Google Deprecates Google Domains, Sells It to Squarespace
We want you to be aware of important upcoming changes to your Google Domains account. On June 15, 2023, Squarespace announced its intent to purchase domain registrations and related customer accounts
Yet another abandoned Google/Alphabet product.
...and no one is surprised. [KilledByGoogle]
What's a good place to get/hold domains these days?
Cloudflare if they have the TLD you want/need (their pricing has no markup). There's also Namecheap and Porkbun. Sometimes they have sales that can make it cheaper.
Namesilo and Namecheap
I migrated my domain to Cloudflare and moved my mail host from gmail to iCloud. I still use google sites as a web host since it’s free hosting and brain dead building but I used google domains for the cheap domain and integrated mail and web hosting with my Google one sub.
How did you migrate your mail hosting? I currently have everything run though google domains. The registration, the hosting, the email domain and I’m not very tech savvy and don’t want to go to Squarespace. Is it easy to migrate to cloudflare?
It was a pretty easy process to migrate the domain and mail hosting. I didn’t feel like it required a lot of knowledge but I’m also a network engineer by trade so this kind of stuff comes easy by me as well.
So when I switch my DNS to Cloudflare, it copied my mx records and other dns records so my gmail kept working during this process. I then went through the process of using a custom domain with iCloud+ on my iPhone which was entirely automated so it was very easy. I think all I had to do was copy a verification token to my Cloudflare DNS after migrating and then when I verified it on my iPhone it noticed I was signed up for cloud flare with my Apple ID and was able to make the changes necessary to move email hosting for me.
I signed up for Cloudflare using my Apple ID to make the process easy. You also have to have an iCloud email address first so if your Apple ID is your gmail or custom domain, you will want to sign up for iCloud mail first.
The last thing I did was set up forwarding on my gmail account to forward all messages to my iCloud and I was good to go
Got an email from them about some domains. They say it won’t happen for “at least a month” as the transaction closes and migration begins. They also said:
Squarespace has publicly committed to continue to utilize Google Cloud DNS infrastructure, meaning reliability and performance regarding DNS will remain unchanged during the migration. The purchase is currently subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. Upon the closing of the transaction, your domain account will be owned by Squarespace but you will continue to manage your domain(s) via Google Domains as you do today, with Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service continuing to apply.
I was already using cloudflair for my dns on my domains, so I guess it'll be an easy choice for me.
I find this mildly infuriating. We're being moved to another pimp. Are there Fediverse solutions available for domain registration?