Yeah I have a .RSVP domain for an event website. Google charged $12/yr and Squarespace charges $20. It was a TLD created by Google so there aren’t too many places that support it yet.
There was a thread about alternatives on HN [1]. The top mentioned ones were: Porkbun, Namecheap, Dynadot, Cloudflare, Nearlyfreespeech, Gandi.
I've used Porkbun, Namecheap, and Gandi. Namecheap is my preferred. Porkbun is fine, Gandi I would prefer to not use again. I haven't tried Dynadot or Cloudflare's domains (but I love Cloudflare's DNS).
Not saying this is what happened necessarily, but sometimes as a startup, you find yourself in a position where you must either sell to someone/anyone or the business must shut down (and you're left with the debt and with long-loyal early employees/friends whose equity you were never able to pay off).
I was a founding member of a social enterprise startup which ended up in a position very similar to that.
In our case, we were lucky that we had two options to sell: (A) to an investor who wanted to pervert our mission, vision, and values for profit; or, (B) to a nonprofit who didn't have the money to give us more than a single paycheck or two worth of payoff for our equity.
If we had sold to Option A, a dozen of us would be wealthy right now. But the company we built would have been perverted into something unrecognizable.
In our case, to our founder's credit, we sold to Option B to keep the dream alive, but none of us became wealthy... and the nonprofit just shut down the company we founded only 2 years after the purchase (partly because the nonprofit didn't have the business savvy to make it sustainable). _Everyone_ was just laid off.
That means, our noble sacrifice only extended the lifetime of our noble vision by 2 years, and we're certainly feeling less good about it.
Because the alternative would have meant that a bunch of us bleeding hearts would have the economic freedom right now to do all sorts of good for untold decades to come.
So I'm just saying, sometimes you don't get to have good options and everything sucks, no matter how well-intentioned you are.
Ah, I knew about the price increases but not the sale of the company.
One thing I really liked about Gandi was that they had a concept of Organizations, and users within those orgs, so we didn’t have to share a login within the org.
I’ve been moving my personal domains to Porkbun and Cloudflare, just to see which I like better. For domains at the company where I work I’d rather move them to Cloudflare, but they require that you use their DNS, and I haven’t yet felt like untangling how that will work with our AWS setup — we’re currently using Route53 and features there, including their certificate management and routing to specific ARNs.
Anyway, It’s a shame, because I was a big advocate for Gandi for a decade, and any time I could I always transferred domains there, for myself and the companies I worked for. In my digital life so far, Apple is the only one I’ve been able to stick with long-term. If they ever get broken up or if I get inexplicably banned, that one’s gonna hurt.
> Cloudflare, but they require that you use their DNS
This has been my only issue with them so far. Realistically it's not likely to cause any problems for either my personal or professional situations since I prefer to use CF DNS. It's simply a missing feature.
If something happens that makes me reconsider their DNS product I'd likely transfer the domains, even if I could change nameservers.
> In February 2023, Gandi was acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions, forming a new brand, Your.Online. In June, the company announced drastic price increases, including a new monthly fee for mailboxes previously included for free.
I have had very good luck with Cloudflare, but their domain registration comes with an annoying limitation: you are not allowed to modify the glue records, you are stuck with their DNS
It’s free, but there are times when it’s more convenient to point to someone else’s nameservers, and some people like to keep their DNS separate from their registrations as a “separation of powers” thing, but I’ve never seen the utility in that.
Because sometimes it’s more convenient to point to someone else’s nameservers (I commented elsewhere in this thread about our AWS setup), and some people don’t want to give a single company control over their entire domain-to-web-server pipeline, though like I said I’ve never seen how that matters in practice.
I had tried NameCheap for a little while, but I've been using NameSilo for everything for the past 5 years. For the most part it stays out of my way.
I've never found a registrar that really felt like it was overall a good experience. It's definitely a "least bad" kind of market. The thing that bothers me the most about registrars is that they all have their own interfaces for stuff and it takes time to learn how to navigate to everything. So it makes it hard to try new ones.
I really wanted to move everything to Porkbun from Gandi after their announcements, but they don't support .st names and I'm not interested in having multiple providers. So I'll be sticking with them until further notice. The price changes seemed to only(/mostly?) affect their email hosting offerings that I don't use...but the change of hands in general makes me nervous.
