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Tell HN: I think there are major issues with Google –> Squarespace domains
120 points by jc_811 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 100 comments
As I’m sure everyone is aware by now, Google domains was sold to SquareSpace domains and the migration has been under way for a few months.

I build sites for clients and have noticed that domains that were transferred to SquareSpace are having serious issues with DNS settings updating/propagating.

Multiple times this week (and for completely different accounts) I’ve updated DNS records in SquareSpace domains dashboard only for nothing to update nor propagate around the web. These domains all use SquareSpace’s nameservers.

Reaching out to support is a nightmare because their agents are simply trained to say “you need to wait 72 hours” (which, I get is technically the limit but every other registrar I’ve worked with propagates settings within minutes or hours), and after 72 hours has passed with no update, they’ve simply stopped replying to me. Which, I’m assuming they’re tracking down some system wide issues. Also they do not let you edit the TTL of records

All this to say, if you had domains on Google and simply let the migration go ahead - I’d recommend moving your domains off SquareSpace asap.




Consider moving to Porkbun, where they have actual humans who know what DNS is and how it works.

I moved a test domain to them. I was impressed that they not only moved the domain while keeping the correct nameservers, but they also imported existing DNS glue, too, meaning there wasn't the tiniest bit of downtime.


I also went to Porkbun (and recommend it, they're great), though in migrating ~30 domains, I must have found 10 different ways to accidentally cause outages:

- Not turning off DNSSEC before migrating

- Moving the domain with no prep work (Google Domains nameservers stop resolving as soon as the migration is complete)

- Starting the migration without updating nameservers (starting a transfer locks them on Google Domains)

These are all of course 100% my fault (and I should have read the "External Domains" docs better), but it was surprisingly tricky to get right.


I really want to move my domains (off of Gandi since the ownership change) to porkbun. Unfortunately they don't support a tld of one of my domains (.st) and I really don't want to have my domains managed at multiple places.


Must be their business model! Same issue here (diff tld).


+1 for PorkBun. Been using them for 4 years. Cheap prices, great support, fully reliable. What more can I ask for.


Porkbun is great. Never had an issue with them. Often one of the cheapest options, too.


Contrary to others here, I am not a fan of Porkbun. Yes, it has everything you need and yes, it is cheap. But the website is sub-usable way more often than it should be. I started using Porkbun because it was so cheap and I've found myself going back to IWantMyName.com. It's more expensive but I think I get a better experience and service.


How shallow am I if I just don't like the name "Porkbun"?

It's the main reason I never used GoDaddy back in the day, simply didn't want to see or think of that word, just didn't like it lol. Funny that it's the only reason I was never their customer as there was a time their cPanel experience was slightly less bad than the others.

So yeah I'll never use Porkbun and my only shallow reason is their awful brand name.


Ditto. The name sounds whimsical and unprofessional, and I don't want to store my serious domain names in a "pork bun".


They have a link covering this in their footer - "Don't like our name?" https://porkbun.com/single-tear.html


Let's see... Amazon has nothing to do with the Amazon basin, the river or anything else, aside from probably contributing to the destruction of all things Amazon. Google couldn't even spell googol correctly. Network Solutions is the opposite of real solutions.

I suppose Windows is a good name - after all, what does it do? It shows windows decently well, and doesn't do anything else well at all.

What else? ;)


Amazon started as books, I think it was a reference to how many trees (pages) are in the Amazon.

I like edgelord kinda names: Vercel, Heroku, Mistral, Lightning, Nvidia...

I want my sentences to be like "...so I ejected the vector, ran re-drive, then exported the sequence to Bytestream and now the dyno is back online..."

and less like "...so I pulled the blobs out of Peanut Butter & Jelly and migrated them over to Casserole and you know these days I just serve the dish cold to save on compute"

:D It matters!


> Amazon started as books, I think it was a reference to how many trees (pages) are in the Amazon.

