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Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

bloomberg.com

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Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#281

Post by t-writescode »

cobertos wrote: post #242
t-writescode wrote: post #205

To the various people saying they’ll transfer their domains away, why is this bad that they transfer to another registrar company? Is there something concerning about Squarespace?

Registrars in general have many failure modes. Customer service nightmares (stakes being high if you lose an important domain, either through error or social engineering), malicious behavior (NetworkSolutions sniffing searches to buy domains[1], WhoIs privacy shell companies used to steal domain ownership, Unregistry increasing some of their new gTLDs by 500+%[2]), stability problems are all non-rare occurances. It's…

Sure; but, we're talking about Squarespace specifically. Why are they problematic? And, how are they problematic for someone that decided Google was a trustworthy company to register their domains with, knowing their history to kill all of their products?

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#282

Post by cobertos »

saurik wrote: post #268
vineyardmike wrote: post #183

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?

Isn't it like ops 101 to never have your DNS hosted by the same people you registered your domain with (as if you are shut out of the DNS for any reason you will need access to the registrar to quickly migrate to a different provider, while, in the other direction, full registrar access isn't actually ops critical until you need to change your DNS hosting company)?

Is it? Having 2 failure points is worse than 1, if the failure points are in series. It's better to have redundancy. You can have redundant DNS (multiple nameservers), but you can't have a redundant registrar (to my knowledge)

I always chose different DNS because registrars normally suck at DNS, feature-wise.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#283

Post by TX81Z »

paulgb wrote: post #235
emmelaich wrote: post #223

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.

In these transactions the users are what’s on offer. The least they can do is tell you to whom they just sold you.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#284

Post by morpheuskafka »

nyc_pizzadev wrote: post #219

So I have a Google Workspace attached to my domain. How will this work when the domain is managed by another company? When I move my domains off Squarespace, how will my Workspace work? I’m confused if they are saying my Workspace services will migrate to Squarespace too? > 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 se…

Squarespace already acted as a reseller/billing provider for Google Workspace, you could buy it through them if you were using Squarespace hosting.

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.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#285

Post by kenhwang »

lukeschlather wrote: post #233
wyclif wrote: 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.

I think Google knows that BigQuery is their only successful cloud product. Everything that isn't BQ is more at risk of being left to stagnate until it's discontinued.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#286

Post by ipaddr »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #256
t-writescode wrote: post #205

To the various people saying they’ll transfer their domains away, why is this bad that they transfer to another registrar company? Is there something concerning about Squarespace?

1: Price (66% increase in price for no additional value) 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).

Use dns at your cloud or webspace provider. Digital ocean offers this. I've used it to point a domain to other servers not connect to digital ocean.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#287

Post by cobertos »

brycelarkin wrote: post #228

I purchase all my domains from AWS Route53 to prevent this kind of thing from happening. 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?

.dev is a Google Registry domain, so they'll have to negotiate with Google to get it in their platform.

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#289

Post by opello »

nyc_pizzadev wrote: post #219

So I have a Google Workspace attached to my domain. How will this work when the domain is managed by another company? When I move my domains off Squarespace, how will my Workspace work? I’m confused if they are saying my Workspace services will migrate to Squarespace too? > 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 se…

I've got a long-grandfathered "free" workspace for a domain that never had Google as the registrar. I don't think there's much concern here -- Squarespace will be (unless they delegate that out) your new registrar and will likely migrate WHOIS and set up the appropriate MX/TXT/... records to keep things working.

Otherwise, Google has documentation for that:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/48090?hl=en

Re: Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace

#290

Post by radus »

schemescape wrote: post #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)

I’ve used namecheap for many years and have started using porkbun recently. Both have given me no problems, have reasonable prices and have those features.
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