+1. I’ll never forget when I had an account with them, set up FIDO 2FA, and lost my password + email access for the account. I emailed customer support asking if there was something that could be done, and if not, I was fine making a new account (I had no domains at the time, and if I had, payment method confirmation would’ve probably let me get it back). Within days, their engineers added that feature, tested it, and rolled it out…
I’ve been using internet.bs for a few domains for many years and haven’t had any issues, anyone else use it?
I remember the control panel looks kinda old and sketchy, but it’s been working fine for me for probably at least a decade now.
I saw the writing on the wall with Google Domains a couple years ago, and moved to Moniker. Their platform is a little bit slow, but other than that, it's excellent.
Out of interest, how did you see that coming? The discussions I remember here on HN were full of people wondering why, and being generally blindsided by the news...
I didn't see the writing on the wall for them shutting it down, rather that I could not rely on it.
I have (or rather had) two Google Domains accounts, one for my own projects, and one with my work email address for work purposes. My work Google Domains account got banned for some imagined rules infraction. I sent an appeal with evidence, which was immediately denied. In case you are curious, the effect of being banned from Google Domains is: you are no longer able to use Google Domains at all, which means you are both unable to change your DNS settings, and unable to transfer your domains out. For all of the domains, I had to wait until they expired, wait for the grace period to expire, and re-register them on a new registrar, hoping nobody else got to them first.
After this experience, I decided it was not worth the risk to keep my personal domains on my personal Google account, so I transferred them out a few days later. I assume this was a bug, but as soon as I initiated the domain transfers, Google deleted all DNS records, which meant I had some non-trivial downtime on all of my websites while I got it all sorted out on a new registrar.
After both of these experiences, there is no way I would ever trust another domain to Google Domains.
I used Hover for personal domains and email for a while. It was fairly priced and reliable, and I also got decent chat support when I was migrating off it (to AWS for domains and purelymail for email--just for convenience reasons since I'd already started using those services for other stuff). They have some cute novelty TLDs too, which is nice.
I've raised this question several times, but it bears repeating: What's Google's rationale behind this decision?
Domain management appears to be a crucial component of a comprehensive cloud solution. It may serve as a loss leader, but it's undeniably an effective entry point for both Google Workspace and Google Cloud. After all, competitors like AWS and Cloudflare offer this service.
GCP still has domain management via Cloud DNS. That isn't going away. This is just domain registration. I say this as someone who uses Google Domains and GCP and is upset at this decision.
I think it’s because GCP isn’t profitable and so they don’t want a loss leader for a product line that isn’t competitive with their other internal products.
Typically you don’t want loss leaders for things that aren’t strategic or very profitable.
Google is not a cloud company. So this is probably just reallocating resources toward more important things.
I bet if domains was a loss leader to AdWords it would stick around.
Google Cloud reported profits in the last two quarters, and seems to be the thing they have been reallocating resources to this year, not from.
I think the reality is just that Google Domains was not (and never had been) a product of the Cloud organization and was not subject to their decision making process. But obviously that's not how anybody outside the company would have viewed it; they don't know the internal org charts nor care about them.
> Typically you don’t want loss leaders for things that aren’t strategic or very profitable.
So does that mean that GCP itself is on the chopping block? I seem to remember a similar discussion regarding its future was in the air about 2-3 years ago.
I think the most shocking thing is that the link to Squarespace is an affiliate link.
Google have sold Google Domains to Squarespace... but apparently, not for enough as they really really want to just make a few hundred bucks more from affiliate revenue.
The most Google-y thing about this is that their FAQ links point to a page which is blocked behind a login form which requires a Google.com corporate account.
Cloud services are sold on the basis of an exchange. I build my product, or my entire business, on your cloud platform, submitting to a huge amount of risk by doing so. In return, you promise to minimize my risk by being a trustworthy and reliable steward of that platform.
Cloud platforms are a lot like banks. The value proposition of a bank is not that they store your money: my mattress can do that. No, the value proposition of a bank is that it’s a safe and trustworthy place.
There is some second-order thinking involved. If I believe that other businesses are questioning the future of a given cloud platform, then I might decide that I need to start migrating to another provider sooner rather than later. If everybody decides that they need to migrate then it could make the platform actually unprofitable. Like a bank run. Only there’s no FDIC protection for cloud platforms.