If that is true, I find it quite interesting that the trees in the Amazon are as much different as possible from the kind of trees used to make paper :)


Same here, I feel stupid not to, but I just can't see a clients trust going up if I start by saying "Ok, let's go to GoDaddy/Porkbun and purchase your business domain"

Namecheap is marginally better, wish cheap wasn't in the title but I haven't had any issues with them over the years.


How about if they were named "Baozi"?


Does Porkbun have a good API?


They are way too ban-happy for my taste. Similar to Hetzner, they won’t let me sign up because I use privacy.com for my card


My biggest mistake was trusting Google. When I heard the news, I migrated all my domains to Cloudflare/Namecheap.


For anyone that wasn't around, a few years back Namecheap decided without any warning to just instantly drop all their customers from an entire country because of political ideology. I wouldn't trust them at all since they've shown they're more interested in making political statements than running a business. You might be the one they randomly drop next, sending you scrambling.


Some missing essential context: pretty sure this was Russian users in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.


The full context is that they gave them 1 week to migrate before termination.

The reason is that namecheap is an American company in name only. The bulk of their staff is in Ukraine, only the well paid execs reside in America.

Personally the short grace period and (very) lackluster attempt at notifying affected customers made me lose trust in them, even though I agree with sanctions on a moral level.

I moved my two dozen domains to porkbun. As a bonus they have actually qualified support staff, being with namecheap so long I had forgotten what it was like to have support immediately understand DNS-specific terms.


Glad you finally made the switch.


I don't consider the country name essential context. The point is that if any country does something the company doesn't like, they've shown they'll just drop the country. Whether you agree with what the country did or not.


AFAIK most of Namecheap’s employees are Ukrainian. It’s quite a bit more than “doesn’t like” when a country is actively trying to kill you and your family, more like “hate with the passion of a thousand burning suns”.


Frankly I wish more companies had the balls to do that.


Seems like the point here is that that country did something that was pretty, pretty bad (in their opinion, anyway) and decided to abide by their principles rather than maximize profit. I assume there are other capitalists out there who made the other decision.

I’m OK with that. I know which of those I’d prefer to work with. Sounds like you do, too.


>Some missing essential context: pretty sure this was Russian users in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine

And what the bloody hell does it matter? If there's one site where I'd expect little in the way of always idiotic Rah Rah war fever, it's this one, yet here it is. A country's government should be distinguished from its people, and treating them all at the same level as if they were garbage without knowing their circumstances is plainly, obviously brainless as it's always been. During the First World War many people started piling shit on anyone with a German last name because "they're our enemy!" and the second one, many people did the same with hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese immigrants. Truly, do intelligent people with a brain really feel a need to support such a mentality today?

What Namecheap did in its own minor turf didn't require balls. It was the easiest sort of falsely brave kowtowing to a popular sentiment. Balls is what's required to ignore politically and socially fashionable labels for the sake of deeper principles.


What deeper principles do you mean, profit above all else, like IBM and countless other companies chose to do business with Nazi Germany?

Russia was and continues to rain down missiles and artillery on cities where most of Namecheap's employees live and work while Russian population cheers for their extermination.

Refusal of service is hardly comparable to Japanese internment camps.


You are capable of making the distinction between IBM selling devices directly to the Nazi government knowing what it might do with them, and Namecheap selling hosting services to average Russians who might be using said hosting to say, run a small business for their basic livelihood, yes?

Russia's government fires missiles at Ukraine, where Namecheap employees live, Some dude in Samara who hosts his family's restaurant page through Namecheap doesn't fire those missiles.

Spare the bullshit. Things like this rarely do much moral good, and speak poorly of the mentality of those who support them. The comparison to the kind of idiot righteousness that caused people to consider all Germans or all Japanese enemies to be derided because of specific things done by a government is in the same vein as this.


> You are capable of making the distinction between IBM selling devices directly to the Nazi government knowing what it might do with them, and Namecheap selling hosting services to average Russians who might be using said hosting to say, run a small business for their basic livelihood, yes?

They are different sides of the same thing. Access to foreign goods and services is a crucial part of maintaining public support for the war. Much like Nazis, Russians too put a lot of effort into maintaining normalcy, that is, keeping up the appearance as if nothing was wrong, that the population should not question what is going on, that they should turn off their brains and focus on running their little lives and doing what they are told to do.

