I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons.
I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again.
This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human.
In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services.
So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.
If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?
I have a Gmail inbox that sends and receives from dozens of addresses on 4 different domains.
If Google locked me out, I could just update the forwarding rule on my domain to go to a different email.
But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life.
I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!
Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted.
If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.
https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#ipv4-ipv6-...
My rational is to align my interests with the company running the infrastructure for a fundamental component of my digital life.
Free email is fine most of the time. Until it's not. I want to limit my "until it's not" exposure.
The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
How bad is life without that filter?
I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
How does it compare to ISPmail:
* https://workaround.org/ispmail
mailinabox seems to be a 'magic script' of sorts, which ones can read through, but it seems to wave a wand and things should Just Work. ISPmail appears to be more of a set of instructions of what to run manually to reach the end goal.
How hard is it to understand what mailinabox does after running the script?
I don't really know how it works but I have been running it for 2 years and it has been fine. The hardest thing was updating to the new ubuntu LTS which involved making sure my backups were safe, wiping the vps and then restoring the backup on a fresh ubuntu install.
Because the software is strict on using only a fresh ubuntu install with nothing else on it, it all just works because you have the same config as everyone else.
I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time.
And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days.
But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.
Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.
It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to.
It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.
This doesn't help when Google decide to sunset one or more of the services that you're relying on, forcing you to migrate elsewhere or re-design