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Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

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Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#231
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not until they sunset free Gmail, at which point there will be millions of voices screaming out in terror.

I've been so nervous about this that I've been preemptively moving my emails over to domains I control (and using Fastmail).

+1 for Fastmail. Great service

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#232
post #215
post #191

Google simply has no incentive to serve the customer who uses them for domain management. They make so much money from ads that they're far more concerned about their ad revenue than they are about money from paying customers.

True, but then why even go into the business? Could they not model out that this would never be a giant revenue stream and customers all the grief.

Domain registration by itself isn’t a revenue stream if you’re charging base rates (which Google was doing). I think domain registration is to keep you in their cloud ecosystem.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#233
post #191

Google simply has no incentive to serve the customer who uses them for domain management. They make so much money from ads that they're far more concerned about their ad revenue than they are about money from paying customers.

As a GCP customer this actually is really concerning, it makes me wonder if some day they are just going to up and sell BigQuery to Salesforce or something.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#234

I guess we know Google isn’t serious about Google Cloud any longer… I feel like this product is table stakes for a cloud. Does this mark a new transition for google leadership? Will google start to sell their unwanted businesses instead of just killing them?

Google's enterprise-grade DNS is "Google Cloud DNS" [1]. It's not going anywhere. Google Domains is a consumer-grade product, in the sense that it is lacking most of the features (access control, bulk management) that a large company needs, though it was not lacking in stability / availability. And you could easily hook Google Domains up to Google Workspace to light up email for a small business. Feels like a good fi…

If you look at the api for AWS Route53 domain registration, it isn’t too complex. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_.... Definitely something Google could build out.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#235

Yet https://domains.google/ is has no mention of it and still invites people to move their domain to Google.... I suppose that's ok if the move to Squarespace goes smoothly.

The comms around this has been weird —- I haven’t been able to find any mention of it from official Google channels. You’d think if they were planning to announce this they’d have a blog post and email to customers ready to go.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#236

I guess we know Google isn’t serious about Google Cloud any longer… I feel like this product is table stakes for a cloud. Does this mark a new transition for google leadership? Will google start to sell their unwanted businesses instead of just killing them?

Google's enterprise-grade DNS is "Google Cloud DNS" [1]. It's not going anywhere. Google Domains is a consumer-grade product, in the sense that it is lacking most of the features (access control, bulk management) that a large company needs, though it was not lacking in stability / availability. And you could easily hook Google Domains up to Google Workspace to light up email for a small business. Feels like a good fi…

They're separate services and I thought as a Google Cloud DNS customer buying a domain with Google Domains was just common sense, this is really perplexing. I had seriously thought I should migrate my registrar to Google Domains just to keep things more consistent. Turns out Google doesn't think these products are related at all. And certainly they can be decoupled but it seems like a bizarre product decision.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#237
Ugh, this makes me sad. Google Domains was hands down the simplest, most reliable, fastest domain service I ever used. I originally was on GoDaddy, then migrated everything to Namecheap, then migrated everything to Google Domains.

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 :).

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#238
I just bought my domain from Google weeks ago. I genuinely considered killedbygoogle.com while making my purchase, and I was like, "Surely domains.google isn't going anywhere, right? I mean, they even have their own TLD!"

Apparently, I was so wrong. We'll have to see if Squarespace goes for any exorbitant price hikes.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#240
It says they’ll only honor existing prices for 12 months after the transaction closes.

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)

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