Google Domains

» see domains.google as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

by the time google domains was in shape to be a default registrar for me, the rumor was already that google was going to kill it. i registered.com.tr domains through turkish registrars in the 2010s and the few.com domains i kept lived at namecheap. google domains never made it onto the short list of registrars i was willing to commit a renewal cycle to, partly because google's track record on consumer products did not earn that commitment.

google domains opened as an invitation-only private beta in june 2014 and went public in january 2015. it then sat in beta for seven years. the registrar offered domain registration with whois privacy and modern dns built in. it also did email forwarding, which was a small but unusual extra. the pitch was that the interface would actually be usable, which was a real complaint against godaddy. by the time it left beta in march 2022 it had about ten million domains under management.

on september 7 2023 google announced it had sold the domain business to squarespace for around 180 million dollars. new registrations stopped the same day. existing customers got migrated to squarespace through the first half of 2024 and the migration finished on july 10 2024. google domains as a product was gone. the domains were not gone, they were just now squarespace's problem instead of google's.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the appeal was the part of google that worked. you could buy a domain in ninety seconds. the dns control panel was not designed by people who hated dns. the customer side was a real web application instead of a 2003 craigslist clone. people who came to google domains from godaddy felt like they had moved out of a hostage situation.

the integration with the rest of google was the second pitch. google workspace email could be wired into a domain with two clicks. google sites and blogger and the various consumer hosting tools all knew about google-registered domains automatically. for users who already lived in the google ecosystem it was the obvious choice once they noticed it existed.

~ the day it died ~

google posted the squarespace announcement on a thursday morning. the registrar product was effectively dead at announcement, since new registrations stopped immediately. existing customers had no choice in the matter beyond transferring out to a different registrar before the squarespace migration completed. quite a few did, and the developer-twitter mood that day was uniformly bitter. for everyone else the domain just one day belonged to a different company.

~ what replaced it ~

squarespace got ten million domains for 180 million dollars and within a year had raised the renewal prices on the.com registrations. that was the actual cost of google domains existing as a product: the threat that the price floor on.com registration could stay low, kept on by a competitor with no margin pressure to extract. with that threat removed, the rest of the registrar market drifted upward. cloudflare registrar stayed cheap as the only at-cost holdout, and most of the technical-user exodus from google domains went there.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »