Of all the reasons to avoid Google, this seems to me like the biggest one that ironically is rarely addressed. If a malicious user flags your account as being in violation of Google's ToS, then all of your Google accounts are at risk of being terminated with no appeal process, no information, and no substantiated hope of recovery. And as far as I understand it, that includes the serious possibility of total data loss from all Google services.
Right. It's worse than it used to be too, because of the breadth of their services. Theoretically, one person on YouTube that flags you could cause you to have a useless (or almost useless...minus your data/config) phone, thermostat, Google Home device, etc. Or, you could lose access to, say, your Google Analytics or Adwords account.
or Gmail. From there, control on any online account you have.
Gmail used to be the argument to log in to their services. Now, if you use Gmail, it’s probably better to dodge the other services, by fear of losing Gmail.
To clarify, are you saying that a youtube flag risks the gmail account with the same username OR that a youtube flag risks all gmail accounts that I control?
So someone does something stupid using a work GSuite email account, gets not just the entire company email suspended, but also any staff member's personal gmail accounts that were linked for password recovery for their work email accounts.
On the other hand, that fact that it's not a story that is obviously dismissed as fake says volumes about many many people's shared experience with Google...
It is. But if you replace "I" with "a lot of unbiased people" it picks up relevance. Google shutdown/support has been awful in many confirmed ways. And that's even if you're paying them...
There are some people who if you hear stories of them doing bad things you'll immediately say "Nope. Clearly not true. That's just not how that person behaves." Google _used_ to be one of those. At least in my head (and from the front page of HN this week, it seems for a lot of other people as well).
I lost access to ALL my Google products for half a day for a youtube flag. I regained access to photos / drive / gmail in a matter of hours (that I spent in panic). But it took me over a year and a half to regain access to my youtube account.
It's potentially worse than this. I've heard rumor that accounts that they suspect to be linked can get included in the dragnet. So even if you are super careful and use a separate google account for youtube with no reference to your personal email account, can get both accounts suspended for unwarrented "copyright violation".
I don't know how much of this is FUD spread by people who don't know any better. But given how much data google collects, I wouldn't bet against it being possible.
They keep trying to get me to shop from Google Express, but the nagging uncertainty about what happens to my Gmail account if I have to do a credit card chargeback against a Google service has me avoiding it.
I'd like to find a way to backup mails preferably via pop or imap - great if dedup and incremental backup are available. Backing up ~/Library/Mail/V5 doesn't really work as expected. Regular snapshot/dumps are also not very effective.
I also moved to Fastmail years ago. I used to think it would be hell to migrate a service as essential as email, but it basically took a repointing of DNS and running Fastmail's importer. It took half an hour and I've been a super happy user ever since, and I couldn't believe how bloated Gmail felt after trying Fastmail.
I think these days it's flat our irresponsible to use the free version of Gmail for anything important. Either use paid Google Apps or use Fastmail/similar.
Email is way too important in life to let it be controlled by a company that has proven they couldn't give a shit about their users.
This is a lot of the underlying motivation behind the indieweb community, which is growing (and holding an event in NYC this weekend): https://indieweb.org
If it's important to your reputation, professional or otherwise, you should own it. Starting a self-hosted blog is easier than ever to do, and immediately frees you from these kinds of arbitrary actions.
"The IndieWeb is a community of individual personal websites, connected by simple standards, based on the principles of owning your domain, using it as your primary identity, to publish on your own site (optionally syndicate elsewhere), and own your data."
Nice. I really like the idea of a return to more simple, light, people oriented websites.
Take a look at this, it was posted some months ago,
https://brutalist-web.design/
I host my blog on github pages but I always have that niggling doubt about it.
My main issue with hosting the blog myself is the HN/Reddit hug of death. Does anyone have any experience around this? Do they use a CDN to take some of the weight off?
If you statically host your blog it will not be a problem.
One of my blog posts hit ~1000 points on Reddit and 500 on hacker news. This barely moved the needle on CPU and network utilization. I guess even a 5€ droplet will do
I host http://compellingsciencefiction.com statically from an S3 bucket. The thing scales remarkably well, never had a problem during spikes, and costs only a few cents per month.