> Russia's government fires missiles at Ukraine, where Namecheap employees live, Some dude in Samara who hosts his family's restaurant page through Namecheap doesn't fire those missiles.

It is exactly the opposite: the men in Kremlin don't fire any missiles at Ukraine. Putin has not raped, tortured or murdered a single person in Ukraine, much like Hitler didn't personally kill a single Jew. Putin doesn't manufacture missiles, doesn't program their targets, doesn't fly bombers or man artillery guns. He is not one of the hundreds of thousands that went to Ukraine for bucks, then returned and renovated a house or opened a restaurant with the money earned killing Ukrainians. Putin would not have any influence on the world without millions of willing executioners who choose to follow him and put his ideas into action, or at least turn a blind eye to it.

You are retelling the same old myth of "Germans as innocent bystanders" that we know from the WWII: pretending that everything was the fault of only one man, and the rest were just following the orders and trying to get by in challenging times.

The actual truth is far more darker, and raises the difficult question: how do you deal with a whole country full of people filled with bloodlust? In Germany's case, it took the total destruction of the country, the hanging of its leaders, systemic banishment of their supporters from public life, and 50 years of Allied oversight to put Germany back on track of being a normal country.


> For anyone that wasn't around, a few years back Namecheap decided without any warning to just instantly drop all their customers from an entire country because of political ideology.

No, not because of political ideology - most of Namecheap's employees were in Kharkiv, the city that fell under siege and almost got encircled. Namecheap's employees could've ended up in mass graves like those in the cities that ultimately fell to the invaders.

And yet here you are, demanding service - like Eva Braun complaining to Harrods during the Blitz that her orders aren't arriving on time. Don't you really understand how entitled and insane it sounds?

Indeed, when artillery and missiles are raining down on you, and enemy forces are on the verge of encircling you, and the population of your enemy is in a feverish war hysteria and gloating about running over you in days, and that "the masters are back", you do not have much interest in "running a business" as if nothing had happened.


Wasn’t it Russia they dropped, which the US has sanctions against and they legally had to?


They made the decision themselves, when there were no sanctions and no legal compulsion to do so


There’s a middle ground: don’t use your registrar as your DNS provider. You can use Google Cloud’s DNS while using Squarespace as the registrar, avoiding any problems with Squarespace’s DNS service being subpar.


Haha, I thought your handle was "amazon", and I'm wondering: why aren't you pimping Route53?


funny - for many TLDs isn't this exactly what you get if you register a domain with Amazon? I know they are the ICANN registrar for some, but many you use say, Gandi and get an auto Route53 zone setup.


This is how I’ve almost always done things. I don’t like making changes with my registrar very often and I don’t like having everyone need access. So keeping their services limited reduces the security scope.


Interestingly, that's how squaresapce left my DNS (pointing to google NS) after the migration.


This. Separate the tasks. Always use one provider as your domain registrar (ex: NameSilo) and another provider for your DNS (ex: Cloudflare).


I can't believe how many people are suggesting Cloudflare who:

1) Is backed by the U.S. Dept of Defense, NIST, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the EU (Horizon 2020 Program).

2) The main way people know about Cloudflare is that awful Verifying you are human message and 3-second redirect you see on some sites - which is my prompt to immediately leave the site.

Why would anyone want anything to do with slow as hell and government-backed Cloudflare?


Because cloudflare works. Build a better one if you're so concerned about the involvement of MIC.


Most if not all of Cloudflare's competitors have been around longer than they have. Their contracts with governments and militaries is why they're valuable, not that nobody knows how to offer a CDN, or other services they sell. They have plenty of competition, and I don't think they lead the market with any of their products.


Could you share some events/resources to back your claims about CF being backed by the government?

I’d love to move out of CF.


This is why I love LLMs. Try using a search engine to find the answer to "how is Cloudflare backed by governments"?

On DuckDuckGo, the entire first page were Cloudflare results! Come on... don't they know what I'm asking?

