Google recently and unexpectedly announced the sale of Google Domains to Squarespace, which will be taking over the business and assets. This includes “approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.”
Google Domains offered great features such as no-cost WHOIS privacy and DNS security to prevent spoofing and cache poison attacks. The most ideal offering was the natural pairing of the domain services with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). However, as the GCP performance degraded during the pandemic and the constant attempts to up-sell services, we migrated all of our website hosting to a more robust (and local!) cloud services provider back in December 2022.
Does This Affect Me?
This will only be an issue if you registered your domain with Google. The majority of our clients, partners, and business owners have their domains setup through other registrar services such as: GoDaddy, Name.com, Bluehost, etc.
The very few number of domains that we have registered for a client will be moved to a different registrar before the Squarespace transition completes.
Why is Squarespace an Issue?
In my opinion, Squarespace and other bargain bin web platforms including Wix and Weebly are to be avoided at all costs if you are looking to grow your business and maintain control/ownership of your content.
Squarespace claims that they will honor all existing Google Domains renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction.
Squarespace is notorious for aggressive upsells for generally standard features while slowly increasing prices on their website platform. I expect this same strategy to continue into their domain registration realm with all their newly acquired registrants.
