Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Domain service - name registry - is a weird market because it includes cross-subsidizing businesses and the information has value (and people will pay for anonymity to avoid hassle), so buy decisions aren't just price/performance.
Google and Cloudflare can offer it near cost just to build goodwill in their clients (i.e., to save them from predation). Cloudflare promises for renewals to only pass through their costs, which makes sense (they make back their customer acquisition cost on the first purchase).
What's the business model of others like porkbun? By hypothesis, you have to pay more to go without the cross-subsidy. If cost is on par, then you might expect them to be marketing the information or to customers somehow. Perhaps just making it back on anonymity charges?
At a minimum, the company would need to have some real reputational concerns about maintaining good relations with customers. E.g., with porkbun, it's super-cute in an ostensibly-benign jurisdiction, but it's a completely hidden LLC who's privacy concerns seem limited only to WHOIS anonymity. What exactly prevents them (or any successor in interest) from misusing the information they have?
On the internet, associating real people with IP's will always be a key goal of governments and criminals, and yet domain name services are a free-for-all with no underlying privacy guarantees.
I've just tried negotiating with a squatter. I'm trying to resurrect a web game with a few thousand players which the original dev neglected. I've rebuilt it on another domain but the community have game data stored in the browser localStorage against the original site. I offered US$200 and was told no - not even a counter offer. I believe they see the domains as lotto tickets - it's in their interests to let a lot of the negotiations fall though so they can win big on a few massive deals.
somebody runs those whois servers. verisign runs .com and they like money just as much as the next guy - i wouldn't expect your lookups of unregistered domains to be unsold no matter how you do them.
With this infrastructure move especially, it is hard to trust in Google. This can't have been losing money or been that costly. Google why?
Google Domains integrates well with Google Cloud and Google Workspace and other products. Even if it was a loss leader it had to be useful. Tell me how this makes sense.
Surely this was at worse profit neutral, or could have been with a modest price hike, I know I would have continued using them even if their domains were an extra $1/year vs competitors because I trusted them more
When I first started using GAE 10 years ago it really felt like somebody lovingly crafted a nice solution to a complex problem.
It's not that anymore.
Instead of porting to Python 3, I'm porting away from Google.
Let’s say you had an old large code base in 100,000s of lines of code that just works and has been mostly untouched for years in eol/maintenance. you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”?
It’s far cheaper, potentially millions cheaper, to just change clouds/providers and find a way to continue on 2.7.
I've migrated 200k LoC python 2.7 codebases to python 3. It certainly wasn't painless but tools like black, flake8, 2to3 and other stuff helped. It's not impossible and can be executed in 2-4 weeks
> you expect there to be budget or time to rewrite it into python 3 for literally no reason other then “2.7 is deprecated”
2.7 is not just deprecated. It's dead. There's no more updates. It's not "millions cheaper" to not migrate. I posit you'd save a LOT of money from the sheer performance improvements and bug fixes from migrating than anything else. In my own case we saved a few hundred dollars a month from not having to spawn new containers and EC2 instances
It doesn't really matter how many years of notice they gave me, I just haven't had time to do it.
This is what happens, when no one is maintaining software.
Security is more important that anything, certainly than having time or not to update your code.
You're 100% in the wrong here, and Google is 100% in the right, and I hate Google more than spammers, more than pretty much any other company there is.
They're not wrong here, and it hurts me to support their stance.
Fix your stuff. Stop blaming others. I doesn't matter why you're in the situation you're in, you're wrong to be there. No matter what.
If you think security is an afterthought, you're doing it wrong.
this also really highlights the problem with python's 2 vs 3 split: there is a large body of work that will never be updated and will forever run 2 including actual web/publicly facing code. And saying "just upgrade because security" isn't going get much of that code upgraded.
This sort of thinking, is why places get hacked. You don't know what the access vector is. Stop making excuses. Secure your shit.
I would be so happy if a law was passed, and such actions were criminal.
Your code took a month, not everyone’s will.
so again something is just running and working why spend the money and or time when there are potentially far more important things to spend limited resources on?
op even said “yes I’m gonna but I don’t have the time” be
Like you mentioned, the docs were really shoddy when I needed them. Certain conventions felt half baked compared to AWS, and I don’t even like AWS to begin with. Overall it seemed like the integration of services was much worse than AWS, though. Administration of different services is like visiting separate worlds at times, like the teams might not be on the same page regarding design and technical language. The other possibility is I’m just a little dumb and don’t pick up on the patterns — I’m pretty open to that.
It’s a shame, I wish there was a cloud provider that I actually liked and at one point, that was GCP.
I'm curious what it is about Azure that puts you off.
I’m perfectly happy with AKS. Their Postgres product is great (formerly citus). But at the the end of the day, they still want to sell Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc. That’s a choice I will probably never make, so it just feels like a mismatch.
Granted my experience was inside Azure so we had the benefit of vertical integration.
I've spent very little time in the Microsoft ecosystem, but several years ago I was on a contract with a Microsoft shop and I found the MS server-related offerings to be pretty solid (granted, I was not the one paying for them).
The one thing that still shocks me (and maybe it's changed since I last checked, but I'm guessing not) is their pricing model around some offerings that are applied per processor core. Holy moly! Need to blow a lot of cash really fast? Then MS SQL server is for you. Fortunately (/s), it was a government contract, and at that point in the fiscal cycle they were desperate to blow cash so they didn't get less of it the next cycle.
That's always seemed like a perverse incentive to me: the people who do more with less resources get fewer resources the next round. Wouldn't it make more sense to give them more resources and incrementally expand the scope of their duties? They're clearly doing something right. Of course, it's always a balancing game. Perhaps the reason they were so efficient is because they had a limited amount of work to be done, and with more work they may not have performed with the same efficiency.
