Looks like google domains is no more.

HTTP_404_NotFound@lemmyonline.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 415 points –

Knock on wood, I have not used them in quite a while.

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Typical of Google to shut down yet another service

I've full on stopped accepting new Google products, only exception being the pixel phone, but I'll root that if they decide to drop support.

I work in development and am proud to say I have convinced 3 companies now to steer clear of GCP because of their track record.

I bet someone has made a list.

googles

Yup.

The first item on the field is a search field. The "all" category has 288 entries.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

That website shows how much Google buys up and then shuts down, centralising it's power even more.

Nah, because there are definitely projects Google started on there. The one OP mentioned is on there, and I remember Google Zeitgeist from back when.

EDIT: Not saying that this is comprehensive, but only five entries reference being acquired from elsewhere in their description.

I mean, scrolling down that list, those all make sense. I guess if Google just did what all the other companies do and silently let go of these things instead of announcing that they are ending them so that developers and users know ahead of time not to expect long term stable and support that would be one thing. Google's development process isn't the same as everyone else's though and their current method of developing tandem products and then gauging success of each and then folding the best features of the less successful one into the main one is obviously not a bad methodology as we have seen. As well it's kind of important to a company to not waste resources on projects that customers both don't find interesting and consume more resources than they generate while at the same time serve no greater benefit to anyone as a whole. Like, what do you want them to do? Nobody needs a web browser toolbar anymore, it's 2023. Everyone screamed at and hated the entire concept of stadia, so they ended it. GPM was a financial failure with very few users that was due for a massive code overhaul. Like damn people, chill out.

I mean, scrolling down that list, those all make sense.

I'm not arguing that Google should have kept them going.

But I think that it might be fair to say that Google did start a number of projects and then cancel them -- even if sensibly -- and that for people who start to rely on them, that's frustrating.

In some cases, like with Google Labs stuff, it was very explicit that anything there was experimental and not something that Google was committing to. If one relied on it, well, that's kind of their fault.

Well that's kind of the thing, that's why Google announces they are ending those things. Most companies just end development silently and let those things differ l drift off without support or intention to solve issues which becomes incredibly telling for anyone who comes along and decides to integrate that software into their systems or daily life which later just becomes a massive problem down the line.

Announcing the end of something, and even coming up with a solution for it like domains switching to square space, GPM transferring user songs into YouTube music, and SketchUp selling to Trimble are low or even zero hassle solutions that result in longer term support for their users without throwing a "sorry it's all broken now, go fuck yourself" methodology

Not to mention that the cpanels, documentation, and APIs for Google Cloud look like they were written by alien robots to be consumed by alien robots. I've never seen any other platform or docs as confusing and pointlessly convoluted as gcloud docs.

They're the absolute worst. Doc links will go in circles, redirecting you back to where you just were, API documentation is out of date - or worse it's out of date and doesn't tell you until the end of reading if it even tells you at all.

Not even mentioning how everything is in permanent "alpha" and "beta" state. Things are never finalized so they can get away with changing the definition on a whim and say "sorry it was in beta, now it's in beta5". I had to rewrite Pub/Sub code at least once a month because they changed their spec on that, and that was one of their "most finalized" products.

Fuck GCP, I will actively avoid jobs that code on it now. If you want enterprise customers, provide an enterprise product. This isn't chat where you can rebuild it every year because your marketers are bored. These are enterprise products that companies depend on.

Doc links will go in circles, redirecting you back to where you just were

Right? Who the fuck created this standard? You'll arrive at a doc trying to figure out how to get somewhere and it'll tell you everything except for how to actually get there. It'll finally have a link with the link text being the name of the section you're trying to find, but noooo... It doesn't actually link there, it links to a second document explaining the fucking history of that section, why they named it what they did, the engineer's dog's puppy's name, and anything else to fluff out the doc without actually being useful. Why in the hell would you write a doc about an interface and not link to the relevant interface? I guess it's probably because they completely rebuilt the way that website interfaces work and you can't actually bookmark or deep link to anything. You always end up at the same page regardless of what you bookmark and then you have to manually navigate there. They took all the wonderful working features of the internet and broke them, then made alternatives that are 1000x worse.

I'm so happy, I'm not alone anymore... this frustration was a constant dread that I felt alone, and I feel like we're two lost souls, wandering the plane of Google's terrible documentation, lost forever looking for the json schema for the API we need, constantly searching, never finding it.

