[zarzavat]

This decision has trashed Google’s brand and whoever made it should be fired. It’s not that Google domains is particularly important, but Google’s reputation for untrustworthiness in the consumer space has now metastasized to their cloud business. People were willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt before, that they would not treat business customers the same as consumers. Now they aren’t.

[dcow]

I mean I’d even argue that Google domains is important in terms of making the product a seamless experience when using GCP (and generally just carving out Google as being part fundamental internet infrastructure). I wouldn’t underestimate how much a small QoL thing like having one company as both your registrar and cloud service provider can impact the choice of which otherwise commodity service to use. Not having to do a bunch of domain verification BS for every new piece of infrastructure is (was) a pretty awesome experience.

Sure you can have an MBA look at the situation and ask “Do we really need a registrar? The other cloud providers don’t have one and look at their margins”. So what this really signals to me is that Google has lost all capacity to be forward thinking, trendy and innovative. And without that (and thus a general relevance as a tech company), what is Google?

[CharlieDigital]

I'm a big time proponent of Google Cloud because I believe that they've done a few things particularly well in their overall architecture that others have gotten wrong.

But this decision rubs me the wrong way because there's a deep integration with several of the services that allow connecting an external domain. The verification of domain ownership with Google purchased domains was effectively seamless and aligned with this overall architecture principle of Stuff That Just Makes Sense.

I still think that GCP is a great platform to build on, but the problem now is that they've further tarnished their image to other stakeholders who have a say in the platform decision making process.

[dtech]

AWS definitely has a domain registrar, although I believe they subcontract. Azure subcontracts to GoDaddy. Both still provide the service.

[explaininjs]

Are you sure? This (sourced) comment claimed the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37456916

[the88doctor]

"I wouldn't underestimate how... having one company as both your registrar and cloud service provider can impact the choice of which otherwise commodity service to use." THIS. Even if I'm just spinning up a simple blog, unless I'm buying a premium domain name, I'm gonna buy it on Bluehost instead of a cheaper registrar like Namecheap just to avoid the few minutes of work and few hours of wait time to link that domain with another hosting service.

[joezydeco]

I'm a paying Workspace customer, running a domain for my family. I reallllly don't want to migrate off but with each passing month I'm growing more and more nervous.

What are my alternatives besides Office365?

[ccakes]

https://www.fastmail.com/

Have been a customer for years, great service run by humans.

[angrygoat]

+1 on fastmail, I've been nothing but happy with their service.

[hdjfkfbfbr]

Also on fastmail. Good service.

[kstrauser]

Apple’s iCloud+ plans (starting at $1/mo) include email hosting with custom domains. I moved my family to that a couple years ago and it’s been fine. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212514

Everyone in my immediate family has 1 or more email addresses in our family domain, and I have a couple of fun/project domains their too, for $0.00 above what I was already paying for iCloud.

[politelemon]

Office 365 is decent overall, good value for money so it's still worth considering. With rough edges.

Zoho is an alternative, can do custom domains, website hosting, email, productivity suite.

[nytesky]

I thought O365 no longer offered custom domains?

[connordoner]

The personal and family service doesn’t, but the business service does.

[numpad0]

Your domains should not be tied to your main Gmail and GDrive anyway. Too many horror stories of wrongful ban leading to a chicken and egg situation around account lockouts.

[joezydeco]

Oh, they're not. I knew of that trap a long time ago.

[Intralexical]

If it's just for your family, then depending on what you need, you could try OnlyOffice— Either self-hosted, or SAAS. They use MS formats as their first-class native format, IIRC, so compatibility is pretty great.

Nextcloud also advertises an office suite, though I haven't tried it. Nextcloud also apparently integrates with OnlyOffice, though I haven't tried that either— Apparently Nextcloud's own office suite is a rebranding of LibreOffice.

I'd probably go with OnlyOffice, either on its own or integrated into Nextcloud.

[ocdtrekkie]

Fastmail is really well set up to be a family account provider. You can add multiple domains, aliases to various accounts, and you can mix and match account levels now (kids accounts can be cheaper ones than your own, but still share your domain). Their spam filter works better than Google or Microsoft's, and I set up aliases that deliver to say, my wife and I, so we can both be notified of updates for particular accounts and such.

If you have any issues, a real person will answer your support ticket.

[newscracker]

If you only need email, then there are a bunch of providers in Europe that are cheaper (especially compared to something like Fastmail if you need one mailbox for each person in the family), have been around for several years and support custom domains. In no particular order, they are mailfence, mailbox.org, runbox.com and migadu. All of them support IMAP directly (unlike ProtonMail that needs a bridge application and Tutanota that does not support IMAP).

[snuxoll]

Been using Zoho services for my family after I got tired of fighting with spam reputation when self-hosting.

[charrondev]

Are you just using it for email? For my family that already had a few Apple devices I switched to using custom domains with iCloud (which is included with any iCloud subscription, even the $1 one).

You can have up to 3 domains configured per family.

[joezydeco]

Mostly email, but we do take advantage of gDrive for file sharing.

And I really really don't like iCloud's file system.

[traceroute66]

> What are my alternatives besides Office365?

Protonmail ? If its email you're after you can point your MX at them.