Perhaps the reasoning behind such a policy is that they're not generally looking for super heroes who might burn themselves out after doing amazing work. They're looking for people who are okay being a little bored, but who will reliably get a specific job done.
Comparable infrastructure on Azure somehow ended up costing that team around 60% of what their AWS setup cost which was a bit confusing. Their monthly spend went from $900 CAD to about $650. I never had a chance to dig deep on that, but I assume that before there was something clumsy happening with allowing expensive resources to live too long or something. It was a big difference for such a small company though.
I’m not sure if that’s a thing (Azure being cheaper) but it made me think I should do price comparisons there next time I have a budget conscious client who isn’t already partial to another platform.
Seriously, 10s of millions wasn't worth switching?
Thanks
I wager it’s just expensive to run a registry. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they’re really selling (the TLDs), rather than the registrar.
I suspect Google finds it a lot easier to run a registry with a few enterprise clients than to deal with flesh and blood customers owning domains.
It is probably something they already had internally that they figured they could monetize easily. They develop Android and RCS. Operating their own MVNO could very well allow them to simplify some things.
> many customer support issues.
Huh? I've used them for years. Never had issues which were not directly related to T-Mobile's network. There were no issues the few times I interacted with support.
> Upon closing, Squarespace, a long- time reseller of Google Workspace, will become the exclusive domains provider for any customer purchasing a domain along with their Workspace subscription from Google directly for a minimum of three years.
> Once regulatory approvals are obtained and the transaction closes, the billing and support services for Google Workspace (including G Suite) subscriptions currently billed by Google Domains will be managed by Squarespace. After close there will be a transition period during which customer and billing information will be migrated over time, subject to limited exceptions, after which your Workspace subscription previously billed by Google Domains will be managed in a Squarespace account and billed by them.
So maaaaybe? I have no idea what these two sentences mean.
They have ~100 left.
https://about.google/intl/ALL_us/products/
What do you think will go next?
I'm sure some of these will bite the bullet this year.
1. Exposure Notifications (maybe in 2-3 years) 2. Google Arts and Culture <- this one has to be expensive to maintain 3. Keep 4. Scholar 5. Tilt Brush 6. Google Lens 7. Google Groups 8. Google Drawings
Agreed, but it's sensible to keep it as an asset should another pandemic arise - and we have quite a number of potential pathogens, from an evasive COVID mutation over a ton of bat-related viruses and currently-frozen Russian permafrost archives to bird flu.
Of course we also had another app called Luca, which tried to do a lot more direct contact tracing and turned out to be extremely insecure and leak user data, so there's that. And of course there were some plausible corruption allegations relating to its public funding.
Exposure Notifications is not an app, but a framework and a protocol, and CWA was an implementation of it, hooking in the features developed by Apple and Google for iOs and Android
[0]: https://github.com/corona-warn-app/cwa-documentation/blob/ma...
Google Voice seems to have been added to Enterprise, so I cross my fingers it will prevail.
Meet is for (planned) Meetings.
Chat is for text/audio/video chats/calls.
Killed by Google will add pretty much anything to the list. It doesn't need to be a product. It doesn't really need to be by Google. And it doesn't even need to be killed.
Also it's a sidebar, but astroturfing by company employees who stand to benefit from increased stock prices on comment boards such as this seems problematic.
It also better follows my note taking habits. It is usually a single sentence I want to be timestamped and searchable (which is also why I wrote https://github.com/wsw70/dly to simplify the quick note taking)
Keep is good for grocery lists and ephemeral data, but too easy to delete a note and no way to backup — well maybe takeout works for backup.
We have however wound down most of the protective measures. Germany has retired the official bluetooth contact tracing app earlier this year. I wouldn't be surprised if Google retires theirs this year or the next.
It's just as dangerous (well, it's probably not, due to less lethal variants winning over more lethal ones), but that measure is not what makes it no longer a pandemic.
Per the WHO[1] and the CDC[2] COVID is still a pandemic.
[1]: https://www.who.int/news/item/30-01-2023-statement-on-the-fo...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of...
Google does not have their own app. Exposure Notifications is the cross-vendor low-level API which apps like Germany's is (...was) using.
Open sourced 3 years ago. https://openbrush.app
Can you imagine living in such a community?
I can't believe people rely upon gmail for anything. Integrate anything.
When I see a business using gmail for a backend, I question their entire business model, because I question their judgement.
I happen to feel the same way about companies that use JIRA... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> The open source archive of the Tilt Brush code can be found at: https://github.com/googlevr/tilt-brush. Please note that it is not an actively developed product, and no pull requests will be accepted.
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/01/the-future-of-tilt...
Yet.
I'll be inconvenienced if I lose Keep- it's very handy and I use it extensively on a daily basis. But there are plenty of competitors in that market space- some excellent ones are open source.
Other way around: they're pushing Lens over reverse image search now.
It works much faster than the Google Translate app for translating text and it also helps identify any plants or landmarks that catch the eye.
I hope that technology never gets killed.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23761905/google-lens-skin...
I was thinking more in terms of why it needs to exist as a separate app.
I guess those products could work just using hosted zones etc but the DevEx is much worse.
Google killing a product should no longer be a surprise to anyone. It’s the opposite of Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition: everybody expects it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty...
Windows XP incorporated more user-centric elements from 9x, which culminated with ME, into NT.
Windows 8 incorporated more mobile-centric elements from CE into NT.
Windows is still rock solid at running programs from almost 30 years ago.
Google software can only DREAM of doing that. Microsoft was doing software while Google people were still even not planned to be born.
If we consider the start year to be 1981, the year MS-DOS 1 came out, that is twenty years of official, commercial support, if we count 7.1 and 8 that's twenty five years.
