Squarespace buys Google Domains for $180 million (1 Viewing)

silentg

silentg

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Oh crap

All of my businesses including dn.ca run on Google Domains.

So may forwarders, sub domains, email accounts etc.

If I have too change it will be days and days of work
 
how many will transfer out? So many keep the domains at Google because of the easy integration with their products.
 
silentg said:
how many will transfer out? So many keep the domains at Google because of the easy integration with their products.
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That's the issue, if the integration ends I will move the domains to WHC, I have a hosting plan there that allows me to addon domains so I can control all the sub domains and email accounts.
 
Squarespace has stated that it will honor the renewal prices for Google Domains customers for a minimum of 12 months after the deal is finalized. Additionally, as per the statement, Squarespace will become the exclusive domains provider for customers who buy a domain from Google along with their Workspace subscription. The aim is to ensure a smooth transition for customers with the assistance of the Google Domains team.

Matt Madrigal, the vice president and general manager of merchant shopping at Google, emphasized this priority in a statement. Squarespace aims to offer an integrated experience by enabling customers to purchase and manage domains while providing other essential tools to establish their online presence.

Source: Alphabet is selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace – DomainGang
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Tucows is the registrar for GoogleDomains, why would they not have made the move to purchase?

I have ZERO intentions to stay at this company now and have already started plans to move my domains out.

I have my 4 main company domains all heavily invested in google domains and services, I know nothing about square space nor am I willing to take a chance on them with my businesses.

Self management, full control from here on forward.


The part about google domains that was so great was that my business domains never went to spam. Before google domains and workspace I always struggled to assure my business emails did not hit clients spam boxes. This whole situation has me worried and is going to create a lot of work for a lot of people.
 
https://twitter.com/x/status/1669441575825428493


This is going to waste squarespace a lot of money because professionals will leave google domains in droves. I can't imagine any business trusting their domain to squarespace. It's going to be a hot mess and squarespace would be wise to reconsider.

Read the comments in the tweet above to see where this is headed.
 
MapleDots said:
Tucows is the registrar for GoogleDomains, why would they not have made the move to purchase?
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Just for .CAs IIRC. They also provide(d) privacy services for other TLDs to Google Domains.
 
So it begins...

Moving my first business domain out of Google Domains today, if all goes smooth my other ones will follow.


For anyone not familiar with it, this is an extremely complicated process. A lot of people using google domains have multiple websites, blogs, sub domains and possibly hundreds of forwarders and email addresses attached to their domains. We picked google domains because it seamlessly worked with other google products but I can no longer rely on that and am not willing to risk my businesses to square space.

So one by one, starting today my sites, blogs, etc will be moved out.

DN.ca will be one of the last site to move when I am positive the process has gone smoothly on some of the other sites.

DNS downtime on Google Domains has been ZERO and I am quite worried moving the DNS to another company and apparantly cloudflare does not work with .ca yet.

So I will be testing WHC for a bit on a few test sites to see how well dns works from their servers and then go from there.
 
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Screenshot - 2023-06-22T210326.040.jpg



Never in all the years have I had error messages, just moved MapleDots out, one more business domain and dn.ca and I'm done.

Good news to report.... the transition to WHC was flawless for my other domains, the .ca's were instant and the .com's took about 20 minutes for GoogleDomains to authorize as the losing registrar.

My other business domain is a massive amount of work, literately a hundred sub domains and just as many email addresses.

DN.ca will be this weekend and I expect about a 20-60 minute outage while waiting for DNS. Moving from Google Domains the DNS propagation happens amazingly fast.

I will be running the domains from my MapleDots hosting account at WHC but my server there is pretty full right now so I'm going to check to see if I can get on a bit of a better server with @FM
 
Screenshot - 2023-06-24T213209.261.jpg



Phew.... took me 6 hours but I moved all my google domains out.

A total unexpected kick in the rear that was.

Squarespace paid 180 million and techie guys like me are going to leave in droves.

I bet they will lose 20% of the held domains before the deal is finished.

As you can see below, my google domains account is now empty.