Google clearly just doesn’t give a shit what people think of their cloud platform. That’s scary. It means they don’t understand that they’re in the trust business. They truly believe that they’re just selling computing services.
They haven’t understood trust as a selling point for at least a decade. At the end of the day Google is an ad company that dabbles in technology, all of their core services (Search, Gmail, YouTube, Android, Chrome) are all about reinforcing/showing off their advertising network and any possible benefit consumers derive from that are secondary to selling/displaying ads.
Yep, they screwed the pooch with Google Reader and forced Google+ registration. Rather than learn their lessons, they just keep doing the same things over and over, eroding trust, and wondering why they can't get more marketshare in new endeavors.
They just can't see why folks have such loyalty to search, gmail, docs, and Chrome: they are consistent. Folks aren't loyal to Google Cloud, chat, etc. precisely because of their inconsistency and likelihood of getting the rug pulled out at any moment.
Google domains is not a cloud product. Google cloud domains is. The latter is unaffected other than the fact the registrar backing the product is going to change to be square space. I'm not sure if any other major cloud vendor is the registrar backing their equivalent product.
The correct comparison to a bank is dedicated hosting or own-hardware colocation.
Cloud providers are selling you an abstraction over that base.
Therefore the correct thing to compare cloud providers to are NBFIs (Non-Bank Financial Institutions).
NBFIs know they are not a bank, they know they can't sell you the trust-model of a bank. Instead they try to incentivise you with attractive sounding interest rates in the hope that you will conveniently disregard the fact that you will not benefit from the government-backed deposit safety scheme that you would gain with a bank.
I think you're taking the analogy too literally. Of course there are certain dimensions where they differ; that's true of any analogy. OP's point is that in both cloud computing and banks, trust is the product.
The OP was the one who said "there's no FDIC protection for cloud", so..... ;-)
> trust is the product
Well, to be fair, too many people put too much trust in the cloud.
"upload all your data to us, we promise we won't look at it"
"trust our key-management service where we too have access to the private-key/API"
etc. etc.
I wouldn't "trust" any of them further than I can throw a 1U server.
That was quick. I just had a renewal coming up, so I took the opportunity to transfer out.
Originally, I was going to try Cloudflare, due to their at-cost pricing, but they didn’t allow transferring domains without first moving DNS (and maybe more? I couldn’t tell) to Cloudflare. I didn’t really understand the implications (would I have to use their CDN?), so I bailed out part way through. Edit: sounds like it’s just DNS: https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/faq/
I ended up going with Porkbun, based on recommendations here. Their interface is a blast from the past, but their documentation is pretty good. The only issue I encountered is that they don’t support wildcard email forwarding like Google Domains, so I had to inventory the email addresses I’d been using and setup manual forwards for each.
Overall, I wish Google Domains was still a thing. It was easy to use and cheap, and I thought it would stand the test of time.
Edit to add: Google Domains’s UI/instructions for transferring out were great. What a shame the service is going away!
Thanks! In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I guess I’m effectively paying $1/year for the option of being able to change authoritative name servers to whatever I want (and the privilege of using Porkbun’s presumably worse interface).
I’ll admit I was already a little biased against Cloudflare because one time I got caught by their infinite captcha (maybe due to my OS not being up to date because it was an old computer? I’ll never know…).
This is what I think about when I see people wiring a bunch of Google assistant devices and compatible widgetry in their homes. Home tech is supposed to last 20 years+, so why be okay with putting things in the walls from a company that has a pretty thick-faced history of leaving markets that it finds itself unable to milk for advertising?
Seriously does anyone trust Google to run a product? Even if they came out tomorrow with a teleportation service I'd be too worried they'd cancel it mid-flight to try it out.
This decision has trashed Google’s brand and whoever made it should be fired. It’s not that Google domains is particularly important, but Google’s reputation for untrustworthiness in the consumer space has now metastasized to their cloud business. People were willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt before, that they would not treat business customers the same as consumers. Now they aren’t.