If you need software you can count on to still be there a few decades down the line, if not more de facto, count on Microsoft to deliver.
specifically, how are those audio files bought from the M$ mu$ic store when they pulled the plug on the licensing server for their DRM?
your claim of still running on modern Windows would be impressive if it is actually true, but saying to use a completely different OS is not something the vast majority of people not typically reading HN are going to do.
Windows and Microsoft are the legendary backwards compatibility outlier in the software industry where essentially everyone else moves fast and breaks shit.
Incidentally, I still have not come across a suitable replacement for Winamp all these years later. They all have crappy UIs or bring features that I do not want and get in my way.
With a complete RCE like that though, I would definitely not advise playing music downloaded from peer-to-peer networks. While I'm not familiar with the exact requirements to exploit the vulnerability, I would err on the side of caution and assume that music files can be crafted that contain malicious metadata which can achieve similar results without actually being connected to the streaming service.
It's fixed in Winamp v5.52 and above, and the version I use is v5.531 so I'm not affected as it turns out.
I'm sure there are other bugs that I'm affected by, but again: Not really concerned about it.
A comparison shows most products that should be dead are on that list.
G, on the other hand, has products actively used and loved by users.
This Domains shutdown definitely qualifies for the short list though, and is the most mystifying shutdown of theirs in like a decade. It was a paid service with clear strategic importance and clearly a ton of happy customers.
I have stopped using any new Google product, and am slowly phasing out my reliance on their other products.
I watched the recent developments to Twitter, Google and Reddit, and loved it all.
One way for self-hosted service to catch up is to wait for the big companies to mess up, and they're messed up very well at this moment.
Google previously changed their account expiration policy, and decided to lock users out of their usernames instead of allowing the old owner to re-active it, making the expiration permanently destructive for the user.
This effectively told their users that use of Google services is not "maintenance-free", you have to constantly engage with Google to keep it alive. And funny enough... maintenance costs is one of the reasons why people choose to abandoned their soft-host services.
Now the pendulum swings another way, it's great.
In this case specifically, I moved the domain away since they want you to pay extra money to use custom DNS servers.
Specifying 3rd party name servers as your domain’s name server was (still is?) not possible with Cloudflare Registrar.
(Disclaimer: I work there)
I guess DNS over https can be antiuser (even for normal consumers) in the sense that it makes it harder to block ads at the dns level but quic?
Honestly, I think that's a core misconception Google has managed to sell people on: That enterprise middleware is somehow bad and malicious, as opposed to the ad company that distributes malware as a primary revenue stream which tells you that the middleware that catches it is bad.
If network traffic is on my home network, I have a right to inspect it. If network traffic is on my work's network, my work certainly has a right to inspect it. To be blunt, with some regulatory supervision assumed, if you're using an ISP's network, they absolutely have the right to manage their network. Why in the actual heck did anyone buy Google's narrative that somehow enabling them to convert the Internet into an end-to-end encrypted ad delivery and spyware platform was a good idea?
The marketing acumen to pull that off, now that's legendary.
Because there are quite the number of countries that run massive nation-scale censorship and surveillance campaigns. Google going all-in on encryption of everything, LetsEncrypt being founded - all of that is a direct response to the actions of the US government wiretapping everything including Google's internal datacenter communications and countries like China, Russia and Iran running massive disruption campaigns.
And that doesn't even touch private entities messing with the Internet traffic of their customers - most notably ISPs not just delivering wrong answers on non-existent domains on their own DNS servers to serve ads instead of NXDOMAINs, but going as far as to hijack and rewrite all DNS traffic for that purpose. Or that sniff on DNS requests to sell that data to advertisers (or to the NSA).
And to make it worse, the various "middleboxes" along the Internet placed there by employers forced to comply with dumbass laws, by ISPs doing above-mentioned DPI and manipulation, or by governments of all kind have led to an ossification of Internet protocols because even trivial stuff could lead to issues (remember DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0?).
Yes, it is a good thing that Google leads the way in making encryption ubiquitous. Fuck governments, fuck ISPs, fuck everyone who thinks they have a right to intercept, snoop on, track or analyze my communication.
PS: If an employer (or you) wish to inspect traffic, there are many solutions - the most obvious being a private CA root cert to be installed on the client.
The whole evil ISPs tampering with your data thing is just "reading too many Jon Brodkin articles on Ars". I used to have an ISP that tampered with web delivery to deliver a piracy notice, and it nearly didn't get noticed at all, because it neither went to the account owner (me), nor the person who did the crime (not me), but went to a different guest at the house (also not me), who thankfully told me about it, leading me to inquire with their office to get an actual copy of their complaint so I could respond with "wasn't me, told that dude not to do stuff on my Wi-Fi". Which is to say, the effect of an ISP doing this is... generally less harmful than Google using protocols to deliver malicious content, and hilariously ineffective even when they employ it.
What scares me a lot more is not just the actively malicious work shipped through Google's various platforms to target society's most vulnerable (usually seniors), but the sheer amount of money that has been dumped around every journalism outlet, activist org, and lobbyist to sell the narrative you just posted, all to protect a trillionaire corporation that watches your every move, and happily provides that information to all of the organizations you're worried about for free while convincing you it's doing you a favor.
In short, screw governments, but screw Google making it hard for me to filter out the traffic that lets them figure out whose visiting abortion clinics, which they are absolutely handing over to the authorities who ask about it.
No, it's personal experience. German Telekom did this crap by default until 2019, when they finally relented after criminal charges were filed [1], and they were far from the only one - NXDOMAIN abuse was shockingly common for a long time [2], including court-ordered censorship (e.g. The Pirate Bay, but governments liked to do DNS censorship against Twitter and other services too to squash resistance movements).