This is quite cool. I've just (yesterday) started making my own website in a similar vein, I didn't realize there were actual standards. I will try to implement them :)
If you want to take a look (still super early stage):
The paranoiac in me is pondering that Google would probably have wanted to do something fun and goodwill-promoting toward their brand on their 20th birthday... and, if I was a rival to Google, I would do everything I could (e.g. astroturfing) to generate as much temporary resentment toward Google as I could, to make running that PR campaign look like a bad idea.
I think it's more a matter of "if you're famous enough to kick up a stink, they'll hear it and fix things".
I've had to rebuild my entire online presence due to Google banning my initial account for seemingly no reason at all, and I had no way to get in contact with them and not enough followers to kick up a stink.
I now basically don't use any Google services other than a Gmail account for signing up to spammy sites, and won't trust them again no matter how convincing they are.
This is probably due to a difference in what we click on and find memorable. My view of Google from HN the past few months is all about privacy concerns, arbitrary punishments against innocent users, and poor customer service.
They provide paid hosted services, or you can self-host it as it's free and open source (https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost). Far better than wordpress. You write posts in Markdown. Editor is really nice.
will throw mine in if people want another example. HTTPS://kolemcrae.com for personal site, HTTPS://kolemcrae.com/thoughts for the blog like experience, though I don't call it a blog.
I moved my clients off of Blogger about eight years ago when some of their blogs randomly disappeared.
Searching the internet turned up dozens and dozens of similar stories of Blogger-hosted blogs vanishing with no trace, no warning, no notification, and no recourse.
>Blogger-hosted blogs vanishing with no trace, no warning, no notification, and no recourse.
Happened to me more than ten years ago. Had a blog on blogger. Wrote completely original stuff - thoughts, rants, one or two tutorials and had a small but growing following.
Then I went to back to college and stayed completely offline for a semester. On getting home, my blog was closed.
Google gave zero explanations why. Just an error message that said the blog was closed and would be unavailable for further use.
Do not feed other companies with your work. Capitalize on your work yourself: keep it independent, host it yourself, use your own domain. It's not expensive and it isn't difficult.
And above all, do not feed Facebook. I sometimes want to cry when I see how much effort people put into Facebook posts that live for a week or two and then disappear in a black hole forever.
It’s not difficult to someone who has already done the work to understand all the technologies involved. But it’s easy to forget how obscure are all these things to beginers, and how little regular users understand the technologies that underpin the internet they use every day.
You have to understand DNS entries, setting up a server (most linux boxes are CLI only), installing apache, setting up a website in apache, setting up TLS, setting up a way to upload your website, creating your website (minimum html/css, probably some javascript, or learning how to install and configure worldpress). Even if you go the route of a managed hosting you still need to worry about half of those steps.
And between DNS and hosting, it’s not that cheap either.
I just have a script that takes a backup of my whole Google account every week.
I've never been suspended, but if I were, I would be able to recreate most of my digital life from that backup, and either create a new Google account or move my business elsewhere.
Nobody I've met has ever had their main Google account permanently suspended. There are stories of it online, but I suspect it might be a vocal tiny minority (I'd be pretty vocal if I lost my online life too!). I suspect most of that tiny minority are either doing really evil things, or have malware on their machines doing really evil things with their login.
And then when the promised email arrives I have a google docs script (pretty much googles copy of VBScript macros, but they can be run as a cronjob and easily search and access your email) which copies the data to my VPS and deletes the old copy of the data and the email.
And perhaps no one you know has been handicaped for life in a terrible accident. That’s no reason for not buying insurance. I backup all my local data offsite against a risk of my flat burning down. It’s a very remote possibility, it barely happens to anyone,... well it happened to me a few years ago!
They're alright for a static site, however they fall into the trap most shared hosts fall into 'Unlimited' this and that which really means 'Please don't use a bunch or we'll suspend your account'.
Hopefully he has a better experience than I've had with them however if he gets traffic in big ways (say like front page of Reddit or HN) he might be in for a shock when they terminate service and try to push him to a higher plan.
Their wordpress plan is super expensive. They have you pay per visitor, I recall looking into it some time ago for my personal blog and it was beyond $100 per month to support enough visitors for the HN front page.
Yeah, that's mostly because wordpress is a dog. It really uses a lot of resources to serve the smallest of content. We use a CDN, a caching layer, and object caching in both wordpress and php, to make our site perform even half-way decently.
