Time To Move On

This blog has been at this location for over ten years.  In the early going, I had switched my free domain name from www.clydestuff.blogspot.com to just clydestuff.com.  And it has remained that way since then.  And although my writings over the past few years have been infrequent, this domain was always part of me.  It was mine.  I owned it. 

Every year since then it has renewed automatically.  Over the past couple of years it has renewed it using my credit card I use for other Google things such as My Play and Google Drive.  But not this year.

Now Google wants to force everybody into using their biggest new thing, Gsuite.  Gsuite is their latest entity to round up businesses and get them to use Google for all everything.  At a price of course.  But no exceptions.  You use Gsuite, or you’re out whether you want it or need it.  And beyond renewing my domain, I don’t really need it. 

And using the free Gsuite to try and renew this domain was an endless nightmare.  Yet, it renewed a domain I no longer need or use, and should have expired back in May at the least, earlier if you want to take into account that it renewed the domain automatically on my credit card that was on file for other things Google besides blog renewal.  But getting and renewing this domain just wasn’t going to happen.

Even clicking on any help link or “speak to someone” did nothing but run you in circles one way or another.  Most of the time it brought up repetitive canned answers.  Or it would invite you to upgrade your Gsuite account at a huge fee to talk to a live person.  Talking to a live person (supposedly but probably not) on Twitter was about the only upgrade I could afford.  And guess what?  It did nothing but give me the same canned response I had read over and over and over and over and over for hours.

Finally after hours wasted on this, and accomplishing nothing it dawned on me that because I didn’t have thousands of dollars to stuff in Google’s wallet, that my blog and my problems meant nothing at all to them.  I mean, they’re a multi-hundreds of billions maybe trillions of dollar company.  Me?  I’m just a freeloader who paid a crummy $10 a year for my domain and $9.99 a month for storage.  So much for that.  This was my final response to them on Twitter:

I wrote some rather nasty replies last night but after calming down, I deleted them.  I have every right to be angry, but realized it accomplished nothing.  I've never had any trouble with Google until now, but when you guys step in it, you step in it bigly.

I did everything you suggest.  The best I could do was to get logged in under an old blog name that I never use anymore and should have expired a long time ago.  But I figured that would work for both of my blogs.  I was wrong.  I paid $10 and got a renewal on a damn blog I haven't used in over a year, and which should have expired a long time ago considering that credit card was out of date since 2014.

But somehow for two years, you were able to use my other credit card, the same one that pays for my Google storage, to renew my domains for two years.  But not this year.  This year you insisted that I go through Gsuite, although I have no real business, and my blog was never anything more than my own personal writings, reviews, rants and opinions, written for the most part to please myself.

And to make matters worse, I received emails from Gsuite, and emails from Enom.  I had never gone through Enom before and figured it as being Spam.  Who wouldn't?  But I tried.  Boy how I tried to renew through Gsuite but it just wouldn't let me sign in under www.clydestuff.com and did nothing but run me around in circles.  I could only hope it would renew on my same card I used for other google services including Google Drive and Google Play.  It didn't.

And last night after finding my domain gone, I tried every which way possible to renew it.  But it absolutely refused to acknowledge I had a second domain beyond the old unused corporate owned USA.  It's ridiculous that you wanted to force me into Gsuite, that I have no use for as an individual with a blog and no lofty expectations.

Initially, it wouldn't even let me revert it back to the old clydestuff.blogspot.com.  I had to finagle and jump through hoops just to get that done. It still won't even redirect people from clydestuff back to that one.  So thanks to whatever you guys think you are achieving with this, I'm basically screwed.  And enom?  I finally tried them.  They linked me back to you and your endless tail chasing.  Go figure.

I'm of a mind right now just to close up shop, take the writings that I really want and move over to Word Press.  Frankly, I don't even need Google Drive I'm paying $9.99 a month for and have mostly kept as a matter of convenience.  I can get one Terrabyte of storage on Amazon for way less than that and I'll probably do that.  They win by default after I had already planned to stick with you guys.

I suspect I'll post this letter somewhere.  Maybe I'll take a screen capture video of all the steps I tried to go through just to renew my domain, which should have been nothing more than having to update a credit card.  Then post it on youtube.  Instead, I had to have something forced down my throat which in the end, never enabled me to do what I needed to do anyway.

So I guess I'll be moving on to other pastures. Maybe not greener, but this experience has really darkened my opinion of Google blogs and unnecessarily so. I'll keep you informed.