Honestly, it's not as bad as AWS or Azure. Plus if you use k8s it's first-in-class support, since Google came up with k8s. There is a fairly steep learning curve though.

If you're deploying anything in cloud infra you need to make sure it's portable between providers. Vendor lock-in is a big avoidable no-no.

In my opinion AWS is considerably more clear and simple than gcloud.

They're both very complex so it's understandable people would have different experiences. In general I've found GCP fairly straightforward, with shitty documentation, generally good support of fundamentals, great k8s support, good prices, fairly modern APIs, and relatively low feature coverage. AWS more built out, awful & totally inconsistent UI, better feature coverage, higher prices, and some pretty janky XML APIs if memory serves.

Hope they didn't instead pick the security shitshow over at Azure.

Actually you meant compliance, security has other random stuff. /s

I am really thinking of switching to Microsoft for all my cloud needs, including email, photos and cloud storage and online office webapps.

I can't trust that company no more.

Just, be prepared for things to randomly not work a few times a day.

As a developer, interacting with their APIs can be quite painful.... as, things are frequently moving around, or temporarily unavailable.

There are others.

Yeah surely. But Microsoft really stands by their product. Especially since it's well integrated with Office, their most important software. Yeah that's right, even more than Windows itself.

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After that Ms master key disaster, that's a bold strategy. ยฏ\_(ใƒ„)_/ยฏ

That's like switching from cholera to plague.

Start easily, subscribe to these communities:

!foss@beehaw.org

!privacy@lemmy.ml

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

Oh I know all about Foss. I was a Foss evangelist in university.

But some things you can't quite replace.

Curious what that would be... I use neither Google nor Microsoft for personal use and I have an msdn, lol.

I've personally switched to Nextcloud and I'm quite happy with it.

You could try Proton, but I am not aware if they are offering any online office web apps.

You could use proton cloud storage to do 90% of the same thing you just would have to have local editors installed

It's only a matter of time before you the same regarding microsoft. Their services always get worse as time progresses.

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My order of preference for domain registrars is:

  1. Cloudflare (doesnโ€™t support all TLDs, unfortunately)
  2. Porkbun (does have wide TLD support, and has no-bullshit pricing, albeit higher than Cloudflare)
  3. Namecheap. Theyโ€™re cheap and Canadianโ€ฆ no other reason than just a backup to have.

Iโ€™ve been using Namecheap for years and have been happy with it. Why do you prefer Cloudflare? Is it for easier integration with Cloudflare services? Howโ€™s the pricing compared to Namecheap?

Sorry for the interrogation lol

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. So yes, cheaper than any other registrar (including NameCheap and Porkbun), except maybe those who sell domains at a loss as a promo to rope you in and then kill you on the renewals.

Integration into their stack is a nice side effect, but really inconsequential. You can have your domains registered with any registrar and have your DNS hosted by any DNS hosting provider. Heck, you can run your own DNS servers if you want to.

Cloudflare could be the cheapest (without cross-financing) because they advertise their pricing as they don't add any additional fees to the ICANN fees. I never actually fact checked this though.

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I really want to use porkbun but I don't want to write scripts to integrate a custom name server api into ddclient. (I know some people have written their own wrappers but they've yet to make it upstream.) Namecheap it is then.

Cloudflare will do DNS for domain suffixes that they don't support. I've never used Porkbun but as long as you can set custom nameservers then you can point it at CF and use all the tools they support.

I just don't like the idea of supporting a company as large as Cloudflare. That and their pricing system doesn't make a lot of sense. I have to wonder where they are making their margin back.

Yeah I've wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don't think it's quite there yet, I think it's a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn't big on.

Technically they wonโ€™t. They wonโ€™t host OpenNIC TLDs, for example. However, you can have your domain registered with any registrar, and as long as you specify Cloudflareโ€™s assigned DNS servers for your domain (DNSSEC records can be set too), you should be OK.

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Njalla is mine. I like the privacy protections they offer.

WHOIS privacy? Porkbun does that for free for all TLDs that support it.