Let's just get to the answer:

  ollama run llama3
> how is Cloudflare backed by governments?

  Cloudflare has partnerships with various government agencies around the world to help improve internet security, stability, and overall performance. Here are some examples:

  1. *US Department of Defense (DoD): Cloudflare is a certified provider for the DoD's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).

  2. *UK Government*: Cloudflare is a partner with the UK Government's Cabinet Office, supporting their efforts to improve internet security and stability in the UK.

  3. *European Union's (EU) Cybersecurity Agency (ENISA)*: Cloudflare collaborates with ENISA, the EU's cybersecurity agency, to help prevent and respond to cyber threats across Europe.

  4. *Australian Signals Directorate (ASD)*: Cloudflare is a partner with ASD, Australia's premier cybersecurity agency, supporting their efforts to improve internet security and stability in Australia.

  5. *Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE)*: Cloudflare collaborates with CSE, Canada's national cyber security authority, to help protect Canadian interests online.

  These partnerships often involve:

  1. *Security research*: Cloudflare works with government agencies to identify and mitigate emerging threats, such as DDoS attacks, malware, and other types of cyber attacks.

  2. *Cybersecurity training*: Cloudflare provides training and education to government officials, security personnel, and industry professionals on best practices for cybersecurity and cloud-based services.

  3. *Technology development*: Cloudflare collaborates with governments on developing new technologies and solutions to address specific cybersecurity challenges, such as combating online terrorism or protecting critical infrastructure.

  4. *Incident response*: In the event of a significant cyber incident, Cloudflare works closely with government agencies to respond quickly and effectively, minimizing the impact on affected organizations.

  These partnerships demonstrate the trust and confidence governments have in Cloudflare's ability to help protect their interests online. By  working together, they can create safer, more secure, and more resilient internet ecosystems for everyone.
> how does Cloudflare partner with DoD? Answer in a single paragraph

  Cloudflare partners with the US Department of Defense (DoD) through various initiatives, including Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), joint cybersecurity initiatives, research and development projects, training and education programs, incident response and recovery efforts, and market research and analysis. Specifically, Cloudflare collaborates with the DoD on threat hunting and cloud security solutions, develops AI-powered tools for detecting and responding to cyber threats, provides secure cloud storage and compute services tailored to the DoD's needs, offers training and education to DoD personnel on best practices for cybersecurity, cloud-based services, and threat hunting techniques, responds quickly and effectively in the event of significant cyber incidents, and analyzes emerging cybersecurity trends and threats to inform the DoD's security strategies and investments.
> how much does dod pay cloudflare

  I couldn't find exact figures on how much the US Department of Defense (DoD) pays Cloudflare, as this information is likely classified or not publicly disclosed. However, I can provide some context:

  1. *Cloudflare's revenue*: In 2020, Cloudflare reported $185 million in revenue, which was a 52% increase from 2019.

  2. *Defense spending*: The DoD has a significant budget for cybersecurity and cloud services. For example, the DoD's 2022 budget request included $15.4 billion for "Cybersecurity" and $3.8 billion for "Cloud Computing Services".

  3. *Cloudflare's defense contracts*: Cloudflare has secured several defense-related contracts with the DoD, including a $40 million contract in 2019 to provide cloud security services to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Another example is a $20 million contract in 2020 to develop an AI-powered threat detection system for the US Air Force.
I could go on...

What might be scarier is I learned this information from reading regular news articles maybe 5-6 years ago, so I've known for a long time that Cloudflare was vaguely involved with, or at least sold services to the U.S. federal government and military. But in 2024 it's very hard to find anything detailed through Google or DuckDuckGo, or even Wikipedia. You can find it on Cloudflare's website when they want to use it for marketing:

“Cloudflare has long served the most technical, security-aware agencies like the FBI and U.S Department of State,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare.

Source: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2022/Cloudflare-Ear...

But I like that the LLM is able to really grab the information in a way search engines are getting worse at (through censorship and other algorithmic pressures).


