Alphabet Selling Google Domains Assets To Squarespace (bloomberg.com) 34
Alphabet is winding down its Google Domains business and selling its assets to Squarespace, according to a statement Thursday. From a report: Squarespace is acquiring the assets associated with the business for about $180 million, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked to not be identified because the financial details of the transaction aren't public. The assets include "10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers," according to the statement, confirming a Bloomberg News report. "We are exceptionally proud to be chosen to serve the customers of the Google Domains business," Anthony Casalena, founder and chief executive officer of Squarespace, said in the statement. "Domains are a critical part of web infrastructure and an essential piece of every business's online presence."
Oh just great (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think this abandonment will be for the best. The main reason I'm in the process of abandoning gmail in favor of proton is because of the way google is known to just ban your account without warning or explanation and with zero appeal process. Though my new email addresses are now on domains that I bought through google domains a while back, that way even if proton for some reason does the same thing, (so far only one recorded case, which actually seems legit) switching again will be far less painful.
Thoug
trying to hide them selfs from the .zip fail? (Score:2)
trying to hide them selfs from the .zip fail?
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Re:Oh just great (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone got any suggestions for a decent replacement supplier?
Cloudflare. They sell it to you at wholesale and you probably use them as a proxy, anyway.
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I'm firmly in the camp of keeping DNS infrastructure separate from domain registration service. Beside the subtle lock-in, p0wnage of your CF admin account results in all the keys to the kingdom. For low value, throw-away or pop-up marketing domains, maybe CF is OK as both the registrar and the primary DNS host. For critical long-term business infrastructure, probably a good idea to keep those responsibilities separate.
I like CF but don't trust them enough to put all my eggs in one basket.
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I have some domains at Cloudflare but it's not a good option for people who only need a registrar.
EasyDNS is ancient and honest.
There is a huge tendency of registrars to go bad over time. I used to use so many including name.com, namecheap, dyndns, the one that's really tucows, netsol, register.com, - and several smaller ones and they all failed me over time.
I have a few at Google for price but now I am forced to spend my labor for free to move them so how much did that save?
I still want to use at least thr
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I was thinking about Cloudflare. They support 2FA with security keys, so that's a plus to me. But it's a bit creepy how easily they can MitM HTTPS connections[1]. Is there something simple that can be done to prevent them intercepting all my data, even if that 'Proxied' switch is accidentally enabled?
[1] I'm aware it is a "feature", but I consider it a risk for some sites too.
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Honestly, this hasn't been a real concern of mine, but it is an interesting thought. My best guess is that if you set your SSL preference to 'Off' and then install your own certificate then it should allay your concerns. You could still use the proxy in this case, but I suspect it would break certain proxy features that depend on actually reading the data (like caching).
There's always going to be someone who has access to your kingdom unless you just own everything. Pretty much any email service can read al
Re: Oh just great (Score:2)
I am happy with namecheap.
But I just have a few cnames, and email forwarding.
Well that sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
My last annual renewal charge from Google was $12. According to Squarespace, their fees range between $20 and $70. [squarespace.com]
Considering that I only have a domain registered as a placeholder so someone else can’t squat on my business’s name (the site generates no revenue for me whatsoever), I guess it’s time to find cheaper domain hosting.
Google sure seems to be pressing the “evil” button a lot lately.
Re:Well that sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
Or renew your domain for the next X years while it's still with google.
The "bet" of Alphabet is the gamble for how long they'll operate something before the abandon or sell it.
Re:Well that sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Transfer to Cloudflare, they charge $9/year for .com and you get free SSL certificates.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-... [cloudflare.com]
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I went down a rabbit-hole from that link, but can anyone tell me why both: .accountant .accountants
and
exist, and are managed by different registrars?
Allowing all these nonsense TLDs really is just namespace pollution.
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It somehow generates money for someone, that's why it exists \_()_/
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Hey I still have clients who pay Digicert thousands per year for the "prestige" so it's a selling feature for some.
Fuckity Fack Feck Fuck (Score:2)
Fuckity Fuck, Fuck a Duck.
I do not want to be a Squarespace customer and I really liked the ease of managing my domains in the same place without getting bent over for fees.
Google is a pain in the ass (Score:5, Interesting)
From now on whenever I see a new Google product I have to silently ask myself "Do I feel like dealing with them getting rid of it?"
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You said it. I moved my four domains over to Google about a year ago because I got sick of GoDaddy's bullshit. One of my domains has a site I created with Google Sites. Thank you for being a complete prick Google. I'm going to avoid Google from now on. According to SquareSpace Google's prices will only be honored for up to 12 months after the switch. I foresee a big up yours when it comes to pricing after that.
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I only have 3 for personal use but for business use the "value add" was with GSuites and Google Cloud (GCE) letting you control your domains, have the nameservers be managed by Google, and being able to handle all the access management through GSuites. They should have rolled this into Google Cloud.
Even route53 (AWS) has domain registration https://d32ze2gidvkk54.cloudfr... [cloudfront.net]
I'll wait and see (Score:2)
I hope they don't break the integration between Google Domains and other Google assets, like Blogger and Google Sites. Or change the admin UI. Although I don't see why they would.
Domains always billed separately to the rest of Google Cloud, so I guess they can do a clean separation without breaking anything. Let's hope. I've got a few websites depending on it.
Legacy Google Suite Accounts (Score:2)
I wonder how this will impact legacy "free" Google Suite (aka Google Workspace) accounts that have their domains with Google Domains and linked to their legacy suites.
I haven't looked into it, but I assume the domain hosting for that isn't contingent on being with Google Domains. It just makes it easy as checking a setting on the domain management.
GKG.net has been good to me (Score:2)
And pretty cheap
Underpriced (Score:2)
By at least an order of magnitude. And there is the pattern.
Punishments for bad behavior by corporations and their leadership are routinely at least an order or magnitude lower than are plainly, to casual observers, deserved.
Wells Fargo and it's multiple abuses of customers, obvious and blatant violations of a variety of banking and credit regulations, and common sense, stand as a salient example. And the leadership responsible, having looked the other way if not merely failed to exercise due diligence in
gandi.net (Score:2)
I started on gandi.net 25 years ago, and unless someone here has some wise ideas, that looks like where I'll be moving everything back to. Looks like they've got some nice new service offerings that'll pair nicely with domains without being a 'hosting provider', strictly speaking.
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EasyDNS (Score:1)
Hey Google, Thanks for Heads-Up! (Score:3)
Nothing says "F- you" better to your paying customers than finding out about significant changes to your services news and social media.
24 hours after this article dropped I am still waiting for any official word from Google. They didn't even bother to set a notification on the actual domains.google.com site.
In the meantime I started packing up my last couple of domains I still have with them so I can transfer them elsewhere.
WTF Google: It JUST came out of beta Last year! (Score:3)
I migrated to it as it came out of beta around march 2022 for my personal domain, since it was cheap, had a simple non broken UI etc.