
This blog has moved - mayankkaizen
https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2018/09/this-blog-has-moved.html
======
arayh
This appears to be a common experience. Google has been terrible at
communicating reasons for account suspension. Here's a more detailed account
on a similar suspension:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/04/life_without_google_when_my_account_was_suspended_i_felt_like_i_d_been_dumped.html)

~~~
tyingq
They also aren't granular. So you could lose access to all Google products for
violating terms on one of them.

~~~
sephware
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.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
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?

~~~
bigiain
Here's a guy, who admittedly was doing something really dumb, but managed to
get his entire company's email accounts suspended:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_gettin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8kvias/tifu_by_getting_google_to_ban_our_entire_company/)

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.

~~~
kelnos
A follow-up post
([https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/8l231x/google_banned_an_entire_company_gsuite_accounts/dzf8cuq/))
seems to indicate that the post you've linked to is most likely a fake TIFU
story.

~~~
bigiain
Yeah well, reddit, huh?

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...

~~~
MrEldritch
"Well, sure, it's fake, but the fact that _I believed it_ sure says something
_anyway_..." is the worst argument.

~~~
Dylan16807
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...

------
benwerd
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](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.

~~~
djhworld
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?

~~~
nielsole
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

------
Boulth
Posting something on Google+ can be a reason for account suspension? Glad I
never used that.

By the way what an interesting atmosphere for Google on their 20th birthday.

~~~
snaky
Google has been uhm _celebrated_ for about a week on the first HN page for one
reason or another.

~~~
derefr
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.

~~~
reitanqild
> ... do something fun and goodwill-promoting toward their brand on their 20th
> birthday...

And I know what they decided on: free hidden advertising for every competitor!

Look how mant people went to Firefox and Vivaldi this week and how many went
to Bing, Duckduckgo or Qwant.

~~~
dredmorbius
Any numbers on this?

------
scrollaway
I'll throw in my recommendation for Ghost if others also want to move their
blog to "a site they control and a company they pay":

[https://ghost.org/](https://ghost.org/)

They provide paid hosted services, or you can self-host it as it's free and
open source
([https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)). Far
better than wordpress. You write posts in Markdown. Editor is really nice.

Example blogs:

[https://spreadprivacy.com/](https://spreadprivacy.com/)

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/)

[https://articles.hsreplay.net/](https://articles.hsreplay.net/)

~~~
canadianwriter
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.

------
reaperducer
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.

~~~
vezycash
>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.

Not only that, my Gmail account was blocked too.

------
jwr
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.

~~~
cm2187
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.

------
londons_explore
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.

~~~
eponeponepon
Do you do this incrementally? Or just grab everything every time? If the
former, I'd be interested to hear how you go about it :-)

edit: actually, scratch the 'if', I'd be interested to hear the rough shape of
your script anyway!

~~~
londons_explore
It just uses selenium to automate clicking on
[https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout](https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout)

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.

------
mwexler
Wow, someone saying nice things about Dreamhost. A rare thing to see.

~~~
woofcat
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.

~~~
user5994461
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.

~~~
milesvp
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.

~~~
user5994461
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.

------
netgusto
The article posted on G+ is this one I believe:
[https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2018/09/two-hour-
marathon-i...](https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2018/09/two-hour-marathon-
in-2031-maybe.html)

The only thing I could see violating TOS would be a misinterpretation of this
proposition:

> Note that this model is based on data from races.

Where "races" would be taken for "Human races" rather than "Sport races" (as
intended).

------
Alir3z4
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](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.

------
the8472
It boggles my mind why people would link their accounts.

Use more baskets for your eggs, not larger ones.

~~~
aidenn0
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.

------
z3t4
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_.

------
djsumdog
Anyone have a link to the article the OP posted on G+ to get the account
suspension?

~~~
mayankkaizen
Someone has posted the probable link elsewhere in the comment thread.

------
homero
Losing my Google account would probably destroy my life, I'm in so deep
switching would be extremely difficult

~~~
justusthane
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.)

Google, to their credit, makes it very easy to download all your data:
[https://takeout.google.com](https://takeout.google.com)

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).

------
markbnj
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.

~~~
snaky
Your domain may be canceled without even a notice any day. Unless you use a
very expensive domain registrar like MarkMonitor.

"Zoho.com CEO says domain with 40M users suspended for abuse complaint"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18059792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18059792)

------
rataata_jr
I generate static HTML pages with hakyll (Jekyll in Haskell) with DO. Couldn't
be happier.

------
xte
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.

------
gpvos
This is why I have a handful of separate Google accounts for different things.
And I even seldom use those.

~~~
swift532
Depending on how well you separate them, they might link them together.

------
sodosopa
Dreamhost is a gamble. Be careful, there are far better hosts.

------
nikkiofearth
huh...I have officially seen enough of these that I am also going to migrate
away from Google....like today.

------
arikrak
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.

~~~
keshab
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.

------
markovbot
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

