A domain name registrar is a business. GoDaddy and Hover are domain registrars. As you may know, GoDaddy is also a web host. It combines the function of registrar and host.
A domain registrar handles the reservation of domain names as well as the assignment of IP addresses for those domain names. Domain names are alphanumeric aliases. For example, a domain name might be ‘cloudinthesky.com’ and the IP address might be something like 104.21.29.45.
Domain names are easier to remember than alphanumeric IP addresses, which is why we use them. But behind every name is the alphanumeric address. There are so many domain names that the system ran out of numbers some years ago and had to be rejigged to include extra numbers.
Squarespace is an SAAS business. For a monthly fee you can host a website with them and they will deal with all the security needs and the options for layout and design of the website.
Google has a long history of introducing products and then dropping them. Well, this time they have sold or passed on their entire domain registrar business to Squarespace.
Squarespace say
Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace will honor all existing Google Domains customers’ renewal prices for at least 12 months following the closing of the transaction, as well as provide additional incentives to encourage Google Domains customers to build a website with Squarespace and adopt other Squarespace offerings. Further, Squarespace will be leveraging Google’s infrastructure powering the Google Domains product during the migration period in order to ensure the seamless transfer of domains.
You can read the details in the Squarespace Newsroom – and note the “additional incentives to encourage Google Domains customers to build a website with Squarespace”
Personally, I think that the flexibility that WordPress offers trumps the SAAS service from Squarespace or indeed any SAAS business.
For more on SAAS, read this that I wrote in the context of selling a product or service online. If you have a blog then it might not matter so much if the content disappears because you stopped paying the monthly fee. If you are selling online it’s a different story.
The Suwalki Gap
To understand the geopolitics of the region, start with Kaliningrad. It is a bit of Russia that is cut off from the rest. I have coloured Kaliningrad yellow on this map and as you can see, it has a coastline so it is accessible to the Russian fleet, but otherwise it has no direct land connection with the rest of Russia.
The land connection is known as the Suwalki Gap (I’ve marked it red on the map). Russia has been trying to establish a solid route along it since the break up of the Soviet Union. For more detail of the history of the Suwalki Gap, read the Wiki entry.
The gap or corridor is named after the Polish town of Suwalki, and it the route had become strategically sensitive to Russia since Poland joined NATO in 1999, and even more so since the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – joined NATO in 2004.
Belarus under its current regime has close ties to Russia. So the recent decision by Belarus to store nuclear weapons supplied by Russia has increased tensions in the Baltic States. They fear that if Russia decided to take a land connection between Kaliningrad and Belarus then the Baltic States would be isolated from the rest of Europe, and easy pickings.
Putin clearly wants to reestablish dominion over what was the territory of the USSR, so it is difficult to see how a negotiated settlement can be achieved.
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