Screenshot - 2023-06-25T001532.110.jpg
 
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MapleDots said:
A total unexpected kick in the rear that was.
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This seems all a bit self-inflected. What is it that makes Squarespace so untrustworthy? I've never used them...
 
rlm said:
This seems all a bit self-inflected. What is it that makes Squarespace so untrustworthy? I've never used them...
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The way the dns was set up for my businesses and dn.ca was all the dns, including main address, subdomains, forwarders, mx(mail) records etc were controlled by google domains. When the changeover happens that would all have fallen to squarspace. Squarespace is much like wix and similar companies and there is no way I can trust all my dns, mail delevery etc to a commercial entity whose sole purpose is to sell more services. One day you wake up and something won't work.

Now most of my dns is self managed at whc and I have total control. Over at squarespace I have no idea how it will be run, or what the control panel will look like. I cannot chance giving control of my sites to a company I know nothing about. Plus a .ca is $30 USD per year as opposed to $10.99 CAD at WHC.

I am in a group of other coders, every single one of them is moving out of google domains for the same reasons.

So the rush to get this done is that I am totally familiar with the google domain setup and control panel and with google I was also able to flush my dns records worldwide to refresh to whc. So getting out with a familiar control panel before things switched was key for me. A lot of this functionality will go away or be controlled by a wix like company after the changeover.

Have you ever tried to move data out of wix? It's almost impossible, if you use their forum software you are locked in forever and cannot move the database out. There is no way you can truly trust companies like that when you are running a serious business on them.


PS. If you look at my pic above, they are already making changes at Google Domains and I had my first errors ever there. That has never happened and is probably a sign of things to come with this massive changeover. For me all is safe now and in my control.
 
rlm said:
This seems all a bit self-inflected. What is it that makes Squarespace so untrustworthy?
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Squarespace is a "valued-added" company that (ab)uses domains to make their profit. This can amount to high initial registration and renewal prices, mandatory add-on modules ($$$) and future policy changes that add over more overhead to your costs.

Remember back in the day when Rebel used to pull this scam, and you had to be careful uncheck about 50 add-on module boxes every time you registered or renewed a domain? Otherwise each domain would cost you $100. Same thing here.

And that's not even counting the hard-sell techniques every future customer at Squarespace will have to put up with.

This transaction had nothing to do with buying the Google registration service, and it was just acquiring another "captive audience" to overcharge and constantly try to upsell services to.
 
DomainRecap said:
This transaction had nothing to do with buying the Google registration service, and it was just acquiring another "captive audience" to overcharge and constantly try to upsell services to.
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Google $17 USD

SquareSpace $30 USD which is $39.64 CAD today

But hey, they will honour the price in the first year but no mention about the up charges for services that are free at the moment.

All that said, it was not a pricing issue for me, it was the thought that my most valuable business domains would end up at a company I did not pick or know nothing about. That's as bad as bosses who allow rogue employees to control their business domain registrations.
 
MapleDots said:
PS. If you look at my pic above, they are already making changes at Google Domains and I had my first errors ever there. That has never happened and is probably a sign of things to come with this massive changeover. For me all is safe now and in my control.
Click to expand...

I would have expected that the acquisition would include google's code base - so that Squarespace could expand their level of service rather than reduce it. Is there any indication that they are shutting the Google services down or downgrading it to theirs?

It would be a massive mistake if they shut down any existing google services, or forced an immediate change of domain or dns management to their systems (which would probably cause a loss of functionality).

In all fairness, its rare to find a hosting company that doesn't take you down the upsell path... That's the point of being a registrar in the first place - to upsell to hosting. I hand regged domains on Rebel's $2.99 sale and they still do it, with a couple of pre-checked services you have to un-check. I think WHC just offers some upgrade options, not pre-checked though.
 
And what would you do if rebel sold to a questionable company like netsol?

You never picked them, best option is to get the heck out before prices double and services suffer.

That's my point, I picked Google domains not some random company. I'm content with my choice to go with WHC moving forward, the cpanel zone editor gives me all the control I need.
 
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