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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

> Permira, the global private equity firm

current Squarespace users about to get gouged

Conveniently after taking over all of Google Domains too! I missed transferring a couple of domains before the cutover and now I’m in squarespace hell trying to get them out. They make it so much harder by putting artificial delays on everything.

I was about to go start the transfer process. How bad of a time am I in for?

Took two days to get any authorization codes. No idea how bad the actual transfer will be. Ugh.

Also, and perhaps Google will finally find this, if you are an OWNER on a SQUARESPACE DOMAIN after the GOOGLE DOMAIN TRANSFER, you can't seem to create MX or TXT or other records.

But if you ADD A NEW USER as a DOMAIN MANAGER then you can create the records, as far as I can tell.

Its supposedly a mandatory five day wait after you initiate the transfer with the code. I had to contact support since the transfer code button wasn't making any requests to their server despite the modal saying it did.

It took me a total of two weeks to complete the transfer.

I didn’t need to contact support, but the process requires patience … and some downtime as I had no way of knowing exactly when the transfer happens to recreate the DNS records.

I transferred 6 domains to porkbun and it was about 2 days to get the code and 5 days to transfer. Mostly painless, but DNS records were not copied over. I tried to see if I could manually copy them over in advance, but I got an error with porkbun. I probably didn't know how to do it correctly, but I needed up with a couple minutes of downtime. I don't remember having to do anything when I went from namecheap to google, but that was a while ago.

I'm migrating to Cloudflare

You can setup alternative nameservers first, they clone current DNS settings, then you update nameservers. Do the transfer after.

This worked while they were at Google Domains and about to be transfered. Haven't tried with squarespace yet, but it ought to work

Thanks, I will try that next time I have to migrate.

I transferred from Google Domains to Porkbun and it took about an hour. Half that time was changing over my dynamic DNS updater on the server

I had a couple of .dev domains on Google Domains. Unfortunately, you can't migrate those to another registrar as the .dev TLD is locked to Squarespace. I wonder if they will ever unlock the .dev TLD.

I was just able to finish transferring out my .dev domain from Google to Cloudflare. I had started the process when SquareSpace first took them over but forgot to finish until I saw this, but I was able to transfer out my .dev domain!

I was looking at hosted website/blog options a while back and it looks like pretty much everyone has teaser rates that blow up after some time period and have low-cost plans that almost work for a given need but you actually have to go up a tier of 2.

I have an existing blog on Blogger and have no need for ecommerce or a lot of business stuff. It's basically a home page and a blog. I came to the conclusion I should just leave things as they are and maybe add a second blog for a different purpose.

It's free and if it becomes a problem, I'll deal with it when it does.

If you were a Google Domains customer even before this buyout you were gonna get gouged on renewals.

After like a year or maybe it was 2 I forget, the cost of my domain was going to double from $15 a year US to to $30 with Squarespace.

Moved it to Cloudflare, and now it's cheaper than it was with Google.

I just launched a site on Squarespace - $25 a month for a basic landing page.

That seems about right? I use Netlify to deploy my own 11ty static site, and it costs $19/month, plus there's no WYSIWYG editor like Squarespace.

What’s the reason for doing that? Can’t you host a static page for 5 dollars basically everywhere?

Even on expensive AWS it’s 5 dollars: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

lightsail is basically the lowest tier of AWS offerings. It's designed to compete with providers like linode or digitalocean, not gcp or azure. Moreover, lightsail is IaaS - you get a vps that you have to set up and administer yourself. Squarespace/Netlify is PaaS or SaaS - all that is handled for you. Maybe you think all of that isn't too hard and isn't worth the $14 or whatever premium, but it's still comparing apples to oranges.

Any reason to go that route over just making an S3 bucket publicly accessible and pointing dns at it? Should cost roughly $0/mo unless you’re getting massive amounts of traffic.

Cloudflare pages has been excellent for my 11ty site. The free tier is great, prices after that are reasonable.

Also - there's a bunch of integrations with their other stuff (serverless, D1, etc.) You'll get more lock-in, but you can scale up the static site to become basically a full frontend-backend app from there.

I run a Wordpress site that gets tens of GB of traffic per month for about half of that (hosting + domain name registration)

I'm really unsure if that is unreasonable. We can do it for cheaper. But we are not the target market. For someone that would be buying a set up and even occasional updates and so on it is not that much money... That is what 300 a year? So not too many billed hours...

I've been procrastinating transferring my domains after Google sold them to squarespace. Now they're getting sold again... Are domains the new junk loans?

No, domains are not junk loans

Wait until you get Domain Backed Securitization.

Oh gosh wait until Amazon sells securities based on their v4 addresses then aggressively starts making their services v6-first lol.

Just wrote that to someone I know who has a square space site

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