> What scares me a lot more is not just the actively malicious work shipped through Google's various platforms to target society's most vulnerable (usually seniors), but the sheer amount of money that has been dumped around every journalism outlet, activist org, and lobbyist to sell the narrative you just posted, all to protect a trillionaire corporation that watches your every move, and happily provides that information to all of the organizations you're worried about for free while convincing you it's doing you a favor.
In the end, you will always be fucked over by someone. At least if you're getting fucked by Google, you're not paying money for the privilege of getting fucked.
> In short, screw governments, but screw Google making it hard for me to filter out the traffic that lets them figure out whose visiting abortion clinics, which they are absolutely handing over to the authorities who ask about it.
Agree with you on that one, dragnet surveillance is plain bad. But the fix for that one is to get rid of DeSantis and his Evangelical ilk one way or the other, these laws have impact far beyond Google. It won't take long until some US state makes it a crime to travel to another US state for obtaining an abortion or for someone to transport a pregnant person to another US state for that purpose, so you'll see women essentially being trapped in these states (particularly those unable to afford their own car). Yes, that may be unconstitutional, but it will take years to reach the Supreme Court in the first place and it isn't guaranteed that the SC will block such outrageous crap.
[1] https://www.golem.de/news/t-online-navigationshilfe-telekom-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking#Manipulation_by_...
That’s the sort of crap you end up with when every network operator asserts their “right” to modify traffic.
Don’t get me wrong I do dns filtering on my home network and block public dns over http endpoints, but there is some balance to be had here imo.
Also I would not attribute https uptake to google only. A slightly less than trillion dollar organization - let’s encrypt - is really imo responsible for making https as ubiquitous as it is.
Meanwhile Google itself is the stick. Google has used it's policy control over Chrome to effectively mandate using Let's Encrypt, by making using certificates without it a nightmare, and making browser features arbitrarily require HTTPS for no reason other than it pushes more people to do it.
I am not wholly against HTTPS, mind you, I think there's reasonable benefit gains for privacy on balance, but we should definitely be clear that Google and it's subsidiaries and sponsored orgs are responsible for the spread, and the reasons for doing so are not goodwill.
DoH, QUIC, and ECH are where it really begins to go "too far", where we're obliterating norms to ensure nobody can tamper with ad delivery. Things like buying gTLDs and putting them in the HSTS preload list, to roll back to why them selling their registrar business is so unusual.
You can still have "classic" certificates - if exchanging certificates is enough of a nightmare that you can't even do it once a year, it's a clear indicator your tech stack is brittle beyond belief and should be updated anyway. Meanwhile if you're using a modern cloud-based stack the provider (e.g. AWS ACM) does the work for you, and acme.sh makes it a breeze on on-prem/bare-metal stacks as well.
> DoH, QUIC, and ECH are where it really begins to go "too far", where we're obliterating norms to ensure nobody can tamper with ad delivery.
What? Browser extensions still exist and DoH doesn't impact whatever you're putting in /etc/hosts, that one works just fine.
And of course, don't worry, Google is ruining ad blocking browser extensions too, for the 70% of users who use their web browser. (This is one of the reasons defenses for Google's behavior so rarely holds... they are attacking users through so many different avenues at once, the justification only holds if you ignore everything else they're currently doing.)
The thing is, if you're doing it right it should not take longer than 5 minutes. It forces people to actually invest in good infrastructure practices rather than build brittle shit that collapses at the first blow. And most of the "enterprise" stuff you're talking squarely fits into that category.
As said I'm happy for anything that aims to prevent ossification, simply because how often I have heard the lines "why invest into something proper when a thrown-together hack lasts us just the same" or "why replace that old Cisco firewall box if it ain't broken yet".
Apparently, I was so wrong. We'll have to see if Squarespace goes for any exorbitant price hikes.
You don’t need to be a registrar to own a TLD, but in their case it seemed pretty essential to their strategy.
Cloudflare, please gain tld parity asap!
I guess that leaves email.
I'm ready to degoogle.
I suppose that's ok if the move to Squarespace goes smoothly.
https://support.google.com/domains
[edit] And a dedicated support topic https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?sjid=1375...
chuckles I'm in danger!
I should have known. I started a transition for most of my stuff to cloudflare anyway. I kind of figured this would come eventually.
Low cost has never been the priority. If you don't value their service at $20/yr they have no problem with you going elsewhere.
But this is actually $20 a year for a domain, which is about 50-80% more expensive than most other domain hosting, including Google Domains.
"I just want a non-scummy registrar that doesn't try and upsell me, has support when I need it, and generally isn't shit."
"Why is this non-shitty registrar $20/yr instead of $10/yr like everyone else! Hell, I can go to Joe's Discount Domain Emporium and get this for _$8_!"
I guess I'd just really like to know, for the people that are looking at it like this... how many domains y'all buying? Because I have to assume it's "lots and lots" or else I don't know how to make sense of any of this.
The $10 difference literally couldn't get me a Big Mac meal these days. Maybe I'm just the super-privileged class to be able to afford an extra 83 cents a month, but I happily pay more for my domains to buy from non-scummy companies.
Godaddy is telling me $0.01 if I register three years up front, and it looks like year two and beyond are $23/yr? But if I bundle this with my other couple domains I get some sort of discount? Also they add the ICAAN fees and stuff after? So something like $16/yr over three years?
Domains.com looks like $10.99/yr once I managed to strip out the upsells.
Namecheap is telling me $6.98/yr with promo code FLASHCOM and I _think_ $13.98/yr after that?
Hover is still playing games but at least it's kind of clear--$14.99/yr up front, $16.99/yr after that.
Name.com is $10.99/yr, $12.99 renewal and they're pushing me to some sort of bundle discounts.
