Why, Google, Why? Google Domains sold to Squarespace!
Two weeks ago, I heard the news on the Linus Tech Tips‘ news show, The WAN Show that Google had sold their domains business to Squarespace. This is very annoying as a year ago, my employer migrated our domains to Google and registered another 5 domains since that time, on my recommendation as we already heavily use Google Workspace for our email, calendar, and office software solutions.
My logic was that we could manage our domains and online systems from a single Google account. But now, we are facing another migration. I’m unsure of the quality of Squarespace’s domain management system, and given Squarespace’s core business is selling website creation and hosting services, I wonder how long it’ll be before they start sending out emails to domain name owners pushing their service.
The question is, should I migrate to a new registrar, or give Squarespace domains a try? The latter option would be the easiest, as hopefully, everything will be transferred over including all domain settings, moving to a new registrar will create a bunch of work for me, setting up DNS, redirects, and forwarders.
What’s annoying to me is that Google has not sent me an email notifying me of the sale to Squarespace, either on my work email or personal email, as we have a couple of personal domains registered with Google, this blog’s domain is not one of them, that’s registered with 123Reg as it’s a UK domain name, as at the time I moved to the US, no US-based registrar allowed me to transfer a .co.uk domain to them.
Google only transitioned its domain service out of beta in 2022, after 8 years of being in beta. I just don’t understand why Google would sell their domain business, it’s easy recurring income through a 99% automated system, but maybe that’s why I am not super wealthy like the Google execs.
Google offered features such as email forwarding, with catchall forwarding for domains at a registrar level, which is extremely useful for me. I make up email addresses for specific services, to direct emails to the correct folders with rules, not requiring me to set up the domain on my hosting package. For example, one of our domain names forwards to our main website, with a catchall email that forwards all emails at the domain to my primary email address, which is something I haven’t seen at other registrars.
Then there’s cost, Google charges $12/yr for gTLD domains like .com, .net, .org, etc, while Squarespace’s domains cost $20/yr for the same gTLD domains, that’s a significant cost increase for 20+ domains. Additionally, there is no guarantee that Squarespace will offer the same features as Google, the only guarantee is Squarespace will honor renewal pricing for 12 months from the date of the deal closing.
I guess the bottom line is, I shouldn’t be surprised, Google is famous for killing off projects that people are actively using, so at least they are transferring the assets instead of killing it. But, it’s irritating nonetheless, as especially as a business, you need stability, and switching domain registrar is a pain.