Comment by scrose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrose | Hacker News Reader

Anything registered with Google seems like such a risk nowadays.

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.

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.

My rule of thumb is that any organization playing-as-registrar, who is not deathly afraid of getting a reputation as a bad registrar, have no reason to not become a bad registrar.

In practice, this means that organizations like Google and Cloudflare, for whom the registrar business is either a cost center or at best a drop in the bucket for their revenue (and likely the pet project of a small team that is almost certainly being reallocated away from it in this economic climate), aren't registrars I would use or recommend. They can be great for other services though, where there's alternatives if there should ever be a disruption to one's account!

Back in the 2000s it used to be common advice to tell people never host anything with their registrar- your registrar should basically just be your registrar and nothing else. This way issues with your hosting (or email) can be resolved by changing providers. I think it's time to start handing this advice out again.

This guidance has never changed, IME.

Hosting and domains can be two different products, and you can just switch hosting, right? All registrars I have seen allow custom DNS so this should not be an issue.

Yeah that's the point.

They do need to keep dabbling as registrar in order to operate .dev. that's some incentive for them to not kill off the service.

Enjoying all the benefits of an otherwise-great Internet service, but where a random false positive from automation may destroy you any minute, is the modern-day version of the Sword of Damocles[1] parable. You can't really depend on any of these services, because you never know when the strand of hair will break and the sword will come down.

Self-hosting and/or moving to smaller, less full-featured hosted services, is a lot more work, but I rest easy at night knowing that my self-hosted services are always going to work.

1: https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-sword-of-damocles

I'm sure fastmail are great folks but if everyone who feels nervous because of Google's shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn't really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.

Definitely. I’m sure there’s other great email providers and would recommend people do their research :) I just already use Fastmail and while I was already forwarding some emails there, this just expedited the full migration.

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.

That itself makes up the difference.

Admittedly, the more important part is maintaining your own custom domain, so you can switch email providers with a simple DNS update.

This is the difference. There was something fastmail was doing that I didn't like and someone followed up with me to find out what's going on and try to solve my problem for me. It was also someone with real knowledge and power to get something done as well.

Yup- I've used fastmail for about three years now (previously I self hosted).

What OP is missing is that the "single provider" is about bundling dns, email, hosting, etc together. If you use Fastmail by itself and something happens to Fastmail you can change your email provider pretty easily. I do regular backups of my email anyways, so I'm not locked into Fastmail at all.

Using GMail and having your domain registered with Google means that if something bad happens and Google locks you out you are simply screwed with no recourse except running a PR campaign to hopefully get someone's attention. Even pretending like Google and Fastmail are the same (they aren't, Fastmail actually offers real support) these are still very very different scenarios.

There are also various regional email providers around the world with good pricing and good track record.

Decoupling email and domain names is an added layer of protection. If Fastmail isn’t reachable then you can port your domain elsewhere, however your domain remains a big risk.

For me the point is that if you're choosing a service provider whose only offering is that particular service (e.g. Fastmail, pCloud, domain.com, ...) then the chances of being treated as a customer and getting some level of service are orders of magnitude higher.

Fastmail support is actually responsive. Let's run this argument again if their reputation worsens.

There are two problems. One is reliance on a single provider and the other, much larger, problem to rely on a provider who makes opaque decisions that screw over their customers and don't have anyone you can talk to. That latter problem seems almost exclusive to Google.

> if everyone who feels nervous because of Google's shithousery jumps ship to fastmail it doesn't really solve the problem of overreliance on a single provider.

In these discussions it's not really about the volume of people using a single provider, but about individual users relying on a single provider to perform multiple functions.

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.

For example Google don't like something you do related to YouTube or AdSense and they kill your account. Now you've got no email and your domain expires as you can't pay for it.

In these kinds of cases it exactly solves the problem as the vital stuff is not affected by shenanigans with the everyday stuff because you've spread the functions across multiple providers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com