Spaceship is $7.88/yr, and I _think_ $8.80/yr on renewals?
Just trying to figure out the damn pricing on these sites is already stressing me out more than the loss of potentially around $6/yr.
Add to that that AWS isn't really a "registrar", they're a cloud company that lets you register domains. Their support isn't budgeted on the revenue from domain sales, it's budgeted on the $80b in cloud revenue. I've dealt with them before. They're excellent. AWS also has a pretty solid track record of supporting their products long term (SimpleDB is still here) so I have zero concern about waking up tomorrow and finding out that my registrar is shutting down.
My domain is what my entire online identity is tied to (via email). It sits between me and a bunch of (self-hosted) services I rely on. Even without the frustrating pricing and stuff, the $6 is worth it as insurance.
So no, I'm not overpaying. I'm paying a small premium for a product with a better process and better support and me not having to waste valuable brain space thinking about it or staying on top of whatever the hell my pricing is doing this year (though I guess I kinda messed that up getting into this conversation). If it weren't AWS, I'd have no problem paying Gandi $17/yr or Squarespace $20/yr.
In this case the danger is having to take tedious action to migrate 100 domains, or suffer from a small price increase x100 = a big price increase.
Several others have suggested porkbun and I'm interested to see that it provides an API (https://porkbun.com/api/json/v3/documentation).
Do folks have experience with this API?
I have a hacky a solution to update Google Domains Dynamic DNS record but would value a more functional API to update DNS records. Had I known about this before today, I may have migrated my domains to porkbun for this reason alone.
I know there's support for our API on the current GitHub hosted version of ddclient, however I haven't had a chance to get it working and a tutorial out, but it's an option.
Like, it's a domain name registrar! What was their objective and plan and where did this go wrong? Out of the 2,650+ active registrars, it's the fourth most popular one!
It obviously was never going to be a massive money maker, but even if they had to raise prices, between their easy email aliases and clean interface, even though there were cheaper options, this easily could have been a small but profitable service for them. Also, it kept me in the Google ecosystem (I use Gmail with their email aliases.)
I don't know how this product realistically could have been more successful for what it is, and I don't know why you'd bother killing a service that could pay for itself, especially now that I (and the many individuals and businesses affected by this) don't even trust Google's paid services. There are over 10 million registered domains through Google Domains! That's a ton of paying customers who will be reluctant to pay for anything Google's selling in the future. Doesn't matter how good of a service Google provides if they're just going to kill it.
*Later edit*: Decided to go ahead and transfer the other domains there, too. Done.
edit: forgot to mention, use code EXODUS to get $1 off three transfers ;)
I'd have to check about the EUR and VAT questions, but my guess is because we can only charge in USD currently it would mean any EUR price we showed wouldn't be "true," since banks ex rate may vary/have added fees.
edit: forgot to mention, use code EXODUS to get $1 off three transfers ;)
Just moved my sole Google Domains domain to Porkbun in literally 6 minutes from account onboarding to transfer completion.
Re: porkbun: A+ work for allowing multiple yubikeys. If anyone else is looking for a registrar that has their security shit together, they seem promising.
Does this mark a new transition for google leadership? Will google start to sell their unwanted businesses instead of just killing them?
Feels like a good fit for Squarespace - lots of overlap with their target market.
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.
_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.
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!
I always chose different DNS because registrars normally suck at DNS, feature-wise.
A few years back, Cloudflare and Amazon did DNS but didn't sell domains or didn't sell your TLD or to your region. And in general, places that were regarded as reasonably good at selling domains didn't have anything in the way of an enterprise grade DNS service. You would go to Namecheap or Porkbun or something and get a reasonable domain they had nothing like the functionality you'd get by putting DNS somewhere better.
It was well established for a long time as a fact you don't mix these roles, it's only recently that decent players started doing both.
(And you seem really knowledgeable in this space, heh)
> Squarespace will also provide billing and support services to Google Workspace customers
I have to admit, I’m at a total loss, this makes zero sense.
The support doc is saying that if you bought Google Workspace through the Google Domains frontend, paying with the same method you used to buy domains, Squarespace will take over the billing of it in the future.
If you went directly to Google Workspace, signed up, and then linked your domain manually, with separate billing, then Google Workspace will continue to bill you directly.
Otherwise, Google has documentation for that:
No one used Google Stadia because Google kills things with little warning, which subsequently caused Google to kill Stadia.
Google will never be able to launch another product.
Google legitimately thought they can enter a brand new market, and treat it like they are already the largest player in it. They duped themselves by honestly believing that "this is not the gaming market, this the the Cloud Gaming market". They did get most of the "cloud gaming" enthusiasts on board. All 200 of them.
They weren't like XBox or Nvidia who just had to go to gaming companies and strike a deal or ask for permission to stream their existing games. They were a new "console", you needed to develop for stadia. They needed to pay millions to incentivize companies to put the effort to port their existing games to stadia. Those companies had no customer for the "stadia console" version of their game other than Google sine no one has a "stadia console" or any way otherwise to play that game.
Those tactics may work for Sony or Nintendo or _maybe_ Microsoft. But not for a nobody in the business that literally has no user-base, no games, no history. They had nothing, and tried to pull a "we're the leaders in this market we can do anything we want and everyone will have no option but to take it"
The only place I interact with google these days is my Google TV. Here's to hoping they don't drop support for that as well.
I'm one of them. Cloud services is a large opportunity Google will be stupid to ignore/give up. I anticipate the service evolving, but I don't see an outright death of Google Cloud.
I'm not throwing Google a challenge ;)
The turning point for me was when they killed Google Music, which I had been using for a decade, forcing me to move my large catalog of songs elsewhere. I self host via Plex now. Strike 1.
