Google no longer offers new domain registrations

I was a founding member of a social enterprise startup which ended up in a position very similar to that.

In our case, we were lucky that we had two options to sell: (A) to an investor who wanted to pervert our mission, vision, and values for profit; or, (B) to a nonprofit who didn't have the money to give us more than a single paycheck or two worth of payoff for our equity.

If we had sold to Option A, a dozen of us would be wealthy right now. But the company we built would have been perverted into something unrecognizable.

In our case, to our founder's credit, we sold to Option B to keep the dream alive, but none of us became wealthy... and the nonprofit just shut down the company we founded only 2 years after the purchase (partly because the nonprofit didn't have the business savvy to make it sustainable). _Everyone_ was just laid off.

That means, our noble sacrifice only extended the lifetime of our noble vision by 2 years, and we're certainly feeling less good about it.

Because the alternative would have meant that a bunch of us bleeding hearts would have the economic freedom right now to do all sorts of good for untold decades to come.

So I'm just saying, sometimes you don't get to have good options and everything sucks, no matter how well-intentioned you are.

> In February 2023, Gandi was acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions, forming a new brand, Your.Online. In June, the company announced drastic price increases, including a new monthly fee for mailboxes previously included for free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandi

This has been my only issue with them so far. Realistically it's not likely to cause any problems for either my personal or professional situations since I prefer to use CF DNS. It's simply a missing feature.

If something happens that makes me reconsider their DNS product I'd likely transfer the domains, even if I could change nameservers.

I have (or rather had) two Google Domains accounts, one for my own projects, and one with my work email address for work purposes. My work Google Domains account got banned for some imagined rules infraction. I sent an appeal with evidence, which was immediately denied. In case you are curious, the effect of being banned from Google Domains is: you are no longer able to use Google Domains at all, which means you are both unable to change your DNS settings, and unable to transfer your domains out. For all of the domains, I had to wait until they expired, wait for the grace period to expire, and re-register them on a new registrar, hoping nobody else got to them first.

After this experience, I decided it was not worth the risk to keep my personal domains on my personal Google account, so I transferred them out a few days later. I assume this was a bug, but as soon as I initiated the domain transfers, Google deleted all DNS records, which meant I had some non-trivial downtime on all of my websites while I got it all sorted out on a new registrar.

After both of these experiences, there is no way I would ever trust another domain to Google Domains.

It’s still a distant 3rd place, but it used to be fourth and seems to have doubled from 5-10% in the last 5 years. [0]

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/06/even-as-cloud-infrastructu...

The OP was the one who said "there's no FDIC protection for cloud", so..... ;-)

> trust is the product

Well, to be fair, too many people put too much trust in the cloud.

"upload all your data to us, we promise we won't look at it" "trust our key-management service where we too have access to the private-key/API" etc. etc.

I wouldn't "trust" any of them further than I can throw a 1U server.

I have yet to see a DNS zone manager as good as CloudFlare, so I've been using it anyway for the past 10 years for all of my domains.

If that's actually how Google works, it does sound structural.

In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.

They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?

If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.

I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.

I’m not saying Google is going to fail. But GCP seems like a dead man limping

But this decision rubs me the wrong way because there's a deep integration with several of the services that allow connecting an external domain. The verification of domain ownership with Google purchased domains was effectively seamless and aligned with this overall architecture principle of Stuff That Just Makes Sense.

I still think that GCP is a great platform to build on, but the problem now is that they've further tarnished their image to other stakeholders who have a say in the platform decision making process.

Have been a customer for years, great service run by humans.

Zoho is an alternative, can do custom domains, website hosting, email, productivity suite.

Everyone in my immediate family has 1 or more email addresses in our family domain, and I have a couple of fun/project domains their too, for $0.00 above what I was already paying for iCloud.

If you have any issues, a real person will answer your support ticket.

Nextcloud also advertises an office suite, though I haven't tried it. Nextcloud also apparently integrates with OnlyOffice, though I haven't tried that either— Apparently Nextcloud's own office suite is a rebranding of LibreOffice.

I'd probably go with OnlyOffice, either on its own or integrated into Nextcloud.

You can have up to 3 domains configured per family.

Protonmail ? If its email you're after you can point your MX at them.