I was happy with Google Domains, but like everything good that they do, they killed it. Without asking for confirmation, they pushed the entirety of their DNS registrations to SquareSpace. World class, Google. It forced me to search a bit and discover that even the little guys can get Cloudflare protection, wholesale. Damn I love them.
The domain transfer process takes work, here’s a rundown of tasks:
- At google domains, turn off autorenewal and unlock your domain
- At cloudflare domains, add your site, extracting in the existing DNS records; it’s messy but helpful; strip out the bad ones
- At google domains, under DNS, click the non-obvious “custom DNS servers” material-view “tab” (gross)
- change all the DNS servers from google to cloudflare (see cloudflare instructions)
- turn off DNSSEC by removing all records
- Start the transfer process at cloudflare; it will make you wait until it can actually pull the updated name server changes
- Once cloudflare sees the name changes, it will allow you to select the “Free” plan and finish setup; but that does not mean the site has been transferred yet
- On cloudflare, continue the transfer, pasting in a transfer code you copied from google
- Once you think everything is in place, it still won’t work until you change SSL mode from “Flexible” (WTF is that!) to Full (strict), so it properly uses my Lets Encrypt certificates.
- Also… EVENTUALLY… you will receive confirmation email from google. Click through that and finally, google and cloudflare will confirm the transfer.
The good news is, even though the process typically requires extension of the renewal by another year (unless the last renewal was very recent), it is an extension (you don’t lose renewal time).