Then they killed the "free domain email", which became freeish (grandfathered) "google workgroups", which became pay up or we kill it. I spent many hours back and forthing with their email support trying to get admin access to my account to no avail. They claimed I needed to reach out to my domain admin. Uhhh sorry I own it and I'm the only guy thats on it or ever used it. There's no one else but me (I never had an admin, as I was just somehow transitioned during the grandfathering). No luck. I (nervously) let Google auto-kill the account, after quickly migrating everything to Fastmail via IMAP (and hand moving my calendar!). Strike 2.
Then (long story short) my Google Fi and Google Pixel experience was fine, until it suddenly wasn't. No human to complain to. Top of the line Pixel phone died like 14 months from purchase, no recourse. Buy a new phone or else. Strike 3.
The pattern is clear, Google services are fine up until the moment they aren't. At that point you're up a creek, as there are (by design) no humans to complain to.
All that is left now is my domain on Google Domains (well that and a free gmail account which I forward), which I figured was safe-ish (as they can't possibly pull the rug out from underneath domain owners can they?). But secretly been monitoring for signs I need to drop that as well. Looks like the time is now.
So.... any thoughts on whether Squarespace will be an improvement? Or should I start looking for another domain name registrar?
https://kb.porkbun.com/article/224-transfer-domain-from-goog...
Since domains can only ever have a max of ten years registration at any given time, sometimes the registry won't allow domain transfers that already have nine years of registration.Issue was that my phone was defective, likely a design problem. Battery life problems around 1 year, wouldn't charge. Google fixed first for free under warranty. Problem popped back up around 5 months later and they told me to pound dirt since it was out of warranty. I said it's the same problem, you didn't fix it the first time when it was in warranty. Apparently a lot of people had the problem, likely a design problem related to life of battery/power connector on PCB. End of the day Google refused to acknowledge their problem, and this is on their flagship phone. I had no choice but to buy a new phone... which is ridiculous considering what I paid and only got a year out of it.
I just got to the point where I got tired of being at Google's mercy when something went wrong. This is my digital life, my domain, my calendar, decades of emails. It's too stressful when a corner case occurs and there's no human being in the loop to make things right. I'm willing to pay for service, just not with Google any longer. I figure I'm paying to get a human on the phone, and some accountability.
Google keeps trying to ping my company and get us to switch to their cloud. I say no way in heck I'm going to put mission critical infrastructure and data in their hands.
Felt like bait and switch to me. They forced me to make a decision. I took my ball and went home.
I remember this[1] article from a few years ago on the subject of Google's shutdowns hurting its brand. It's even funnier to read now with it being written shortly after Stadia's launch. The author and everyone else were pointing out that they have little expectation for the service to be around in a few years. And it turned out we were right!
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-pro...
… and AI trainer
I'm also confused, it's a paid product! If it wasn't making enough money, why didn't they just raise the price? It already wasn't the cheapest name registrar, so I don't think people were selecting it solely based on cost (I went with it because of the free 100 email aliases included, but others liked the clean layout and simplicity compared to some other options.)
I get why they kill free things that don't make them money, but it seems very strange with a paid product, especially when, as others have said, they have GCP, which will presumably require a third party registrar in the future.
It wasn't "the cheapest registrar" because they didn't offer "signup deals", just like cloudflare. Other cheaper registrar offer a signup deal for $1 or $2 a domain (subtext: renews for $24 dollars the next year)
I had moved from GoDaddy to Name.com years prior for similar reasons but Name burned my good will.
Is there a service that replaces Google Domains in simplicity and not pushing add-ons?
Edit: fixed autocorrect of domain name
AWS
Who has any idea what Route 53 is supposed to mean!
I'm more surprised that given Google's scale, they couldn't do it in a way that makes them much more money, but perhaps at the expense of ethics/user experience
Nonetheless, Squarespace isn't bad but I found their domain pricing to be overpriced to target the specific market that doesn't really care about domain pricing they just want their domain and Squarespace set up at once. I can't see myself sticking around post the grace period mentioned.
That being said, they seem the most stable of the companies in this space that is not otherwise egregiously bad in some way or the other, so I’ve been willing to pay those few bucks more. For the key domains I own it adds up to around $20-$30 more a year which isn’t bad for the greater piece of mind IMO.
Any recommendations on where/how to transfer to get a) similar price, b) mail forwarding, and c) self-service subdomains? (Maybe the last two are standard—I have no idea since I’ve always used Google Domains)
I know email forwarding isn’t the standard because Hover charges you 5$ per year per domain just for email forwarding. So frustrating.
Porkbun advertises $10/year, which would be great, if true.
This setup means I get reasonable prices with a single point of purchase for all my domains, but also get a decent UI and API to manage the DNS.
Cloudflare email makes mail forwarding incredibly easy too. You get this as well in this setup.
Not an issue for me, but worth noting since this is fairly unusual, as far as I’ve seen.
The problem is not leadership or management. It is the owners. It is Larry and Sergey.
EDIT: Looks it is answered here. We become customers of squarespace for that too, so I doubt it will be free after this. Time to plan the move. https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670
Maybe there was no special reason to use Google Cloud DNS, or the other Google Cloud services I use, with Google Domains. It's been so long since I set this all up that I honestly can't remember. But I wouldn't be revisiting any of that but for this announcement that Google Domains is turning down. Now, in the process of finding a new registrar, I'm revisiting all of it.
I'm a tiny customer, less than a rounding error for Google. But this still seems like a strategic error to me. How much can it cost to run a domain registrar? How does this weigh against the goodwill and trust gained from maintaining an important service you've implicitly promised that you would maintain?
Guess I'll have to transfer a bunch of domains now.
Google Domains - $12/yr (includes private whois)
Squarespace - $20/yr (includes private whois)
Yeah, total rip off. There are plenty of Registrars that are at $12 (AWS), or less (Porkbun $9.73).