I mean I’d even argue that Google domains is important in terms of making the product a seamless experience when using GCP (and generally just carving out Google as being part fundamental internet infrastructure). I wouldn’t underestimate how much a small QoL thing like having one company as both your registrar and cloud service provider can impact the choice of which otherwise commodity service to use. Not having to do a bunch of domain verification BS for every new piece of infrastructure is (was) a pretty awesome experience.
Sure you can have an MBA look at the situation and ask “Do we really need a registrar? The other cloud providers don’t have one and look at their margins”. So what this really signals to me is that Google has lost all capacity to be forward thinking, trendy and innovative. And without that (and thus a general relevance as a tech company), what is Google?
I'm a big time proponent of Google Cloud because I believe that they've done a few things particularly well in their overall architecture that others have gotten wrong.
But this decision rubs me the wrong way because there's a deep integration with several of the services that allow connecting an external domain. The verification of domain ownership with Google purchased domains was effectively seamless and aligned with this overall architecture principle of Stuff That Just Makes Sense.
I still think that GCP is a great platform to build on, but the problem now is that they've further tarnished their image to other stakeholders who have a say in the platform decision making process.
"I wouldn't underestimate how... having one company as both your registrar and cloud service provider can impact the choice of which otherwise commodity service to use." THIS. Even if I'm just spinning up a simple blog, unless I'm buying a premium domain name, I'm gonna buy it on Bluehost instead of a cheaper registrar like Namecheap just to avoid the few minutes of work and few hours of wait time to link that domain with another hosting service.
I'm a paying Workspace customer, running a domain for my family. I reallllly don't want to migrate off but with each passing month I'm growing more and more nervous.
Apple’s iCloud+ plans (starting at $1/mo) include email hosting with custom domains. I moved my family to that a couple years ago and it’s been fine. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514
Everyone in my immediate family has 1 or more email addresses in our family domain, and I have a couple of fun/project domains their too, for $0.00 above what I was already paying for iCloud.
Your domains should not be tied to your main Gmail and GDrive anyway. Too many horror stories of wrongful ban leading to a chicken and egg situation around account lockouts.
If it's just for your family, then depending on what you need, you could try OnlyOffice— Either self-hosted, or SAAS. They use MS formats as their first-class native format, IIRC, so compatibility is pretty great.
Nextcloud also advertises an office suite, though I haven't tried it. Nextcloud also apparently integrates with OnlyOffice, though I haven't tried that either— Apparently Nextcloud's own office suite is a rebranding of LibreOffice.
I'd probably go with OnlyOffice, either on its own or integrated into Nextcloud.
Fastmail is really well set up to be a family account provider. You can add multiple domains, aliases to various accounts, and you can mix and match account levels now (kids accounts can be cheaper ones than your own, but still share your domain). Their spam filter works better than Google or Microsoft's, and I set up aliases that deliver to say, my wife and I, so we can both be notified of updates for particular accounts and such.
If you have any issues, a real person will answer your support ticket.
If you only need email, then there are a bunch of providers in Europe that are cheaper (especially compared to something like Fastmail if you need one mailbox for each person in the family), have been around for several years and support custom domains. In no particular order, they are mailfence, mailbox.org, runbox.com and migadu. All of them support IMAP directly (unlike ProtonMail that needs a bridge application and Tutanota that does not support IMAP).
Are you just using it for email? For my family that already had a few Apple devices I switched to using custom domains with iCloud (which is included with any iCloud subscription, even the $1 one).
You can have up to 3 domains configured per family.
Until Domains, I mostly trusted google to keep running a paid b2b product with lots of users. Most of the famous products they've killed have been ones that either didn't bring in revenue, or never became popular.
After the Domains announcement, I can't in good conscience bring myself to spin up any new GCP services, and have started leaning more heavily on AWS. Part of me thinks that Domains is a signal that Google is planning a larger exit from the cloud business, given the GCP / Domains integration, and the absolutely atrocious comms from Google around Domains has not reassured me at all.
They used it to upsell Google Workspace, as well as their own TLDs (.dev, .app). And although they didn't upsell GCP through it, the integration between the two was a nice (small) incentive to use GCP.
There’s a lot of contractual obligations and edge cases in domain names, and a lot of potential for fraud and disputes. It’s a business with high legal fees.
