Google Domains Selling to Squarespace

Google is selling its domain registration business to Squarespace. Auxilio is already taking care of our clients’ domain names.

Consider the humble domain name

It may not seem like it, but your organization’s domain name—that .com or .org that you probably registered for less than $20 so many years ago—is one of the most important components of your technology and security infrastructure. In the right hands, it represents your organization to the public on your website, it helps direct emails to your inboxes, and it reassures the people you communicate with that they’re dealing with the right person. In the wrong hands, your domain name can be used to impersonate your staff or organization, scam people you communicate with, and provide unfettered access to all of your data.

Confusingly, your domain name is not even permanently yours—you effectively lease it from a company called a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions. If the credit card on file expires or you forget to renew it for another year, someone else is free to register it themselves after it expires, and can use it for whatever purpose they choose, though there are legal procedures to remedy these situations.

Because our clients’ domain names are so important, we strategically include managing client domain registrations as part of our comprehensive technology infrastructure management to ensure they are at a reputable and capable registrar.

Whither Google Domains?

For several years, Auxilio has helped our clients transfer their domain registrations from other costly or less-reputable registrars to Google Domains. We did this because Google Domains was delightfully straightforward, cost-effective, integrated nicely with Google Workspace, and offered very competitive pricing. Critically, Google Domains also helped us easily manage a great deal of domain names for all of our clients in one place.

In June, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced their intention to sell off the Google Domains service to Squarespace. We’re big fans of Squarespace at Auxilio—their website platform is one of the simplest and most capable ways to build a website, and many of our clients successfully host their websites at Squarespace—we do, too!

We love Squarespace as a website builder platform, but it’s unclear if Squarespace will offer all of the management features we find helpful at Google Domains. Squarespace has traditionally charged $20/year (and up) for their domain registrations, while Google Domains started around $12/year. Squarespace will honor Google’s pricing for the first year of renewals, but they haven’t announced what their new pricing will be after that.

Where do we go next?

Squarespace will be a great home for domain names as well as websites, and Squarespace is working hard on improving their domain registration and management capabilities ahead of this acquisition. For Google Domains customers, there’s no action needed to let your domain name registration move over to Squarespace Domains as part of this acquisition process.

But the gap between Google Domains and where Squarespace Domains is now, combined with the yet-to-be-answered questions on pricing, bulk management, and other features of Google Domains we rely on is too great for us to be comfortable with, so in June after the announcement, we began looking at other options.

Auxilio has begun to move our client domain registrations over to Cloudflare. They’re a behemoth in the cloud services world, and their domain registration services have been maturing over the last several years. Cloudflare’s at-cost pricing comes in a bit under even Google Domains current prices, which will save our clients even a bit more beyond the cost savings they were already seeing with Google Domains. And importantly, Cloudflare allows Auxilio to easily manage domain registrations and DNS service—arguably the two most important—yet, behind-the-scenes—aspects of technology infrastructure all in one place.

What’s involved in moving registrars?

For Auxilio clients, there’s no action needed. If we’re managing your domain registration at Google Domains, we’ve already begun the work to move you to Cloudflare.

There’s a good bit of effort involved in the changeover—we first need to establish a Cloudflare account for each client, where we’ll connect billing for automatic renewals, and file the necessary sales tax exemption for those clients that qualify. We’ll also carefully migrate existing DNS service from the current DNS provider (usually Google Domains) over to Cloudflare, and ensure that all records are properly configured and working. And finally, we’ll unlock and transfer the domain registrations themselves over to Cloudflare.

We’ve completed this process for a handful of clients already as we’ve been developing and testing our processes, and we’ll begin this changeover for the rest of the domains we manage at Google Domains.

This is one of the many benefits our Auxilio clients enjoy as part of our comprehensive business services partnership.

Can Auxilio help with our domain management?

If your domains aren’t already at Cloudflare, or if you’re not already an Auxilio client, we’d love to talk with you about how we can help manage the business and technology for your organization to help free you up to focus on your mission. Let us know how we can help with the form at the bottom of this article, or email hello@auxilio.partners. We look forward to partnering with you!