I donโ€™t think I fully understand how what they offer isnโ€™t โ€œownership by proxyโ€. I suppose they promise not to release your info if police ask for it? On the other hand, they technically own the domains you register through them, so if they get repossessed (e.g. through legal bankruptcy proceedings), whoever their new owner is, will presumably also own your domainsโ€ฆ

Iโ€™m probably not seeing something here, but this all sounds sketchy to me.

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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CF CloudFlare
DNS Domain Name Service/System
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
k8s Kubernetes container management package

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

[Thread #54 for this sub, first seen 16th Aug 2023, 15:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I see this bot as useful for new people trying to get into the community. Don't downvote, but provide corrections to whom it may concern. This is a really cool resource.

I already move my domains to cloudfare! Great decision.

I want to move to CloudFlare too, but I have a couple of .com.au domains that CloudFlare doesn't support.

Yup, I have been using cloudflare for a few years now, and, no complaints at all. Completely painless.

And they don't charge for a fucking email forwarding. Fuck you, domain.com!

Cloudflare recently added that in the last year or so. Very nice features. In the past, I ended up using amazon SES to replicate that functionality.

How do I do this? I currently pay for a google domain at a cheap rate of like $13 a year. I want to keep it cheap and make sure I can just point it to my box.

Cloudflare doesn't support every TLD's, but they don't have any markup on top of the ICANN fees that every register must pay, so they will probably be one of the cheapest. I use Cloudflare myself for DNS, Tunnels and anti-bot measures, but my main domain is not registered with them because it's included in my web hosting plan.

Yea, I donโ€™t need anything but a register to the site and access to the DNS record to point to an IP that I can change sometimes. No special anything past that.

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What's different about this announcement from the one they made 2 months ago?

This one they emailed to people with slightly more detail. You could barely find any official information about this from Google after the last announcement, so itโ€™s good theyโ€™re telling people now. Very annoying that Iโ€™m being forced into square space if I donโ€™t transfer out before then though.

I cuurently use one of three registrars: Namecheap, Cloudflare, or Porkbun. Porkbun is my favorite and I will move my domains to them as they expire.

For Europe and specifically if you need European ccTLD's, inwx.de and netim.com have the largest selection and good prices.

You can see other European registrars on this page but check if they support all the TLDs you need and the pricing, sometimes they have an oddly expensive price for one of them.

Oh and a note about Gandi because it's listed as "cheap" there, they're currently jacking up their domain prices across the board. Until now they used to be sort of expensive, after this they'll be the most expensive by 75-100% than the others.

I renewed one of my domains in a panic because auto renew somehow turned off and yeah....wish I didn't panic because Gandi is expensive as hell now. Guess I'll move everything in a year

Remember that some TLDs will retain their validity period when transferred, so you can transfer them ahead of time if needed.

Look it up on the INWX TLD list and click on the ones you're interested in. They have very good information about each TLD. You can find out if the leftover term transfers over, how long the transfer can take, if there's a transfer fee (and whether it translates directly to the renewal cost) etc.

Thanks for the tip, I actually didn't know that! I used GoDaddy until Gandi and I've been using them ever since.

Why wait? When you move they just extend it by a year.

I didn't even wait for expiration. I went ahead and moved all of mine into Cloudflare last night.

Well crap

I pretty much only have my domain for my email adress. It's also a back up plan should my career take another nose dive and I need a portfolio. Gsuite was good for all that.

I'm not quite in the loop with best options for that kinda thing. And I been using the email for contract work for over a decade now. So I don't want to give that up. Would cloudflare be good for that as well?

I use Namecheap as my registrar, then split the domain between Adobe for the site (through their CC portfolio builder), and Proton for email. I migrated off Gsuite a while ago, but haven't had any problems since doing so.

How has email deliverability been for you using Proton with a custom domain? Iโ€™m trying to move off of Google for everything but Iโ€™m still on Gmail for my personal email and a few custom domains. Iโ€™d love to move to Proton but have heard of problems with email going to spam or never being delivered but not sure if that only applies to their domains.

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Thank you namecheap looks like the best choice for me so far. I'm also looking at a local one called host papa. I may need to export my email history and figure out exactly what my needs are in terms of space. Proton might be a good option there as well if I can keep it at 1GB.

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I would recommend cloudflare.

I second cloudflare. When they announced that squarespace bought Google domains a couple months ago I immediately switched over to cloudflare, no issues so far (plus additional features are a plus)

Netim.com includes a 1 GB email address and a website with 250 MB and SSL with any domain.

