Google announced that its domain registrar known as Google Domains will be sold to Squarespace. All current users will have their accounts transferred to Squarespace around January of 2024 pending approval of the sale.
I had chosen to use Google Domains because it was cheap and easy to use, but with this news I decided to look for other options. The logical choice was going to be Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their Route53 because over time most of my sites had become static pages hosted out of S3 buckets.
The trick was that I had never transferred a domain before and had to figure to all the steps needed. There wasn’t a good write up so I wanted to walk through the process here for anyone like me who is looking to migrate away from Google Domains.
This took a little more learning than I expected and forced me to spend time with DNS records which was an area I was almost completely unfamiliar with. The step by step guide I made was mostly to help others navigate the change, but it was also partially to remind myself how transfers work in case I ever find myself in this situation again.
Lots of emails
The number of emails and verifications needed seems a bit excessive when you are trying to move a domain that you own to another registrar. However, the need for multiple checks is a good protection against your domain ever being stolen
Hosted Zones
AWS uses hosted zones to group DNS records by domain. At first it seems confusing as to what a hosted zone is but it is simply a container for records to help you keep them organized. Think of them like folders.
Name Servers
It is important to make sure you update the name servers to Amazons and not carry over the Google Domains name servers. This caused me a lot of headache when trying to diagnose why my site was inaccessible. It was just a simple misconfiguration.
Retrospective
I am quite happy with how this guide came out and It even got a fair amount of traffic the closer the sale of Google domains got. The only change I would make is to perhaps expand this to other registrars. For example how to transfer from Cloudflare to AWS or AWS to Cloudflare, etc.
