Google Deprecates Google Domains, Sells It to Squarespace | Hacker News Reader

Google Deprecates Google Domains, Sells It to Squarespace

support.google.com

40 pointstherein47 comments

Didn't this happen a few weeks ago already?

The discussion, yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346454

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Google Domains to Shut Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36437962 - June 2023 (12 comments)

Google is selling all my personal information in Google Domains to Squarespace? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36423465 - June 2023 (124 comments)

Google Cloud Domains is to be fully deprecated as part of Google Domains sale - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36369701 - June 2023 (45 comments)

Ask HN: Where are you moving your Google domains to? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364519 - June 2023 (16 comments)

Ask HN: Why would Google sell Google domains to Squarespace? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36352347 - June 2023 (72 comments)

Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346454 - June 2023 (606 comments)

Sounds like it applies to Cloud Domains as well (with the existing UI being preserved but essentially becoming a frontend to Squarespace).

Subcontracting one of your core cloud services to a visual website building company, lol. You’d have to be crazy to trust GCP over AWS for any serious project after this.

Right? It is so silly to cut yourself off at the knees from offering a complete ecosystem.

If they really wanted to cut out the riff-raff, low-value customers, and only sell to industry, they could have just 10x the cost. Enough to make private parties go elsewhere, but corporate customers would not blink. If only to avoid filling out one more TPS report.

Bizarrely Azure does the exact same thing with Godaddy.

I read it the opposite direction - That Cloud Domains will continue to exist and for the migration period that the Google Domains product will remain a frontend to said product.

Nevertheless, the confusion around it and poor messaging, particularly the timing of this message coming over a month after the deal was first announced, is infuriating.

Yes, I believe you are correct. AWS uses Gandi in a similar way that Google Cloud will use Squarespace going forward.

The big advantage of Google Domains was that I could automatically connect my domains to other google services like Cloud Run, Google Search Console, Analytics, Adsense etc. without all the complexity of adding TXT records or text files.

I hope it continues to work with Squarscape.

It is beyond me why Google domains could not be a part of Google Cloud. It makes so much sense.

And another one

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Regular reminder that you’re asking for it.

I warned people not to buy games on Stadia. I specifically told them this was going to happen. Nobody should trust Google for anything long term at this point, ever.

> I warned people not to buy games on Stadia.

I got a full refund for the Stadia games and hardware - which I got to keep (free 4k Chromecast and Bluetooth controller!). The shutdown of Stadia could not have been handled better - if Google handled all their other service sunsets like they did with Stadia, I'd be more inclined to take a risk with Google.

Packing a controller and a Chromecast was the epitome of traveling light, and served me very well when I had to travel a lot for work. I could resume my games on hotel room TVs, or even on an underpowered laptop. Stadia's UX was frictionless - the couple of times I tried Nvidia's streaming, it felt a lot clunkier

I think it was either here or Reddit that left a comment predicting that Stadia would eventually be canned - my boyfriend wanted to play a game that was only being released on the platform so I ended up getting it for his birthday when it came with a Chromecast.

Well - life got in the way so he never actually got to play the game much but Google did refund our Stadia/Chromecast purchase so we got a Chromecast out of it at least.

I remember reading a comment from a dev of one of the Stadia exclusives here who was very upset to learn that their work moot after it was announced here; can't imagine how deflating that must have felt for them.

I have a friend who ported his game to Stadia. They got as far as having a release date published on the Stadia store before they encountered a final check - Stadia requires games to be playable only with controller, and his game needed a keyboard. All of the testing was done on their web client, everything worked, but because it wasn't pure controller compatible, it was canned at the last minute.

Literally months of effort and a six figure advance sum, and Google didn't even bother with an extremely obvious checkbox.

Google's willingness to abandon so many of its projects may be disappointing but to me it's a positive signal regarding their ability to avoid sunk-cost thinking, which is the #1 killer of mammoth companies.

You could also read it as their incapability to iterate towards a successful product. They have become too big to try.

Or there inability to keep an already successful product successful.

Ah but the number of promotion packets all these projects led to. Ooh aah!

According to the article it's not killed, though. Acquired. Service will continue.

They can’t kill it: their contract with ICANN requires Google to transfer their customers to another provider if they are too feeble to run the service themselves any longer.

This is not entirely a bad idea. It does not make sense for Google to be a domain registrar when there are like 100s of of other companies doing exact same thing. Finding a good partner and providing tight integration makes so much sense.

What I hate about many domain registrars is that they have terrible UI, have shady marketing techniques and they operate on low margins which means they have to really push for scale.

I hope Squarespace is a good partner for Google here.

Well, since they’re making me think about it…

What registrars does the hacker news community recommend?

Cloudflare Domains sells at cost and has been great.

https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

Cloudflare Domains is not a legitimate registrar option because you are REQUIRED to use the Cloudflare nameservers. If you want to use different nameservers, you have to transfer the domain out to a different registrar.

Moving domains to another Cloudflare user is a total pain though, especially if you sell your site to someone.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/get-started/b...

Would also recommend. They support a lot of extensions and you’re not going to get it for cheaper.

Been slowly abandoning my namecheap account…

Porkbun is where I'm moving everything. If considered cloudflare as well.

Currently moving my dns to digital ocean and cloudflare. After that, will start exfiltrating the domains to porkbun.

I transferred all my domains to Porkbun. Their renewal prices are low and so far, I don't have any complaints.

Pitifully, Porkbun's marketplace depends on Paypal... Otherwise it'd be perfect!

Hm? They appear to have Stripe and crypto options too, as well as Alipay.

The trinity: Cloudflare, Porkbun, Namecheap

strongly endorse cloudflare and porkbun. namecheap is ehh.

Anyone that isn't Godaddy.

Why?

We use quite a few registrars and GD is far from the worst, in my opinion.

Namesilo.com Since... 2012? I think? Never found a reason to change? I never see it suggested in these lists for some reason -- Maybe I've been missing something all along...?

From reading the Protonmail Reddit this one pops up a lot:

https://njal.la/about/

Anyone have experience with them?

Simple, straight forward, privacy friendly, crypto payments, support was about 5x faster with Njalla than Gandi.

It's more expensive but I don't care. It's pennies a day difference and it's critical infra, not something yo cheap out on, especially given the horror stories of other registrars over the years.

I moved everything there.

I just use AWS. Probably not the cheapest option, but I know they will not play games with domain sniping or other kinds of nonsense.

I think Namecheap is the goto recommendation on hacker news.

I have been with them since forever. I see no particular reason to switch, although I find their UI rather clunky.

I’m about to switch away from namecheap, been meaning to ever since they cut off a subset of their customers without much warning or recourse. Haven’t gotten around to it yet but I’ve since lost trust and wonder whether that couldn’t happen to me next if I continue using namecheap. So just be careful if your views don’t align with theirs.

Just checked my account, and I'm 10 days away from my 20-year anniversary. Holy smokes.

been using joker for 25 years or so

Been very happy with Amazon. They also make it very easy to get an SSL certificate.

Was gonna be another Google Graveyard entry but they couldn't actually simply deprecate it so they sold it?

I wish there was a Domain Name serve that charged more but was actually good.

What do you mean? TBH, I though Google's domain registrar service wss pretty great. Though now that they're selling, I'm moving to PorkBun, the UI/UX isn't quite as polished, but even Google's had some short comings.

If you're referring to DNS, I'm mostly moving from Google's own to Digital Ocean for most of my domains that aren't using Cloudflare already. To make the domain migration smoother.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com