Last summer, Google announced that it would be shutting down its Google Domains service and selling it to Squarespace. I had a few domains (like this one) registered through Google that I had transferred from DynDNS (which is now owned by Oracle!) back in 2016 and was just going to let the transfer happen and see how things went. But then the other week I got an e-mail from Squarespace informing me that a dynamic DNS service would not be provided by Squarespace:

As previously communicated, Squarespace has purchased all domain name registrations and related customer accounts from Google Domains. Customers are in the process of being moved to Squarespace Domains, but before we migrate your domain we wanted to inform you that a feature you use, Dynamic DNS (DDNS), will not be supported by Squarespace.

After your domain has been migrated, you will no longer be able to update DDNS records using the DDNS service offered by Google Domains. Any active DDNS records will remain as A and/or AAAA records with the last IP addresses provided prior to migration, but those IP addresses will no longer update automatically. If you leave any DDNS client active, it will receive an error when trying to perform an update.

Since Squarespace Domains doesn’t offer DDNS services, you should consider looking for an alternative from another provider and configure that ahead of your domain migration. Your domain will be migrated as soon as 30 days from today, so please act now to ensure your DDNS records will continue to work as you’d like.

So much for nothing really changing! Their suggestion to “consider looking for an alternative from another provider” seemed like good advice, but rather than just trying to find a new DDNS provider, I decided to just switch registrars and avoid Squarespace completely. After doing some research, I decided to try out Cloudflare.

Transferring my domains to Cloudflare was amazingly easy. First I had to add both domains as “websites” in Cloudflare and update their DNS records (in Google Domains) to use Cloudflare’s servers. Once that was effective, Cloudflare was able to import all of my DNS records (A, CNAME, MX, etc.) and start handling DNS traffic for my sites. Then I was able to transfer the actual registration from Google Domains to Cloudflare (which took a little longer, but that was all behind-the-scenes).

For dynamic DNS updates (the whole reason I was switching in the first place), I was able to simply update the ddclient setup on my EdgeRouter-X to use the Cloudflare API to handle IP address changes on my A records. The only issue I had here was that the older version of ddclient in EdgeOS doesn’t support the newer Cloudflare API tokens so I had to use my global API key.

In addition to updating my DNS records, I also had to manually re-create all of my e-mail forwarding addresses. In addition to traditional one-to-one address forwarding, Cloudflare’s e-mail routing also features “workers” which let you code rules. As a result, I was able to remove a bunch of filters in my GMail used for “distribution lists” and replace them with workers for a much cleaner setup. I love being able to see each indivdual message that comes into a fowarding alias, who it was from, and where it was forwarded, complete with stats and charts, Google had nothing like that. The only downside of using workers is that incoming messages handled by them are shown as “dropped” in the dashboard (even though they were forwarded). Like with Google, e-mail addresses need to be “verified” before you can forward mail to them (so you can’t just start forwarding mail to any old e-mail address, even using a worker).

And that was that … a pretty simple switch. Even better,  Cloudflare is cheaper then Google Domains ($10.10/yr as compared to $12.00/yr). And there’re a ton of more features available (some for free) from Cloudflare now that my sites are configured there: DNSSec, caching and proxying, certificates, analytics and logs, etc. Things I may look into in the future, but for now just getting feature parity (plus a few nice extras) with Google Domains was my primary goal, achieved!