Following up, over 2 days have passed since opening my ticket with SquareSpace support (after waiting 72 hours for DNS), and I have not received a single reply.

I've edited DNS records for multiple domains that have not propagated at all.

As far as I can tell, it looks like there are major system-wide issues with SquareSpace domain's DNS records propagation. Doesn't seem like it works at all.

Can ANYONE in this thread confirm they've have DNS records propagate correctly after a domain was transferred from Google -> SquareSpace?


I'm trying for the first time and running into the same problems as you. They do update in the squarespace UI but don't actually get updated in any DNS. It believes the google name servers are its correct defaults - I was thinking about trying to switch to whatever non-google name servers squarespace uses and see if it is smart enough to update those.


You can set up a free Cloudflare plan and use their nameservers. Or if you have a Linode account you can add the domain there and use theirs.


Not only their nameservers, but I just found out that Cloudflare is also a registrar with a policy I like "at-cost pricing for registration and renewal."

I'm not sure how their tools are yet but my hope would be pretty good as I doubt there's a DNS configuration out there that CF hasn't seen yet.


Although IIUC you must use their nameservers if you use their registrar.


it pains me to object because Cloudflare truly has some great products and services, but if there's something worse than google controlling the internet, it's Cloudflare.


Cloudflare isn’t forcing people to use their services and can be swapped out for other providers.

DDoSes and various internet attacks suck to deal with.

I blame the people thinking attacking other people’s infrastructure is funny.


Yeah, the Internet is extremely adversarial, like almost comically so. Cloudflare's CDN/bot-mitigation stuff is very much a symptom of a far larger problem.


:old-man-yells-at-cloudflare:

https://slackmojis.com/emojis/59795-old-man-yells-at-cloudfl...


[flagged]


Using CloudFlare's DNS does not require you to use their proxy service.


The point is they're backed by the government and military-industrial-complex :) Their annoying and slow "Human Verification" redirect is just an example of how they solve problems - poorly. I would never use that crap and I can't believe anyone on HN does


I've also run into issues: I have 4 domains, only one of which has been migrated so far. The rest are seemingly in limbo.

Separately, I was surprised (meaning concerned) to see that they had also "conveniently" copied my credit card information over to my (automatically?) created Squarespace account. I was under the impression that sharing credit card numbers like that was a classic "must not" for account migrations between third-party vendors.


> [...] sharing credit card numbers like that was a classic "must not" [...]

That's indeed a complete no-go. If they did that, they'd have to keep your CVC on file too, and that would end with them losing their certificate to process credit cards entirely. So that probably didn't happen.

Another way it could've gone down is if the payment provider is unchanged. I.e. Google processed payments through global collect and handed your subscription IDs to square space. Now there is no need to pass credit card information as the collecting party hasn't changed. Only the person triggering the collection.

That's just an example however, I don't work for Google nor am i involved in this migration.


Thanks, that's a plausible explanation. I would be mildly surprised if Google was using a third-party payment provider for Google Domains, but I don't think I have any way to verify or refute this :-)

(I suppose Google could remain the payment processor while handing the operations themselves off to Squarespace, as well.)


You can transfer saved cards between gateways without storing CVVs (or card numbers) yourself - they don't like to do it but if you are a big enough fish they still will.


I’ve always used Cloudflare for DNS and Google Domains for registration, which worked great for me.

When I heard about Google selling domains to square Space I migrated all my domains to Cloudflare Domain Registrar.

Now I’m running with a single point of success.


A couple dozen of my domains have been migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace. The experience has been seamless so far. All the settings have been retained and the UI is very good compared to other registrar UIs out there that look dated.

Your description is confusing to me. A domain migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace retains its zone in Google's Cloud DNS service. In other words, there is no DNS zone migration. The name server entries on all of my migrated domains are *.googledomains.com. If you're saying that Squarespace is having DNS propagation issues for your migrated domains, then Google Cloud is having propagation issues on the Cloud DNS service. We would have likely heard about that in a separate HN thread. But it's not happening. My migrated domains are propagating edited entries just fine.

Did you find the actual issue on your domain?


