RIP Google Domains - Exploring New Digital Homes for Our Domains

I’ve been critical of Google services and products ever since I knew about their products graveyard. I’ve been careful and diligent in my research before I decided to go for any of their stuff, and their registrar service was no exception. There were no hidden fees or additional cost for privacy protection, just plain and simple domain registration for X amount of whatever currency per year, it’s great.

Well, seems like all good things must come to an end, “Alphabet selling Google Domains assets to Squarespace”. Fireship immediately made a video about it, which didn’t seem to bother me at the time, until I got another semi-related email from Google just 2 days after, announcing that they’re also shutting down Album Archive.

Quoted from Squarespace’s blog post, this does not comfort me at the slightest…

Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction, as well as provide additional incentives to encourage Google Domains customers to build a website with Squarespace and adopt other Squarespace offerings.

Like many others, I’m not happy about this, we have a lot of questions to Google, especially why, but there’s no point in dwelling on it. I immediately started looking for alternatives, the first step was to find out who offered dev domains, and then filter out by name and price.

So there I go, I went to https://get.dev/ for the list of the dev TLD preferred partners and found a couple that stood out, some particularly interesting ones are:

• https://www.gandi.net/
• https://www.godaddy.com/
• https://www.name.com/
• https://www.namecheap.com/
• https://porkbun.com/
• https://www.rebel.com/
• https://www.sav.com/

I was contemplating heavily between porkbun.com and Sav since they offered the cheapest prices for almost all domains they offered. The rest of them are big names that I may or may not have read some critical reviews about, either way some of them are too expensive and feels a bit too corporate-y for my taste.

Ultimately, I decided to go with https://porkbun.com/ for the following reasons:

• It offers free WHOIS privacy protection for all domains and any TLDs
• It seems to have a slightly better price for most domains than the rest above
• It has a transparent pricing model, all laid out, no hidden fees or additional cost
• It offers the .id and .moe TLDs, which are rare to find in one place with .dev
• It has a really cute name and mascot, and the website feels more personal and straightforward

All in all, I’m happy with my research and decision, I’ve transferred some of my domains to porkbun.com with ease and quickly, without any problems. There’s a transfer fee that caught me off guard at first, but it’s a one-time fee and costs just as much as a year of that domain registration. To my surprise, the expiration date was also extended by a year! The transfer was completed within a day, it was a pleasant experience, and I’m looking forward to using their service for a long time.

Reference(s):

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346454
• https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/googledomains
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSq7Je32iw
• https://9to5google.com/2023/06/15/google-domains-squarespace/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366105
• https://9to5google.com/2023/06/16/google-album-archive-photos-delete/
• https://www.namepros.com/threads/porkbun-vs-sav-looking-to-change-registrars.1288500/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Domains/comments/px3aik/is_savcom_a_legit_one/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Domains/comments/vdgzv2/porkbun_vs_namecheap/