Google sold their domain business to Squarespace
I don’t have anything against Squarespace, but I also don’t care to keep track of billing with a company that I didn’t engage with in the first place, so I’m going to move off of Squarespace Domains (previously Google Domains).
This is actually what I was looking at doing anyway since I realized that .dev is an HSTS TLD which costs a lot more money than plain old static site hosting. It costs less to run a Bluesky bot 24/7/365 than to use a GCP load balancer to serve an SSL cert so you can imagine how I’m feeling about it.
First, I need to find a new registrar
I did some searching around and found that Cloudflare offered the cheapest no-frills domain registration with plenty of documentation on how to get things working the way I want:
- CNAME to a Google Cloud Storage Bucket
- Redirect for root -> www
- Free email redirect to a primary email
Signed up, got all this handled, easy peasy.
Cleaning up Squarespace and GCP
Disable renewal and billing at Squarespace. Add a redirect. Redirect doesn’t work. Redirect doesn’t work? Look, I don’t understand why and I don’t even care to figure it out. My site isn’t getting any traffic anyway because I’ve never pointed people here. So I’m out. That’s fine.
GCP, on the other hand, was a bit more of a pain:
- Copy bucket so it has the proper name
- Delete old bucket
- Delete cert and load balancer
- Realize a couple weeks later that my billing is higher than expected?
I’m getting billed for Compute now, but Networking (where you set up an LB) is gone. So apparently my LB was using Compute but with no cost because it fell under the LB? Okay. So I had to look up how to disable the Compute API, and now my billing is <$1/mo.
Success!
It’s not ideal to have paid for extra GCP stuff I didn’t want while I had little motivation to change it, but it’s done! I’m finally where I wanted to be at the beginning of all this.