I think the issue is the connection between the squarespace management UI and the google DNS service - they probably are not successfully sending your changes over to google which is why nothing is updating. I'm having the exact same problem as OP.


I also had one migrated and the left on GD, safe to say the transfer from GD to Cloudflare for all of the non migrated domains was very quick. The one on Squarespace is taking days to move. It took several hours to get the transfer authorisation code and now I've been waiting days for the actual transfer to happen. I was very happy with Google Domains, however I'm not surprised in the least that they killed off the product as they seem to do for everything.


> Also they do not let you edit the TTL of records

That's going to make migrating name-servers painful. What a nightmare.

Edit: Just confirmed on my domains that moved. You cannot update the TTL of any record.

Can anyone suggest a strategy for safely migrating DNS providers without changing the current TTL settings since they can't be updated?


What do you mean by safely?

Step 1) configure your zone(s) on the new server(s)

Step 2) update your configured dns servers at the domain registry (usually through an interface at your registrar)

Step 3) wait for as long as you feel is appropriate

Step 4) remove the zones from your old server(s)

Most tlds serve glue records with a ttl of 1-2 days. I'd wait at least that long after the tld servers update before dropping the zone on the old server. But you may want to wait much longer, because some DNS servers cache some records for an unreasonable amount of time. If you can change the NS records on the old servers to point at your new ones, that might help, but it might not. I don't know how much effort you want to put into keeping things working on servers that act unreasonable.


Thanks for the reply. That's roughly the strategy I'm thinking. In the past I would have also reduced the domain TTLs well in advance. You are probably correct about those using unreasonable TTLs on their nameservers.


I have two domains with GD. One was transfered a few weeks ago and the other is still just hanging out there with no way to know what's going on. I'm not confident it's going to remain mine.


I moved all my domains to Cloudflare, but one .dev is still stuck with Google for being a premium domain.

No word on migrating it to Squarespace for me for some reason.


That really screwed me over. AWS can’t register.dev, so we had to vet and approve a different vendor just for that domain. Super annoying.


Are the rules different for moving premium domains? I have a couple.


Isn’t .app only available on Google too?


Google is the registry for .app, they own the .app zone.

Other registrars also sell .app via Google and most of them should have an option to transfer .app, .dev, etc.

They only shutdown their registrar business.


I also use Porkbun, they are great.

Anyone tried Cloudflare before? I was thinking of trying them next it seems they sell domains at wholesale prices as it's not how they make money. Along with that vercel billing debacle that recently happened people were recommending cloudflare as an alternative for hosting as well so things could be streamlined a bit.


Porkbun uses Cloudflare, but you knew that right? This entire thread is a Cloudlfare shill post.

PS: Cloudflare vs Vercel. Cloudflare is a military/government contractor that offers outdated and slow cloud products that others have already offered for years. Vercel is a serverless platform who somewhat innovated in that space, designed ideally for Next.js and/or React apps for convenient CI/CD from a github repo. Not the same.


I guess I made the right choice moving to route53 a couple months ago. I can't for the life of me imagine who thought it was a good idea to drop registrar services from GCP. CloudDNS is still functioning and so I left zones there as the authoritative name servers but I'm starting to question why I leave anything in GCP.


R53 is great but doesn’t support a lot of the newer TLDs.


Does anyone have suggestions for a good registrar for domains? I'm not interested in the squarespace hosting products and I don't think they are great at being a registrar / dns provider.


Another option I haven't seen mentioned yet is Spaceship.

I've moved four domains to them over the last few months away from Gandi, and am globally very satisfied.

It is a Namecheap spinoff to allow them to "cut the cruft" and restart fresh without having to deal with technical debt.

It has a few rough edges (the interface is not the clearest because it uses a different paradigm which takes some getting used to) and it doesn't support all the features of more established players (the biggest ones for me being the lack of an API and the absence of a raw/advanced zone editor), but they are consistently cheaper than Porkbun (for how long we'll see, but for now I've renewed my domains to their max to benefit from the current prices) and also have quick, efficient support via chat.