If you want more email features you can delegate your MX records to Migadu.com, $20/year for unlimited mailboxes, domains, aliases etc. with 5 GB. The send/receive limits are soft limits, they don't block emails if you go over. If you constantly and grossly go over your tier they ask you to consider going to the next one up but occasional misses are ok.

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I'm out of the loop on this, do people have a problem with squarespace?

My problem with squarespace is that 10 years ago I used to visit a few forums run on their servers, and every time I hit ESC in Firefox to stop animated gifs or to make a page stop loading/redirecting, it would navigate me to the CMS login page for the site owner.

Is this a problem today? No, I mostly browser on a tablet without a keyboard, I have no idea if they still do this.

Am I going to give them any money for this? Nope, the only thing I know about squarespace is that they used to intercept a browser shortcut to stop loading a page instead navigate away from the current page.

Good. The less Google does the better the internet will be.

Are CloudFlare, Amazon or Microsoft any better? Google at least take security (if not privacy) very seriously.

In general it seems bad to have any huge profit-driven organisation exercising significant control over open standards, but I do think that Google is lesser than many of the other evils.

It's all big tech. I try to pick smaller companies myself.

It's only a matter of time before cloudflare becomes arrogant enough to be user hostile also.

Oh no.. I just bought a domain for my friend from there, only a few months ago.

I should've used namesilo or porkbun instead.

Happened a while back. I had my domain on it and as soon as I saw the email I got a refund on my domain.

If I wanted to be on squarespace, I would've joined squarespace.

Ahh crap.

What's the best no nonsense alternative?

Cloudflare is just that. It supports most domains except for premium .dev (for now) from google. Registrar costs are at cost and no markup. Lots of options, no pressure to do anything beyond free.

Next option is Namecheap, but theyโ€™ve had issues lately.

I'll vouch for cloud flare. Its hands down my favorite registrar I have used.

The ABSOLUTE, HANDS DOWN worst one you can possibly ever pick, would be GoDaddy. Don't. Just Don't. Don't even search for a domain there.... They have been caught sniping up domains after you search for them.. Absolute scum.

Had some guy from one of their shell companies tell me a domain no one would ever spend five figures on was being sold for $55k. GoDaddy sucks massively.

I followed that link, and the post itself seems to not be that, no one in comments was pointing to anything that was a smoking gun on that, and someone else linked to the CEO directly saying that, no, absolutely not, it'd be bad business to do so.

Which feels weird to defend GoDaddy, because, while I haven't used them in a few years, my experience with them is that they're an awful registrar, but mostly because of how hard they make it to transfer away and how sleazy they get with sales tactics. And their ads haven't been... good, but I'd probably let that slide if they provided reliable, good service.

What's the problem with Namecheap? I've been with them since GoDaddy got on the shit list, but I'm not against moving again.

Honestly, nothing. But theyโ€™ve been having more network and dns issues, which caused resolution issues. So Iโ€™m moving away entirely.

except for premium .dev

WHYY ;-;

Yeah, Iโ€™ve been waiting for Cloudflare to finally support .dev but it might be too late before Squarespace transfers sites. I might have to temporarily use porkbun

I have a .ms domain registered with nic.ms but I point the domain name servers at cloudflare and i can manage it in CF with all their features. I do have to pay for it elsewhere but that's a minor inconvenience.

what wrong with porkbun it what i been using for my domains?

I just have everything else on Cloudflare, unless they never support the .dev domain it doesnโ€™t make sense to keep one domain separated from my others. No personal dislike or disrespect towards porkbun.

No idea. I moved my personal .dev over and that was fine. But I pay for a premium .dev domain and canโ€™t move that yet. No explanation from Cloudflare.

Probably not Google Cloud Domains, I'm in the middle of a transition to GCP, and this is total overkill, while at the same time not having the convenience I was hoping to find. I've got to deploy a whole custom cloud function to replace the Synthetic DNS record for my dynamic DNS.

I've heard really good things about Hover, that's probably where I'm going to go once I get close to renwal

I had a few domains there. I migrated them to Cloudflare as soon as I saw the news that this was coming.

I was undecided between Google Domains and Cloudflare a few years ago.
Iโ€™m happy that I chose them over Google, no headaches now.

One more for the Google graveyard. Abandon all hope ye who enter here