Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,” with Squarespace taking over the business and assets…
Google try not to kill their services challenge(impossible)
I just registered like 6 domains with them this year. What a PITA.
How long can they keep doing this before people stop trusting Google to support any new service? At some point it’s like, why bother engaging with their products if you know they have limited, unpredictable shelf life?
Funny thing is that that’s one of the reasons they axe many projects - it’s a viscous cycle
I was talking to a friend currently working for Waymo (an Alphabet subsidiary) about this issue and he mentioned that there’s a strong incentive to launch products because that can be used to lobby for promotions and raises, but very little incentive to support them long term unless it’s Gmail or one of the other flagships.
If everyone wants to make stuff and nobody wants to run or improve stuff, it makes sense that this would happen. It just seems like such a relatively easy issue to fix.
This is bad news, I appreciated the easy integration with Google Cloud Platform and other Google services via Google Domains. It was the one place I felt like buying a domain name was safe.
It was the reason I used them in the past, I just looked at Squarespaces pricing and it looks fairly bad.
I would expect this to effect the broader market negatively, I’ve been using porkbun as they’re very cheap, but had been missing the Google Sites integration.
I guess I’m going to get better with self-hosting.
Thankfully my autorenewal happened at the end of May (May 29th). Folks, you have 30 days from the date of an auto-renewal to cancel and get a refund.
Bruh.
Anyone know if squarespace is likely to jack up the price? I quite like my domain and was planning on spinning up a kbin instance with it
You can transfer your domain if you act fast, it takes a few days. You may have to pay again on the new registrar though.
You pay for the transfer basically and keep the current registration time + 1 year. But ICANN only allows transfers within certain time windows of age of the domain, before/after registration, and such as well… but could be easier now to get out of Google and locked into a mess later.
Once it’s been bought or transferred it’s locked for 60 days.
They’ve got to cover their marketing budget somehow…
Any recommendations on a registrar?
namecheap has been good
It might be more efficient to list Google projects that haven’t shut down.
Don’t do that—we might remind them of something they missed.
this is why is stopped using google, before they turned evil. Now I don’t use them because they’re an evil af company.
I am currently using a Google phone lol, I know I probably shouldn’t but its worth it for me
How is this evil? Google is selling off a portion of their business that is probably not profitable for them. Evil would be ruining the service for the sake of profits. Would shutting it down be less evil?
If you don’t like Squarespace, then aren’t they the evil ones in this scenario?
Maybe you misread. aeternum gave two reasons for not “using Google”: (1) they often shut down services—his/her original reason—and (2) being “evil”, an additional reason and possibly a reference to Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto which is now used only in a very weak context at the end of their Code of Conduct.
Everyone don’t trust Squarespace, they will make you pay $20 just to own the domain, google is only $12. Do not let your domain go to them.
At the cost of renewing another year upfront, they can transfer to Cloudflare. If they don’t support the top level domain, I’ve found porkbun to be great pricing.
Thanks! Would have been nice to get an email from Google about it. I have a website on Squarespace (recently moved over from Wix). Since them people are getting my money anyway, should I just let them have ny domain too or move to something else? The comments here like Cloudflare (need to check prices, I currently pay 12 bucks a year).
.com is $9.15
This. Being a customer and learning about it through 9/5 and not an official communication kinda sucks.
That does present a poor user experience, but also seems like a quick decision too.
Right as I was looking at them yesterday to buy a domain for a Lemmy instance. Glad I didn’t bother going through with it.
This is a weird move, I guess not worth the small amount they make. The only provider I’ve never had issues with so far is Namecheap. I see a lot of people recommending Cloud flare here, so I may try them out for my ones on Google.
I use namecheap. They’re mostly fine, but they do not make it easy to support free SSL certs, and their shared hosting is not a particularly good deal, but it’s still cheap enough for one site that I haven’t investigated thoroughly. I haven’t changed my registrar, but I did send my DNS over to Cloudflare due to the SSL issue.
I use namecheap for the registration and Cloudflare for the DNS. Pretty easy setup and support as well. The SSL is great as I get a free SSL wildcard and can use that for other origin and edge certificates as well.
I just transferred my Google domains to Cloudflare. Super easy and good interface, like everything else Cloudflare. Plus it’s cheaper!
