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Comment by bradleybuda | Hacker News Reader

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

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DNS is not registrar services. Comparing Google Domains to Google Cloud DNS is like comparing apples and oranges. Though it's true you'll usually want both if you're working with domains OR DNS.

_Needing_ to interface with a 3rd party for a critical part of any web app or service feels like a step backward for Google's commitment to Cloud.

There's also Google Cloud Domains. It's entirely unclear if that's also being sold off, but the sale would make a bit more sense if it's not. It's insane how bad Google is at communicating things like this.

I had never heard of this service but indeed, it seems to be a registrar builtin to GCP. I suppose this is not going to be killed, and presumably the reason they aren't migrating domains users to it is awkward mapping to GCP projects? It would be great to at least have a button to copy it over for people that do have a GCP project for it...

Edit: it looks like there may indeed be such a button / command. Really strange they wouldn't communicate the option to keep customers on their services!

https://cloud.google.com/domains/docs/import-domains

Cloud Domains is just a wrapper around Google Domains. It's likely being killed off too.

They're separate services and I thought as a Google Cloud DNS customer buying a domain with Google Domains was just common sense, this is really perplexing. I had seriously thought I should migrate my registrar to Google Domains just to keep things more consistent. Turns out Google doesn't think these products are related at all. And certainly they can be decoupled but it seems like a bizarre product decision.

As you say, I found google domains + google workspace was enough for my needs.

I am shocked they've sold to squarespace -- squarespace seems to have (from looking at their website) no interest, or experience, in just DNS hosting. Their website is all about hosting, I have my own hosting.

I guess they must be planning (or already have, hidden somewhere) a similar service to google domains, but I'm certainly not risking my domains on that assumption.

Squarespace acts as a reseller for Google Workspace (for customers who start out by using their domain for hosting with them and want to add email/etc), so they already had a relationship with Google. It makes sense that they would want to sell domains to their customers, but IDK why they would want to buy all the existing domains that likely are not in the market for their hosting service.

If you look at the api for AWS Route53 domain registration, it isn’t too complex. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_.... Definitely something Google could build out.

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