Google is double screwing it's users. First by selling them off, then by selling them to a price gouger.
> Squarespace said it will honor Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months following the close of the deal.
... knowing it meant Renewal Sticker Shock, eventually, for those who stay.
Everyone hates them but they're providing the a competitive deal because the domains are a lead for the read of their business.
I hope they don't change anything for as long as possible. I hate having to deal with DNS busy work.
I have 97 domains with Google Domains. 20 of them are in active use. ~10 I manage for family and friends. ~10 are redirects. I'm embarrassed to say I have ~57 side project ideas (GitHub pages + Google Domains is a bad habit—looks like I would brainstorm about 1 per week). Maybe the fact that Google Domains made it so easy to buy and manage many domains was actually a bad thing for me, as I picked up too many. So maybe I should be less sad :).
A company can be a registry for a tld, like how Google owns the .app tld. That is different than a registrar, like godaddy, who resells the names in namespaces provided by registries. The registries set the price for that tld and other things like requiring .app namespace to be secure, so you need HTTPS and an SSL certificate for your website to load on most browsers. Due to these SSL requirements, domain forwarding isnt supported. another example of requirements set by a registry is the .AI namespace which is more expensive by default (over $125 a year last i looked)and requires a minimum of 2 years when you register.
Registries also charge more for names they think are worth more. So if you see a premium .app name that cost $2,000 per year, that is because the registry (Google in the case of .app) decided the name was valuable (probably because its a short common noun) and they want a lot more per year for it. Ive never heard of this happening after someone already had it for cheaper, so no rug pull type situations.
As for why some names renew for more than when you first get them, its a strategy for registrars (not registries) to attract new customers. Companies give items away at a discount or loss to get you into their ecosystem and then make profits at renewals. It’s like getting a free smartphone from a phone company and then paying more for the service than if you had owned the phone and not got it free.
That's just a limitation on some registrar. Domain forwarding absolutely does work on .app; you simply need to configure an SSL certificate on the web server serving the redirect for the forwarding.
The UX at Squarespace is just terrible and I want nothing to do with it.
Apparently it didn't work. Or they were juicing up their customer base for the sale.
I still use Gmail, but that’s it for me among Google’s offerings. (I can’t easily transition away from that due to using my email address for several hundred login credentials, though I suppose I really should begin that project.) But certainly for anything new, I have no confidence in any Google products, paid or unpaid.
I guess now it is? How bad is Squarespace for this sort of “set it and forget it” kinda thing?
Edit: I am located in the US.
Gandi served me well for last 10 years:
* Plenty of zones supported with reasonable prices.
* Have team account access for companies.
* In case of emergency there is an option to renew domains registered with Gandi even without being owner.
I haven’t used squarespace but I also imagine they don’t have as much of a power-user appeal, given that DNS is not their main product.
It's hard to trust a new registrar when it's so easy to fuck over customers
[1]: They're mentioned in this article https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running
[2]: Can't find the article anymore, it was like, 2015.
Google Domains has been around longer than their more recent reputation of frequently killing things. It also felt "complete". It worked (just maintain it) and people liked it, why kill it? It felt stable. But apparently everyone misjudged.
But that's also why I personally am no longer on Gmail, Google Drive, Google itself, etc. I have found replacements.
2: Uncertainty around Squarespace's technical ability. Are they going to be a rock solid DNS provider? When DNS is down it is no fun. I left a smaller registrar because they couldn't handle large DDoS attacks (we weren't targets, but were affected).
Squarespace feels like an unknown to me because I don't know why they were selected and when the domain will move, so I transferred my domain away just now. This way, the registrar and transfer date are both within my control.
[1] On the other hand, Google Domains appears to consistently rank in the top 10 for market share and they still want to give it up, so maybe market share doesn't mean anything.
I wonder what the rationale for doing this is? I just assumed cloud providers offered domain registration as a loss leader keep you in their ecosystem.
Can AWS offer support for “.dev” domains so I can transfer it there?
Now I genuinely think they could sell search soon.
>Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers' renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction
https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670
Google Domains - $12/yr
Squarespace - $20/yr
Maybe I’m not familiar enough with GCP, but why is this not just rolled into GCP? Is it even possible to buy a domain on GCP when this rolls off?
Perhaps they have different audiences? I guess if your on GCP, you wouldn’t need to use a non-GCP domain product.
Domains are a pretty core part of cloud infrastructure. The fact that they could have brought domains under GCP and didn’t makes me wonder what they know about the future of GCP that isn’t public yet.
But, ah well.
If they kill THIS nothing is off the table.
Time to find alternatives and even switch phones. No more all-in-ones platforms.
For a solid alternative I recommend Porkbun. They do just domains and nothing else, with a clean no bullshit UI.
Also recently Google photos has really done a good job of adding editing features. Ah I really hope Google keeps it going.
For backups, sync your camera roll to a computer/different service. Dropbox can do this, but there are third party apps like Autosync that can sync to a variety of services and protocols. Better than locking it all up in Google anyway.
I’m wondering how Search Console properties that were verified by domain purchase in Google Domains will be affected.
There are so many comments in that thread advising not to use Google Domains (including my comment).
https://cloud.google.com/dns (Cloud Domains)
Ostensibly to compete with AWS Route 53.
I also figured hosting domains had to be pretty much zero effort and thus passive profit.
Can’t wait for all the Squarespace spam to hit!
Who do you use as a registrar? Why do you like them? Do you recommend them?
My family name .com is still available. That should be very rare in 2023. The name has only 4 letters.
It is also a word that is hard to pronounce in the english speaking world and I hope to get a reasonable price with that argument. Chances for a company with that name are slim and I also have no company or business in that name (normal employed software dev that I am)
The squatter in question has a form up asking for contact details and initial offer.
