<story><title>Tell HN: Transfer your Google domain to other registrar before it locks you out</title><text>I have been running imagetoexcel.com registered with Google Domain. The service is live since May 2019 with 1000 DAUs. I have auto-renewal turned on, so every year it renews for one year charging my credit card linked in the account. I lost my cards in February, so I had to block my cards with the bank. Apparently, in May, Google Services tried to take the payment and hit a bad response from the Payment. I received an email stating the same, so when I tried to add a new card(s) it threw an error `OR-HDT-09`. Understandably they had to verify me and asked me to submit my ID, which I did. Two weeks to date no response from the Google Pay services, even on the follow-up. Now the site is down.&lt;p&gt;As a precautionary step, I&amp;#x27;ve transferred my 4 other domains to the porkbun, which was super easy. I just thought of informing fellow hacker news followers to keep them out in such a situation.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>na85</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure fastmail are great folks but if everyone who feels nervous because of Google&amp;#x27;s shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn&amp;#x27;t really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.</text></item><item><author>scrose</author><text>Anything registered with Google seems like such a risk nowadays.&lt;p&gt;A friend’s business site which I help with got removed from Google Business without warning or any known reason 2 weeks ago(they’ve been listed for over 2 years with no changes to the listing in that time). The company already lost over 50% of their regular leads during their normal peak time(it’s a junk hauling business) since their business page accounted for most of their organic searches. Even though Google states an appeal response normally takes 3 days, they haven’t heard anything for going on 2 weeks now.&lt;p&gt;This whole ordeal led me to begin forwarding all my existing emails to my own custom domain on Fastmail since seeing the result of these arbitrary bans firsthand really drove home the risk you take when using Google services. Unfortunately for my friend’s business, they really have no other options to get as much exposure for their business as a Google business listing provides.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>julianlam</author><text>This keeps being bandied around as a reason to NOT switch to Fastmail, but the truth of the matter is: if I need to get in touch with Fastmail support, I can. Easily.&lt;p&gt;That itself makes up the difference.&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, the more important part is maintaining your own custom domain, so you can switch email providers with a simple DNS update.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tell HN: Transfer your Google domain to other registrar before it locks you out</title><text>I have been running imagetoexcel.com registered with Google Domain. The service is live since May 2019 with 1000 DAUs. I have auto-renewal turned on, so every year it renews for one year charging my credit card linked in the account. I lost my cards in February, so I had to block my cards with the bank. Apparently, in May, Google Services tried to take the payment and hit a bad response from the Payment. I received an email stating the same, so when I tried to add a new card(s) it threw an error `OR-HDT-09`. Understandably they had to verify me and asked me to submit my ID, which I did. Two weeks to date no response from the Google Pay services, even on the follow-up. Now the site is down.&lt;p&gt;As a precautionary step, I&amp;#x27;ve transferred my 4 other domains to the porkbun, which was super easy. I just thought of informing fellow hacker news followers to keep them out in such a situation.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>na85</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m sure fastmail are great folks but if everyone who feels nervous because of Google&amp;#x27;s shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn&amp;#x27;t really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.</text></item><item><author>scrose</author><text>Anything registered with Google seems like such a risk nowadays.&lt;p&gt;A friend’s business site which I help with got removed from Google Business without warning or any known reason 2 weeks ago(they’ve been listed for over 2 years with no changes to the listing in that time). The company already lost over 50% of their regular leads during their normal peak time(it’s a junk hauling business) since their business page accounted for most of their organic searches. Even though Google states an appeal response normally takes 3 days, they haven’t heard anything for going on 2 weeks now.&lt;p&gt;This whole ordeal led me to begin forwarding all my existing emails to my own custom domain on Fastmail since seeing the result of these arbitrary bans firsthand really drove home the risk you take when using Google services. Unfortunately for my friend’s business, they really have no other options to get as much exposure for their business as a Google business listing provides.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kcartlidge</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;if everyone who feels nervous because of Google&amp;#x27;s shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn&amp;#x27;t really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In these discussions it&amp;#x27;s not really about the &lt;i&gt;volume&lt;/i&gt; of people using a single provider, but about &lt;i&gt;individual&lt;/i&gt; users relying on a single provider to perform multiple functions.&lt;p&gt;So the issue of over-reliance on a single provider is usually in the context of that provider being in a situation to take offence at something unrelated and apply penalties that impact other things you actually rely on.&lt;p&gt;For example Google don&amp;#x27;t like something you do related to YouTube or AdSense and they kill your account. Now you&amp;#x27;ve got no email and your domain expires as you can&amp;#x27;t pay for it.&lt;p&gt;In these kinds of cases it &lt;i&gt;exactly&lt;/i&gt; solves the problem as the vital stuff is not affected by shenanigans with the everyday stuff because you&amp;#x27;ve spread the functions across multiple providers.</text></comment>