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.<p>As a precautionary step, I'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.
Anything registered with Google seems like such a risk nowadays.<p>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.<p>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.
Sorry to hear, and good warning for anyone still relying on Google for anything critical really (business or personal).<p>The moral here I'd say is transfer any service you have with a company that doesn't even have the possibility of customer-service, with everything running with crappy ml models (that get them probably around 40% accuracy and product managers are fighting about how/who can fix it, or even if they should).<p>Leave any company that has automated customer service with AI.
Something's wrong at Google. I was trying to setup my new startup with a project on GCP and had a very similar problem. I was told to go to a page, upload my ID and wait. Four weeks went by without an answer. Finally, I opened a customer support ticket and got a response 3 days later that said they'd asked the other group to validate my account. Another day passed and I was approved to give them money.<p>Lol, no. I had long since taken my business elsewhere.
Google marked my Google Payments account as fraud for some unknown reason last year and it won't allow me to put in a credit card. They have a form I've filled out 2-3 times that requires my Drivers License, etc. I've never received a response and I still can't add a credit card.<p>This broke my Gmail account (I was over the free limit) and I had to migrate everything to fastmail and delete a ridiculous amount of mail.<p>This also broke my domains DNS resolution, I had no idea my custom domain didn't have mail flowing until people told me they were getting bouncebacks.<p>This broke all of my app subscriptions.<p>Since then I've de-googled everything, including my phone. The only thing I can't get off is SSO but I use email as much as possible now. If they nuke my SSO login I will be screwed.
I started moving everything off of Google last year. Two months ago I finally moved the last piece, which was my domain. There's just too many of these Google horror stories. To lose access to your most important account, with no recourse, because of an innocent slip up (or even something completely out of your control) is unacceptable.<p>Its amazing how Google transformed itself from "a convenient place to centralize my digital life", to "I've made a huge mistake" this quickly.
Don't ever trust your business, hobby, important services to a company without a working customer support. Mistakes do happen, and when they happen, you need someone to react quickly.<p>Since I moved my custom domain mail hosting out of Google, I don't have to worry anymore. I finally put my Google password in a password manager, since I don't use it that often.<p>Nowadays, I would recommend using Google account only for a throwaway stuff, like setting up a new Android phone, E-Mail used for spam, etc, ... for anything <i>real</i>, thanks but no thanks.
Something tangentially related happened to me: After my wife's card was cloned and used, I decided to block all my cards. My banks allow me to use their app to block and unblock my cards at will. So I decided to block all of them and then only unblock them when I am going to use them.<p>I got a surprise that *most companies, including Google!! do not support this*. Apparently, Tidal, Google (all Google related billing including Youtube, Google Domains, etc), DigitalOcean, among others attempt to bill you at some random time during the night/early-morning. Of course when they tried to charge my card the payment was rejected as it was blocked.<p>I contacted all those services asking them the process to <i>actively</i> perform the payment (like, me clicking a button so that they could charge me), but they DON'T have that option. AWS surprised me, because they DO have an option to charge on demand.<p>How is it possible that something so simple like that is not commonplace? So now, I have to leave one card unblocked, exposed to being stolen, so that all these half cooked services can bill me (I got several warnings from Google Domains saying that my payment could not be processed). At the end, I left a card with $500 USD limit permanently unlocked... but I shouldn't have to.
I had a google ads account and I misconfigured the payment details. Something in my configuration google didnt like, and it banned me for life from using Google Ads until I "resolve the issue". The domains I was trying to advertise on are also banned from being used on Google Ads. There's no one to contact, no response, just rejections and no answers.
I wonder if consumer protection agencies can do anything.<p>State level ones may exist, but maybe we can convince the CFPB to strongarm corporations into the desired compliance over matters like this
<i>I cant edit the post, hence posting an update</i><p>I guess this has brought the attention at the Google. The verification is done. I was able to renew immediately. The site is up and running now. I am going to transfer this domain too under porkbun.
My mum's phone was stolen last week, got her a new phone two days later but couldn't login to her gmail account while setting up the new phone.<p>I created the email myself, so I retrieved her password from bitwarden but couldn't login. Confused, I tried the same password multiple times, then tried the 'forgot password' feature, entered her phone number and got another shock when google asked me to get a code from my samsung galaxy S20 app - I don't use galaxy.<p>Google refused to send a reset code to her phone number even when I provided the original password.<p>Turns out she needed some contacts the previous day and asked my siblings for help. They used the forgot password feature, got a code through the retrieved SIM card, changed the password and logged in through an app on a samsung galaxy phone.<p>It's crazy, someone who didn't know the password could change it. But I who
had both the original password and the SIM card but couldn't.<p>We'd have lost her contacts if it was thief who changed her password before we retrieved her SIM card.
This scares me. I have a .dev domain, though managed through Cloudflare. I feel like I should get another from another gTLD not owned by Google...<p>What do you all think, are the .dev domains safe enough?
Google keeps shooting itself in the foot.<p>Trying to save a lousy dollar here and there they're destroying billions of dollars of goodwill that'll be hard, slow and expensive to rebuild.
Paying Google for things was a massive pain in the ass for us at times too, until we were "big enough". I don't know exactly how we earned the privilege of easy payments, and there may have been some decision other than a mechanical threshold.<p>That's for work. On a personal level, I block their ASes at my router.
The problem with Google is that not only are they too big to fail but their main business is advertising - paid Google services are peanuts in comparison that doesn't even make it worthwhile for them to care about paid customers.
My personal policy is: only relay on national enterprises, possibly NOT much big, who happen to have a phone line with some humans on the other side. That's is. A secondary policy is NOT relaying (as possible) on a single company. For domains that means use different companies on different domains and advertise up front your other domains on all of them as possible so third parties can know what to do if something goes wrong.<p>Not complex, not complicated, not much expensive.
Ah ha, they wouldn't let you pay and then they blocked you for not paying? Bad scene, man. Part of the whole problem with the Google thing is that they unify payments across all properties but they're rubbish about doing it.<p>They have a good interface for buying domains, but thanks for this warning.
I’d love to transfer my remaining domains to iwantmyname, but their 2fa uses SMS, so it’s subject to trivial SIM-swap attacks :( Considering my domain is used for my email address, that’s a huge issue.