So Long Google Domains!

If you haven't seen it, heard it, or received email after email from Squarespace, GoDaddy, or WordPress BEGGING to take over your domain registry, Google Domains has been sold off.?

For those of you who just said "WHAT?!", I will back up a little: Google Domains has been purchased by Squarespace.

Per Google Domains: "Your domain will continue to operate and be managed by Google until it is time to move to Squarespace. That won’t happen until after the transaction closes and the migration process begins, which will likely take place over the next few months."

Those few months came to a head September 7, 2023 when the acquisition was completed.

Now that it is completed, Squarespace has moved on to the transition period before it begins the final process of migrating Google Domains to SquareSpace.

"The acquisition now completed, Squarespace will, after a transition period, initiate the transfer of Google Domains accounts to its Squarespace Domains platform, leveraging Google's existing infrastructure during this period to ensure a seamless transition to its leading domains platform."

What does this mean? Simple, you have two options:

1) If you choose to not doing anything, once the transition?period?is completed, Squarespace will migrate your domain and honor the pricing paid by Google Domains for 12 months before updating any pricing and features to Squarespace's tiers: "Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months after closing the acquisition, ensuring that domain hosting and management remain hassle-free."

2) Migrate your domain now.

Quick lesson on Domain Registries: Your domain does not have to be registered where your site is hosted. You can register your domain with anyone and simply point your A records or NS records to the service provider (self-hosted or fully hosted). For this reason, you are welcome to move your domain to any registrar if you prefer NOT to migrate to Squarespace. Again, if you have a Squarespace site (an example of fully hosted) - you can still keep your site on Squarespace but have your domains registered to another domain registrar, such as NameCheap. The primary reason for this is not all domain registrars are created equal. Some have more affordable renewal prices, better privacy (i.e. hiding your personal registration information for free on WHOIS versus charging for privacy as an add-on), email forwarding, domain masking, etc.

A few domain registries:

• If you have a self-hosted site, your service provider (Siteground, Bluehost, Ionos, etc)
• If you are fully-hosted, they normally offer a domain registry service as well (Wix, Weebly, WordPress.com)
• NameCheap
• Rebel
• GoDaddy
• Ionos

Migrating a domain is as simple as unlocking it, transferring it, inputting the transfer code, approving it, and ensuring the DNS records are migrated properly to prevent any downtime with the transfer. Remember, it can take up to 24 hours for changes to propagate (I have seen it in less than an hour but I have also seen it take the full day). If your head is spinning, don't worry - Kopf Consulting has Quick Gig to help with this.

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