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by schemescape 1016 days ago
That was quick. I just had a renewal coming up, so I took the opportunity to transfer out.

Originally, I was going to try Cloudflare, due to their at-cost pricing, but they didn’t allow transferring domains without first moving DNS (and maybe more? I couldn’t tell) to Cloudflare. I didn’t really understand the implications (would I have to use their CDN?), so I bailed out part way through. Edit: sounds like it’s just DNS: https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/faq/

I ended up going with Porkbun, based on recommendations here. Their interface is a blast from the past, but their documentation is pretty good. The only issue I encountered is that they don’t support wildcard email forwarding like Google Domains, so I had to inventory the email addresses I’d been using and setup manual forwards for each.

Overall, I wish Google Domains was still a thing. It was easy to use and cheap, and I thought it would stand the test of time.

Edit to add: Google Domains’s UI/instructions for transferring out were great. What a shame the service is going away!

3 comments

My only dislike about porkbun is their domain search. Google domains had amazing search, as might be expected.
Just keep the NS set to the original DNS? I've done that with cloudflare before and not needed to transfer in the whole DNS.
The Cloudflare FAQ says you have to set the authoritative name servers to Cloudflare’s: https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/faq/#what-happen...

If that’s not the case, then I’m definitely misunderstanding something about DNS!

That's correct, you cannot change the name servers of a domain purchased on Cloudflare, but you don't have to use their proxy.

I have yet to see a DNS zone manager as good as CloudFlare, so I've been using it anyway for the past 10 years for all of my domains.

Thanks! In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like a big deal. I guess I’m effectively paying $1/year for the option of being able to change authoritative name servers to whatever I want (and the privilege of using Porkbun’s presumably worse interface).

I’ll admit I was already a little biased against Cloudflare because one time I got caught by their infinite captcha (maybe due to my OS not being up to date because it was an old computer? I’ll never know…).

You just reminded me about wildcard email forwarding. If squarespace turns that off I am screwed. Do you know any providers which will keep it?
https://purelymail.com/ https://mxroute.com/

Are two providers that I've used to catch-all and forward to an external mailbox.

Namecheap has it for free on domains registered there.
Cloudflare supports it.