How would I go about doing that and what should I expect price wise?
As part of the Google Domains deal, I get free static hosting on Firebase…
Well, there's at least 2 weeks notice. Unlocking to prepare for a transfer...
now is a good time as any for cloudflare to "amazon lightsail" their domain offerings.
but personally, i am still on the lookout for a good EU registrar with fair pricing and no risk of future acquisition.
Why is the CEO still there at Google?
One day Google will really need developers and the developers won’t be there.
Can anyone suggest a domain registrar that supports forwarding over SSL?
How will this affect mx records? I’ve got my vanity domain acting as a front end to Google for work gmail and things?
Sending email with your custom domain in the from/reply-to address is a different business, I recall it requires getting gmail to verify that you can receive via that custom address, and also set the mail server to smtp.gmail.com port 587.
Back to gandi I go, I guess.
I was perfectly happy with Gandi until 2016 or so. Political changes in my country made dealing with the EU more complex and potentially more expensive, and I needed to to move my ~100 domain portfolio elsewhere. I originally started looking for a UK domain registrar[1] to keep the UK sales tax (VAT) simple and avoid the credit card fees & arbitrary conversion rate for an overseas transaction. I spent a Saturday or so scouting out options, factoring in:
* purchase and renewal price, with VAT
* overall look and feel of admin panels
* workflow of (and feedback on) transferring domains in and out, and other admin tasks
* how likely the company was to be eaten by another registrar
I've tended to have my web + email stuff split across multiple orgs to reduce instances of single point of failure:
* domains at one registrar, so I can keep track
* DNS at Cloudflare (reliably fastest at DNSPerf), all but one domain is on the the free plan with Cloudflare features disabled (i.e. purely DNS).
* hosting at a build-your-own cloud provider (DigitalOcean and recently Hetzner)
* email at managed provider (Fastmail currently)
Ultimately, UK registrars turned out quite expensive compared to north American registrars, with no clear advantage. Even with the VAT being reclaimable, the sums worked out in favour of looking overseas.
I found Porkbun when I was looking for off-piste domain registrars for a couple of ccTLD domains I had. There's a single .ag which is the most expensive to renew, and comparatively few registrars support it. I ran the numbers on the portfolio of domains for each of the off-piste registrars if I moved all the domains in…and that was expensive.
I told myself I could manage >1 domain registrar if I'm organised, so I re-ran the numbers with a split between the exotic TLDs and the boring ones. I was left with Namecheap & Porkbun for the boring (cheaper) domains. I registered 3x domains at each -- all burners, a ccTLD + a gTLD + their cheapest 99c offering -- and ran some tests. I ignored the SPOF stuff above since these were r&d domains, effectively. The tests included:
* how easy it was to administer via the control panel, including transfers in and out
* testing the support team with a minor, non-documented issue
* how much junk email I'd end up with
* the overall 'feel' of the registrar
Namecheap didn't fare well, sadly. The ccTLD I set up was transferred out (to Porkbun), but remained in the Namecheap control panel. I deliberately chose a .uk domain to test this with, since the process is a little whacky[2]. To their credit, Porkbun handled it seamlessly, exactly as their kb doc explained. Namecheap continued to send my expiry warnings about the domain (which was safe at Porkbun), and a support ticket was not able to have it removed from my account at Namecheap. Minor, granted, but enough to put me off.
Porkbun was mostly better out of the gate. I set up a CAA record on my burner domain (at Porkbun) and it broke DNS completely. I opened a ticket, explained what I'd done, and had a prompt, courteous reply back within a few hours. I'd used the wrong CAA syntax, which clobbered the DNS. When I fixed that, it worked perfectly. This not-in-the-kb support ticket stuff was not planned, but it worked out really well.
I moved all-but-one of my domains to Porkbun. I'd move the .ag domain if they supported it, but they don't yet. The .ag is languishing at Gandi, and there's a support ticket open with them (2 days and counting) to get an auth code to transfer out since it's not shown on the domain control panel, and with their upcoming price changes I'm keen to get that out before the PE folks turn it into a wasteland.
So, Porkbun: it works, they have a good experience that fits my workflow, and they don't have the upselling bullshit that GoDaddy and Namecheap seem to peddle.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057987
[2] https://kb.porkbun.com/article/180-how-to-transfer-a-uk-doma...
Thanks to you I've narrowed down to cloud flare and pork in.
https://www.namepros.com/threads/your-favorite-registrar-of-...
I have zero desire to be in business with Squarespace.
Fortunately this is the last Google product I was still using, so after this migration I will be 100% google free, which will be a great day.
I don't know Squarespace as a company, but looking at the wikipedia entry, they are a publicly-traded American company on the NYSE and appear to have removed websites that promoted bigotry or hate, etc. so how bad could they really be? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squarespace
This is exactly the problem. I don't go to a domain registrar to be my parent and/or make social decisions for me. I go there to register domains and manage DNS records, that's it. That Squarespace management felt the need to assert themselves into that process with social contagion related matters is deeply concerning and frankly, a deal breaker for me. It'd be like AT&T cancelling your phone service because they didn't like the content of your conversations.
Because it's not being killed, it's being transferred to another company. (If this reporting is correct.)
Which is something to celebrate, not criticize. With Reader/Stadia/etc., wouldn't users prefer that it had been transferred rather than killed?
This is like saying Photos isn't killed because they didn't delete old photos when you exceed your new low quota.
But the whole sell of the google domains product is that you are getting a domain from Google. If it is no longer from google, the product is largely indistinguishable from those from other large cloud providers like Cloudflare or AWS (or more boutique or focused offerings like Porkbun and Namecheap).