Also how domains should be managed evolves with time. For example GDPR has a huge impact on WHOIS, especially since the ICANN took so much time to acknowledge that in their specs, so there was a time where it was impossible for a registrar to be compliant with GDPR and ICANN rules. It’s still not 100% clear how it’ll be handled by RDAP (future successor of WHOIS)
And last but not least, some registries for ccTLDs are real pains in the ass to work with, and won’t hesitate to slap you with big fines if you make any mistake.
We've had multiple multi-cloud customers signal a desire to move away from GCP for years now because savvy CXOs are just fed up with the unreliability. When you're looking to resolve a ton of tech debt that you have because of the ground constantly shifting beneath your feet for 1-2 decades... well, you just get fed up and want the reliability of serious enterprise vendors.
It makes innovation much harder due to the downstream effects, but at least I'm not carrying more and more risk forward thanks to Google/Alphabet's ADHD approach to product, brand, and support.
Probably the constant deprecation of API / SDK from Google, you have to keep up with their crazy deprecation policy. On the other side I still have some APPS calling AWS API since 10y without any issues.
"When will Alphabet opaquely and unilaterally depreciate this product upon which we've come to rely, as they do with many other products all the time?"
Alphabet is a hopelessly disorganized bureaucracy whose leadership appears, at best indifferent to customer needs, at worst hostile to customers that don't toe their line.
It's just a risk calculation you have to make when you're spending millions to build systems of record upon which your enterprise will depend for years to come.
I don't know if its fair or even accurate – but it's the feedback I get from client CTOs and CIOs at sizable companies.
Their stock price reflects their ad moat, and nothing more.
In my opinion, their stock price is the least interesting. They are coming around on the other side of an upswing and seem poised to be headed back down towards their pre-COVID normalization of around 90 dollars. Compared to Amazon, it's disappointing, and Microsoft is in another galaxy in comarison. With no real option for growth, considering they simply cannot be trusted to launch a new product, it seems like the early feedback is this will also hurt their cloud business as customers simply cannot trust them to maintain new offerings.
They'll do what they always have done: survive off ads and YouTube. But I am not sure how many more percentage points they can squeeze out of those two. People are already starting to catch whiff that their search engine results are not what they used to be. What will happen then?
If history is doomed to repeat itself, they'll do what their predecessors have done: get some Harvard-style MBA types in the building to "optimize", jettison all the excess baggage, and keep the cash flowing into their investors pockets, while they slowly lose whats left of their reputation and ability to innovate.
I suppose they have enough patents to troll on for the next 25+ years or so. Just like some other 3 letter company we may know about that once was a tech giant.
We're not talking about profit (which is dictated by depreciation of capital intensive investments), we're talking about adoption the service. GCP is alive and well.
Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.
I wasn't saying that. You have no idea what % of overall revenue is GSuite vs core GCP. Until you do, your "mostly gsuite" is purely speculation.
> Adoption has never paid a bill, anyone can sell a bunch of dollars for 95 cents and you can’t just hand wave away depreciation, servers have to be replaced, they aren’t just keeping the same servers online forever.
I wasn't hand waving away depreciation. I was saying the depreciation (which is when capital hits the IS) is very likely going to outpace revenue for years given the growth rate of cloud adoption. We're talking at least another 10 years before they stop allocating capital towards data centers. To illustrate this further:
year 0 - $1B for data center buildings + server racks
year 5 - $200M for refresh of server racks
So, profit will come much much later. Amazon has proven this many times over.
I remember reading about dream workplace called Google where devs can join or leave any team for credits to count towards promotions, with a catch that helping others and/or bothering yourself with low-impact maintenance tasks could risk your employment.
If that's actually how Google works, it does sound structural.
Sure, if you want to fade into history as an ultimately irrelevant ad network that simply had the novel ideal of tying ads into internet search early on in the internet’s youth and became popular and rich for a decade, then take this stance.
> Sure, if you want to fade into history as an ultimately irrelevant ad network that simply had the novel ideal of tying ads into internet search early on in the internet’s youth and became popular and rich for a decade, then take this stance.
The problem with any current leader is that they do want to do this. Or, rather, they don't care if they do. Who cares what Google will look like in the long run? They'll be gone. Right now, they presided over the appearance of continued growth, and that's what matters.
(I have no internal knowledge about Google, of course, but I am at a university, whose plan is (1) attract more students, (2) more students, (3) more, (4) start thinking about what to do with all these students.)
