Registrars: Google Domains and Squarespace

Google Domains no longer exists. Google sold its domain registration business to Squarespace in 2023, and all registrations were migrated to Squarespace Domains over the following months. Existing registrations carried over automatically, including renewal pricing.

brisberg.dev was originally registered with Google Domains and now lives at Squarespace. Renewal pricing was grandfathered at the original rate.

The rest of this page is kept because the concepts are registrar-independent — the DNS record types and their behavior are the same everywhere. Only the UI moved.

What Google Domains offered

• Privacy Protection — the registrar uses a third-party service to alias your personal information in the WHOIS registry. Squarespace carries this forward.
• Registrar-operated DNS servers, with the option to delegate to your own
• SSL/TLS certificates
• Custom email forwarding

DNS configuration

DNS servers

Registrars default to their own name servers. You can delegate to someone else’s (Cloudflare, Route 53) if you want features the registrar doesn’t offer.

DNSSEC

Domain Name System Security Extensions protect a domain against attacks such as DNS cache poisoning and DNS spoofing, by signing responses so resolvers can verify they were not tampered with.

Synthetic records

Google Domains had “synthetic records” — automatically-generated groupings of resource records that set up a common feature (domain forwarding, Google Workspace) in one step.

These did not work for GitHub Pages hosting. The subdomain-forwarding synthetic record directs to ghs.googlehosted.com rather than <user>.github.io, which is not what Pages expects. Use plain resource records instead — see GitHub Pages.

Custom resource records

Resource records define how the domain behaves, and are common to every DNS service: A and AAAA records pointing at server IPs, CNAME aliases, MX for mail, TXT for verification.

For a working configuration example, see Brisberg.dev.