On June 15, Squarespace announced its intention to purchase domain registrations and related customer accounts from Google Domains.
Accordingly, Alphabet has entered into an agreement with Squarespace to sell domain registration packages and related customer accounts from the Google Domains service. A report from Bloomberg says the deal is valued at $180 million.
The Android operating system giant said that users’ Google Domains accounts will not be affected immediately and they do not need to do anything. Upon receiving regulatory approval, users will become Squarespace customers and their domains will be managed by Squarespace. At the time of the transition, the associated Google Workspace services will be automatically managed by Squarespace with some exceptions.
The user’s domain name registration and DNS authorization will not be affected when migrating to Squarespace. Customers can still manage additional services (if any) through the management console
On the Squarespace side, the company said it estimates it will own about 10 million domain names hosted on Google Domains from millions of customers.
This is considered one of the efforts to increase the focus of Google when deciding to sell the domain name registration business. Google Domains launched in 2014 and is a big supporter of the HTTPS standard and top-level domains (TLDs), the service ending in beta in 2022.
Squarespace said it will honor the renewal rates of all existing Google Domains customers for at least 12 months after the close of the transaction. Notably, Squarespace will become the exclusive domain name registrar to any customer purchasing with their Workspace subscription directly from Google for a minimum of 3 years