLD?

That's Google Registry.

I use Google Domains frequently because they support domain forwarding for both HTTP and HTTPS requests. This is critical for end users that type or click an HTTP address.

Can anyone suggest a domain registrar that supports forwarding over SSL?

I never thought google would be the next yahoo. Goes to show you how things can change in the world.

Classic Google

Did any customers receive an email about this from Google? I have not.

Sold for 1x or 2x revenue. Not that great a business. But 8 years in "beta"??

I like to use https://tld-list.com/ for registrar shopping. It has a lot of data on costs and features for many registrars.

I was such a fool to believe that Google wouldn't drop this one too.

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670

How many engineers should it take to maintain domains.google in a steady state, maybe fixing bugs and patching security vulnerabilities that come up, doing an occasional release?

I am so pissed. F U Google. Now I’ve gotta transfer all my domains to Cloudflare. Ugh.

How will this affect mx records? I’ve got my vanity domain acting as a front end to Google for work gmail and things?

It shouldn't affect anything. Just transfer them as-is to another DNS provider. The IPs the MX records are pointing to aren't changing

I'm feeling better about being a Gandi customer now, huehuehue

This bites because there was a little-documented little integration between Google Domains and Gmail to allow you to use a custom domain for a personal Gmail address.

If your domain registrar supports forwarding emails, I think you can continue to receive emails through a custom domain.

Sending email with your custom domain in the from/reply-to address is a different business, I recall it requires getting gmail to verify that you can receive via that custom address, and also set the mail server to smtp.gmail.com port 587.

I never understood them being a domain registrar in the first place. Maybe as a back-up to secure an important internet core function. The seems quite (very) high.

I've been using them for my domains for a couple of years now. This is a bit upsetting. I guess I will transfer my domains to name cheap or something

Well, I guess this will lessen any future impact of potential "Google suspended my account and all our domains disappeared!" scenarios.

Does anyone know why they wouldn't just merge this into the GCP offering? It makes perfect sense for domains.google to be a GCP product

I recently moved my 100 domain portfolio to dynadot away from Google Domains - light years ahead of GD in terms of features and price.

Does anyone have an ELI5 for how to proceed? I have several websites that use this. What's the course of action required here, if any?

I would assume nothing if you are okay with being part of the squarespace family. If you have issues with squarespace, then that's another story.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Anyone got any other registars they recommend google domains has been my go to. Anyone that got similar features and prices?

What’s a cheap and reliable registrar? GoDaddy bought my registrar and renewal prices are about to double for me.

Porkbun! porkbun.com

I noticed my Chrome Canary install uBlock Origin has stopped working this last week. Any one else see the same?

So frustrating. Is there any way to migrate all emails out of gmail reliably on to another email service?

Shame. I really like the google domains UI. Does anybody know of good alternatives with a similar UI?

Don't build your business on Google - at the end of the day it's just another reminder.

Well at least now if Google ever locks my account I won't lose access to all my email aliases.

That makes no sense. Just as long as they don't shut down Keep, I'll stay sane though.

Sad. I'm surprised Domains wasn't rolled into Google Workspace.

It looks like it was in beta for 7+ years, and GA for 14 months...?

Classic fucking mistake trusting Google with my domains.

Back to gandi I go, I guess.

What are the top recommendations to migrate to these days?

I have heard great things about porkbun, but I personally use namecheap and am quite happy with that.

I'm in the UK and have used Krystal for years. Great service, great support. I have no affiliation with them.

At the risk of spamming this thread: Porkbun has been excellent for me.

So wait, does this include Charleston Road Registry?

Ah crap. Does anybody else support the .dev TLD?

Lots of them, including Porkbun: https://tld-list.com/tld/dev

Name cheap, but the price was higher than Google Domains

tld-list.com for all your tld related needs.

Well, don’t kill Firebase next please.

They should sell gmail to someone who can actually manage it and make it better instead of sucking out the last juice of users' data.

Holy awful

I absolutely hate AWS with a passion but I might actually have to transfer my domains to them now

wonder if my fake italian ID will still be legit with them?

Namecheap

removed

What are they misunderstanding?

Dynadot is a solid registrar for anyone looking for a replacement.

Seems a bit pricey.

Jeez, could they have possibly given less notice? Now I have to scramble to migrate all of my domains away from Google/Squarespace this weekend. Damn it.

I have zero desire to be in business with Squarespace.

They've given months of notice! The transfer process is gonna take awhile and you don't have to scramble to do anything this weekend.

Why do you feel the need to do this? Do you anticipate that all your traffic will now be routed to the Kremlin?

Can we hopefully avoid the worn trope of Google killing products in this thread?

Because it's not being killed, it's being transferred to another company. (If this reporting is correct.)

Which is something to celebrate, not criticize. With Reader/Stadia/etc., wouldn't users prefer that it had been transferred rather than killed?

There is little difference here between killed and sold. Squarespace charges 66% more per year for .com domain, so it is going to make sense to transfer out for most people. Same result as if Google killed it, just a slightly longer window to go through the hassle of transferring.

For stuff like stadia, which has no real identical products, a transfer would indeed be nicer.

But the whole sell of the google domains product is that you are getting a domain from Google. If it is no longer from google, the product is largely indistinguishable from those from other large cloud providers like Cloudflare or AWS (or more boutique or focused offerings like Porkbun and Namecheap).

I mean, they're domains, you can't kill them.

This is like saying Photos isn't killed because they didn't delete old photos when you exceed your new low quota.

They're transferring the user's assets, the domains, and killing the product (Google Domains).

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