It's mostly static and cached content. Wordpress.com can serve orders of magnitude more traffic for free. Dreampress price is definitely not justified by the costs of resources.
Are there Dreamhost horror stories? I've been using them for a while and while they are a little on the pricey side, the product has been as advertised, with very good support on the rare times I had problems.
There was a notable incident years ago when they messed up a billing script and precharged a year's service to all their customers, to the tune of $7.5 million. I'm not sure I've heard any horror stories since then behind the usual shared hosting things.
To be fair I contacted them after this incident because exchange rate shifts plus fees meant I lost money even after they unwound their transaction, and they immediately credited me the difference rounded up. No "please send us proof" no blaming someone else. Just money in the bank immediately.
So whatever else somebody at Dreamhost understands that "sorry" is not just a magic word that makes things OK by itself.
To be honest the fear of losing my whole blog or content (which happened couple of times) was one of the reasons I made https://www.gonevis.com, so I could write and share my stuff and be a place for other people as well.
I do host my own email server as well, but still have some dependency on GMail.
I use google docs, but stuff that I don't care if they get vanished.
They suspended my google adwords and even though I sent emails and try to talk to them, follow every step of their guidelines, none of them helped, talking with Google support is like talking to robots, I tell them my account is suspended and ect they would respond "yes your account is suspend", such a waste of time.
Well, I try to not put important stuff online or at hands of some people who don't communicate and reason the suspension of my account.
I've heard horror stories of accounts ending up implicitly linked (as in when account X gets banned, accounts Y and Z do as well because Google has determined that they are all controlled by the same person).
To be fair, in all the stories I've heard, Google was correct about the linkage, but it means that one person using 3 accounts gets less benefit from not linking them than one might think.
Centralized hosting is bad for both parties, the service provider because they have some responsibility for the content, and the author risking false positive take-downs.
Good news is that you can get 1 TB bandwidth for $1 /month, so hosting it yourself is both fun and cheap.
Then get out now before you potentially lose it all. It's not actually that difficult. I still use Google services on a daily basis (Android phone, Google Maps, Music, etc), but have migrated off anything that I can't live without (e.g. Gmail, Calendar, Contacts -> Fastmail. Google Drive -> Syncthing.)
I had close to a decade of data on Gmail. I created a new email address on my own domain using Fastmail and set a vacation responder on my Gmail notifying people of my new address. I changed my email address on all my online accounts to my new address, and after probably six months or so took the plunge, downloaded all my Gmail data for archival and deleted my Gmail.
It was remarkably painless, and there are two tidbits that make it even easier:
1) You can delete your Gmail while keeping your Google account, and you can even use your new email address as your username for your existing Google account, so that things like Google Docs sharing still work seamlessly.
2) You don't lose your Gmail address, and you can re-enable it at any time (just in case you discover a critical account or something that you forgot to switch over).
Timely for me, as I have been noodling over the last few months about whether to keep my personal site. Fwiw since hosting has been mentioned I'll give a shoutout to rochen.com. They've been hosting my site on a vps for years, good pricing and awesome service.
Personally I left GMail & others Google services for similar reasons: I need my data in my hand, I know they are substantially public but at least I can own them locally.
It's understandable to want your own domain and control of your site. Wordpress is a good option but a self-hosted installation is not as reliable as using something like Blogger. With proper caching it should be able to handle a large number of visitors, but there's still security issues and the like that can affect it.
Scaling a blog is not a big of an issue these days. Even with Wordpress, caching and other optimizations should not be a hassle. There are also many other alternatives in the static-site realm.
Blogger is not as good an option as it was before. It was an attractive buy for google at the time of the acquisition. But now they have stopped using it even for their own blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if Google decides to shut down blogger in the near future.
I have no idea who this person is, nor do I have much to add about the Google+ thing (person uses Google services, get completely fucked over for literally no reason, is surprised, this is not a remotely new narrative, just standard Google user problems).
The new site has TLS (partially) configured, but doesn't upgrade users to it, making it effectively non-existent. I'm not sure if moving off of Google services to an insecure site for something like a blog is better or worse.
Probably better, as it provides a path forward for moving to a secure, de-Googled platform