They have some enjoyably modern features, such as a DNS propagation map so you can follow in real time the propagation of your records' modifications to their servers across the globe.

All in all I'd say it's a great registrar for individuals and small ventures for whom price comes first, but the lack of an API will probably turn away more technical or demanding customers (which are probably already better served by the likes of Cloudflare). Of course, as others have alluded to you can also just use them as a registrar and define other nameservers.


I’ve had a lot of success with namecheap. Granted, I haven’t tried many others, but it’s worked well for me.


Namecheap is ok, but unfortunately they also practice a despicable trend in domain registration, which is to hijack domains with less than five letters and classify them as premium, right on the act of registration. A concrete example: When trying to register aucky.com [for an auction site], a domain resulting from brainstorming and creation, previously non-existent, I was informed that it was a premium domain and therefore subject to other acquisition conditions. I did not accept it and had to content myself with the registration under my country's TLD, which has less punch than a pure .com. My failed domain is up for grabs in the premium market, and the issue will have to be settled in court. This is almost criminal and it has to stop.


Namecheap is garbage.

Slow and dated UI, awful support, and shady practices.

Search for domains on instantdomainsearch.com to avoid registrars jacking up the price when they notice interest in a domain.

Register with Cloudflare when they support the TLD and AWS for the rest.


Does CF allow changing the nameservers?


Happy with Cloudflare and Porkbun for domains that CF doesn't support.

Both have great API and fair pricing.


I've enjoyed switching everything I can to Cloudflare Domains. They sell at-cost.


A never mentioned but crucial issue with Cloudflare is that you are required to use their nameservers; you cannot change to use third party NS without transferring out.

Sources:

- https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/get-started/tran...:

> All domains using Cloudflare Registrar must use Cloudflare DNS on a full setup. This also means that you cannot change to another DNS provider while using Cloudflare Registrar.

- https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-transfer...:

> We built our registrar specifically for customers who want to use other Cloudflare products. This means domains registered with Cloudflare can only use our nameservers. If your domain requires non-Cloudflare nameservers then we’re not the right registrar for you.

- https://community.cloudflare.com/t/can-i-register-a-domain-a...


I haven't tried any others but have had no problems with Namecheap


Porkbun is a clean option.


You can use other name servers, point it to your favourite provider. Done.


I'm on Google Domains right now, was disappointed when I heard the change to SS, and have been putting off moving to someone else before the transfer but want to now. What are other registrars other there that I should move my domains to? I've heard good things about porkbun.


Personally, I like Namecheap. They offer really robust DNS configuration, extraordinarily low TTLs, and they have a dashboard that isn’t complete trash. I’ve learned over time that outside of exorbitant exceptions, the prices are irrelevant. Essentially, I don’t chase domain promotions. I’ve also never observed them participating in typical registrar skeez. Their email reminders/notifications and MFA are also nice.


I've been very happy with Cloudflare


[flagged]


Seconded, while so tedious, we're in the process of moving hundreds (400+) domains from Google Domains (now Squarespace) to Cloudflare Registrar. We're seeing similar oddities with redirects for domain protection.


Do Cloudflare still restrict you to only their nameservers?


> 6.1 Nameservers. Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare’s nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES, AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS.

https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-registration-agreement/


Not allowing custom nameservers is the one thing stopping me from switching to Cloudflare.

Bit of a shame, as I had a bunch of domains with Google, which I suppose are now owned by Squarespace, which is a company I never saw myself using...


Can I ask when/why you would use custom name servers? I’m unfamiliar with them.


My reason is so that I can manage the DNS from a different place.

I use Digital Ocean to manage all my servers, and they have a DNS management interface where you can add domains, I prefer their UI and it has some nice integrations with their other services (e.g auto complete for VPS IPs).


Letting an email provider manage the domain.


Changing it is part of one of their paid things for some reason.


Yeah looks like it, says you'd need to upgrade to their Business plan to specify Custom Nameservers. But haven't needed to as it still lets me have non-proxied DNS A/CNAME/MX entries to elsewhere.




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