Founder run companies care and even hand picked successors to founders who are “company men”. The Google CEO is just a suit.
If you look at all of the Big Tech companies - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, (yes I left off Netflix, it’s a nothingburger compared to those five), Google is the only one that seems to be rudderless without a long term plan or vision.
Im not saying that is what they want, but it looks like what is happening to me. Ads was not new, it was selling internet search ads on a open auction that was novel.
Counter point, I've been using a VoIP service called GrandCentral since college. Google purchased them. Nearly 20 years later, I'm still using that same number with far more feature. In this case, Squarespace acquired Google Domains. Assuming the transition as seamless as GrandCentral was for me, what's the issue here? From what I've heard of Squarespace and their support, they will be just as good a custodian as Google.
Bandwidth.com mostly runs that service and they have proven themselves a competant business that Google built other products like GOOG-411 off of. Google Voice is just a frontend to it.
I think if it ran entirely on Google's infra and the service itself could be killed like the registrar was it would have been killed years ago (notably it stagnated from like 2012-2018 or so and there was a period of time they had a half-assed panel redesign and the product blog for it wasn't updated for years)
You can but they don't really do B2C, their B2B has come down for small businesses but still requires a larger commitment then makes sense for a phone number or two.
Unrelated, but I've found it bizarre Google Voice doesn't do RCS but they made a big push otherwise to enable it for their Messages app.
The problem is, organizationally, it's a mesh network. If no one is kept on a single product for long, how can a product survive turnover rates when the next shiny object appears? It's a game of musical chairs.
I’m starting to see this as a feature. AWS makes you pay per-request for a lot of things, but in my mind it makes those services sustainable.
Maybe I’ve just been bitten by the promise of “free” or really cheap services either imploding or suddenly changing their billing model over the years.
I wrote this 9 years go
> The last thing I trust Google with is my domains. They can outright ban or disable you just like with any of their products and not offer support or explanation.
Google will eventually kill all products that do not help them sell ads. Keep that in mind.
Depending on the extent of trust you want, the ultimate (whilst being "reasonably" affordable) option is becoming a Nominet member.
Nominet are the registry for .uk. Anybody (person or business) can become a member and the core benefit of membership is you effectively become your own registrar. As long as you pay the membership fee, Nominet don't care.
You therefore cut out the middlemen.
Sure, Nominet could theoretically cut off your domain (e.g. if you don't pay your membership fees). But the bar is much, much higher than $Mega_Corp.
Unless you've got money to burn, probably a bit extravagant for only one domain name. But if you'll be needing a few it might be worth considering.
Unfortunately cloud domains domains are going to managed by Squarespace.
> Since Google Domains is the underlying domains registrar for Cloud Domains, there are some important changes that we want to share with you.
> What do you need to know?
Upon closing of the Squarespace-Google Domains transaction, Squarespace Domains will become the registrar for your domains managed by Cloud Domains.
Google Cloud Domains as a product will continue to function but it’ll be an interface to Squarespace: Squarespace will be the registrar.
“Yes, you can continue to search and register for new domains using Cloud Domains. After migration, Google Cloud becomes a reseller of Squarespace Domains. When you buy new domains using Cloud Domains after migration, the registrar of record is Squarespace.”
How does this affect the .dev domains? I don't understand the governance around TLDs very deeply, but can SquareSpace jack up the prices? Can they disable/discontinue existing domains?
I heard something like this a while ago. Paraphrasing: A company is first run by engineers (becomes a well made product that people love), then it is run by MBAs (so that it looks good on the balance sheet), then it is run by lawyers (to extract every bit of value created), then it dies (i.e sustained only by inertia).
But I find it hard to figure out what stage Google is at in this (maybe simplictic) progression.
So nowadays I use google domain's feature of easy email forwarding (forward some xxyyy@mydomain.com to a personal email). Is there an alternative provider that can do that?
you have a whole subreddit dunking on the artstyle. corporate memphis aka Alegria Art. The artstyle is fucking stupid and outright pathetic. Looking at it makes me want to puke on it.
Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346454) (548 points | 86 days ago | 606 comments)
Also relevant,
About the Squarespace purchase of Google Domains registrations (https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?hl=en)