Oh dear, Google Domains
30 July 2024Not long after I found out about them Google Domains was divested which was a bit of a surprise as they were barely out of beta, with all its accounts transferred to SquareSpace which seemed to take a surprisingly long time to complete. However once it was all up-and-running I was happy with SquareSpace, until a recent issue with a domain transfer and as a result of having to deal with their technical support have decided to deprecate my use of them. Google Domains seemed so promising but the more I read up on SquareSpace the clearer it becomes the latter is not for me.
Destination: SquareSpace
I had been moving a couple of the remaining domains I still had on 123-Reg and for whatever reason I decided to move them to SquareSpace since the migration was finally complete and my transferred account fully operational. However the most recent transfer has caused me grief with the new registrar, and I suspect it may have been down to it being a.co.uk domain, for which SquareSpace is a Tucows reseller rather than registrar in its own right.
Said domain was due for auto-renewal but for some reason I was getting a lot of emails about payment being taken 15 days prior to expiry, which is annoying but in itself not too critical.
The problem was these emails still kept coming after this payment date had passed and they had not actually billed me for the auto-renew.
To make matters worse there was no option for manual renewal and unlike 123-Reg their support department left much to be desired.
Ultimately the problem was “fixed” by transferring the domain to a different registrar while there was still about 10 days left before expiry, because I had lost all faith in their technical support sorting things out in the remaining time. I had a hunch that taking over the Google Domains portfolio had been less than smooth, and today found out that the SquareSpace migration had left them open to massive DNS high-jackings which would explain why their support department was reportedly so busy. A screwed-up billing system is no longer an immediate concern since all my remaining domains are not due for renewal until well into next year and beyond, but they have lost my trust because support is the last line of defence when things get really bad.
Time to migrate
I was in two minds over whether to give SquareSpace benefit of the doubt since my suspicions were the problem being down to the transfer of a domain close to its renewal date, but after reading recent reports of missing transfer codes on their forums it was clear that if I was to move my domains elsewhere it should be on good time and not in the sort of panic I had just gone through. One tricky thing is a Google Workspace account that is directly linked to a domain name registered at the same time, which is a situation Google solved by making SquareSpace a Workspace reseller, and it is unclear how complex getting the Workspace account reverted back to Google will be. However what sealed SquareSpace's fate was the realisation that my life would be easier if I simply got shot of them as soon as possible and consolidated my domains elsewhere.A while back I moved my New Zealand domains from Domainz to Dynadot because while I was happy with them overall they were a bit expensive, and this is in addition to domains moved over from 123-Reg since the latter was withdrawing support for some of the TLDs, so moving the SquareSpace ones across almost completed the consolidation process. About half of the domains that were on SquareSpace are either in the process of being transferred or are already across,