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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

Google Domains shutdown was an own-goal. They should have just ran it at a loss forever if that is what it took, the optics were and are just awful.

I get it, it was a "consumer" product essentially, hence selling the business to Squarespace instead of someone like Cloudflare. But anything related to DNS is going to make infra folk very wary of what else you might be willing to kill or neuter. It's just at that level of fundamental things that make operators skittish.

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  > I get it, it was a "consumer" product essentially, hence selling the
  > business to Squarespace instead of someone like Cloudflare.

Ironically, I moved all my Google Domains domains to Cloudflare. Their revenue from being a domain registrar is likely a rounding error compared to their other products, but (1) now they have my credit card on file for value-add services, and (2) sometimes people with corporate spending authority ask me for advice about who they should buy cloud services from.

Grocery stores don't make their money from selling bread and milk, but a store that doesn't sell bread and milk is run by fools.

Great analogy.

They shouldn't have any revenue from registering domains because they sell them at cost. It's probably the opposite because of all the overhead (which is of course compensated by pulling in more clients as you explained).

Revenue is not profit

The obvious go-to choice was Cloudflare for us too, but then it turned out you can't use CF just as a registrar (at least on the basic plan or equivalent), you need to use Cloudflare's nameservers as well... But we use Google's Cloud DNS for everything, so that was a showstopper. In the end we went with AWS Route 53.

CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.

If I'm not mistaken, it is possible, but not on the free tier.

I don’t think it’s the case even on a paid tier, if it is I can’t find any reference to it. There are a lot of posts on their community support form where the recommendation is to use another registrar. https://community.cloudflare.com/t/use-cloudflare-registrar-...

I do see an option for custom nameservers on my dashboard, followed by a button "upgrade to business".

That option means "your nameservers are now ns1/ns2 on your domain but they still map to Cloudflare", not "you get to pick your own third-party nameservers".

I see, thanks.

> CF could probably get a lot more customers if they would allow you to use custom nameservers for your domain.

Why would they want that? The whole point of CF as a registrar was so you could use the other services. The registrar is sold at cost. It's a way to lock you in.

It would lower the barrier to switch to Cloudflare for new customers, and once they are inside with a credit card on file it’s arguably easier to explore their product offerings

It's already "free". How much lower should it be?

So that's not the use of the domains. It's to make it easier / lock in existing customers.

Why not Cloud Domains?

you mean google cloud domains? They shut it down together with google domains (it still runs, but you cannot register a new domain).

Google Domains was a service where no new features could be added, so nobody would get promoted for working on it, so nobody wanted to maintain it. Classic Google.

The funny thing is it wasn't even a true shutdown - Cloud Domains continues to be a reasonable registrar with proper IAM management so actually much nicer than Google Domains for larger projects. There were plenty of docs on migrating which was a one command thing (don't think there was a UI). Non-"consumers" had a reasonable out, which they could then drop for another provider if they felt a need, but there was definitely no requirement to end up at Squarespace.

But they never marketed it, among all the backlash over turning down Google Domains there was never any true call-out to this. To this day I suspect many people don't know about Cloud Domains (which still exists and accepts new domains). I can't fathom any user-related reason for this - the contract in selling to Squarespace must have forced Google to be unable to properly market Cloud Domains as a transition option. If not, the Google Domains PM truly didn't know the existence of Cloud Domains?

I was also surprised Google didn’t really mention the Cloud Domains path. I did it, but there are some caveats. It doesn’t support all domains that Google Domains did (e.g. “premium” domains on new tlds), and Squarespace does still end up being the registrar of record; Google Cloud is just a frontend.

Cloud Domains is a weird zombie, not really alive but not dead either. They're actively preventing people from becoming customers:

> Caution: Transferring a registered domain from a third-party domain registrar to Cloud Domains is deprecated and removed.

It was also only available at all to customers in a very small number of countries.

> They're actively preventing people from becoming customers:

So, maybe, it will be killed soon then.

Migrating out of this mess caused me downtime.

Squarespace's domain panel crashed with a nondescript error when I tried to update nameservers prior to transferring out, and they shut off the Google nameservers as soon as the transfer went through on their side. To add insult to injury, Squarespace makes you wait 5 days for a transfer, with no way to expedite -- and in my case, they waited 6 days, taking me offline on a Friday night. This was the worst experience I've ever had using a domain service.

I believe the reason for divesting from the registrar business had to do more with ICANN rules that require Google not both be a registry operator and a registrar. Google does have a large registry business with 60+ TLDs so they could not also be a registrar (even if not for the same TLDs). It wasn’t really a money thing AFAIK.

Google already had an arms-length subsidiary (Charleston Road Registry) to take care of that requirement. The Google Domains shutdown came much later.

Shouldn’t have been much of a loss. Tons and tons and tons of domain registrars exist, so it’s not an inherently expensive business.

While it's likely profitable, it's probably not generating AdSense level margin/growth.

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