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Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th?
- nacs 13y ago"I'll keep trying - maybe someone at Google could help?" Doubtful. Getting support from Google is pretty much impossible (you do have slightly increased chances since you've put it on HN however). If I were you, I'd initiate a domain transfer to a different registrar that will actually provide support when you need it before your domain expires. Even if you're lucky enough to have Google resolve the issue this time, you may not be so lucky in the future and there are numerous domain registrars that would handle your domain better than Google will.
- rhizome 13y agoWhat are you talking about, I saw "The Internship." Google has enough phone support to tell grandmothers how to fix GMail problems. Likely a manager will be cut over this, just like the snooty guy who led the other team in the movie. /s
- tjtrapp 13y agolol i was just thinking the same thing. as much as i know these comments do not help the OP, i cant help but think, as i sat there watching w my family, how their perception of googles help desk has been setup to be one of "OMG they're even amazing at help desk".
- EdwardDiego 13y ago> I saw "The Internship." Me too, as such, you have my sympathies.
- rhizome 13y agoSnark all you like, but I think it's perfectly reasonable (if not required) to hold Google to the standards they paid Vince Vaughan to portray them having.
- EdwardDiego 13y agoI don't disagree with your point, I just hope working for Google isn't as humourless as portrayed in the film.
- rhizome 13y agoOoh, I suspect it's even more so. Careerism is a harsh mistress.
- doubledub 13y agoYep. Follow nacs's advice. I ran into a similar problem when using Google Apps and registering a domain name. Google often uses services like domainsbyproxy.com to reserve domains for users. Your DNS console is buried in something like that. It's janky and frustrating... but figure out your DNS access info, "unlock" your domain, and get it away from Google to avoid these sorts of problems.
- fat0wl 13y agohmmmmm i know "i told you so"s are annoying but i wouldnt register a domain name with a service other than a full-on registrar. then you could always change hosting or even scrap the blog entirely but still keep your address (and hopefully traffic...)
- knowitall 13y agoWhy not move the domain?
- jimktrains2 13y agoI don't think it's a matter of the domain, but blogger recognizing it and serving up his blog. I'm not sure though, that's just my reading of it.
- fsckin 13y agoThey like using the service Google provides and they really want to continue paying for it. Not everyone gets their rocks off serving a popular website and tuning the dozens of arcane knobs to make it hum as well as Google can. They probably don't want to pay $$$$ for someone else to move it and/or host it. Migrating years of posts and all the comments... that's a decent sized job. Even if the export/import to some other blogging engine was nearly perfect (Hint: it's not all roses and perfume), there's a dozen or more billable hours involved to make it run exactly the way it did before on another host. That's probably more than he spends in a year at the current location. ...and so on. There are plenty of good reasons not to move it.
- dangrossman 13y agoI don't think he was suggesting switching hosts but domain registrars. Not only does Blogger let you bring your own domain from any registrar while hosting with them, but they stopped selling domain registration themselves at some point in the past. Transferring the domain should be completely transparent to Google; the website doesn't need to move or be changed at all.
- alternize 13y agobeen there - getting support for free accounts is almost impossible. you might be able mitigate the problem by upgrading to a google apps business account and receive support through it. i've used their email support through a paid apps account several time, the problems were always resolved promptly.
- alternize 13y agoyour blog's name is awesome for story submissions: 'what risky thing is she/he doing which might anger google?!' click EDIT: this comment was made under the original title "Calculated Risk: Will Google Kill my Blog on December 6th? (calculatedriskblog.com)"
- eldridgea 13y agoWhen you updated your info did you update it in Google Wallet? Google Checkout was only very recently completely deprecated so make sure it is updated at http://wallet.google.com http://wallet.google.com. Also, do you have any communication from when you configured the account? That would be useful. What may have happened is you set up a Google Apps For Your Domain account (which would have been free at the time of your registration). If that is the case you would need to login into Google Wallet with your Google Apps account - xxxx@calculatedriskblog.com and update the payment information for that account (as opposed to your normal Gmail).
- masterleep 13y agoCalculated Risk is a huge blog in the financial space. It would definitely behoove Google to avoid its erasure.
- pgrote 13y agoEven if you use the recommended support channels such as Groups, your request goes nowhere. I've run into this reporting issues for Google Now and Picasa Web. Moderators continually move or delete reports of issues. When you explain the situation and why X is more appropriate than Y you get radio silence. Has anyone actually gotten real support from Google for paid applications? Is it limited to the Groups?
- bradleyjg 13y agoI once got an automated notice from the google app engine team that said at the end: "If you have any questions about our Java 6 to Java 7 upgrade, you can reach us at google-appengine-java-6-to-7-migration@googlegroups.com" when I sent an email to that address I got a bounce with the message: "We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (google-appengine-java-6-to-7-migration) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group." --- Also Calculated Risk is a rather famous blog in certain circles, so it's kind of funny to see some of the comments here that imply it's an obscure blog whose blogmaster lucked into a front page HN post.
- byjove 13y agoI have. Google Apps support, you get to speak to a real person and everything (unless it was an advanced internal build of Google Now).
- gohrt 13y agoPicasa Web was put out to pasture a long time ago, in favor of G+ Photos.
- prawn 13y agoPicasa is now overrun with Chinese spammers using the "send to a friend"-type feature. I mark every incoming Picasa share message as spam and Gmail still lets them all through...
- andrewfong 13y ago
- JoeCortopassi 13y agoHeavily relying on Google product? ✓ Hitting a dead-end with Google's customer service? ✓ Have an existing audience you can leverage to get some random Google employee's attention? ✓ Reach front page of Hacker News? ✓ Good news! You should have your problem fixed in 2-5 business days. The rest of us suckers relying on google services get to stare at our inboxes helplessly, waiting for a response to our support ticket (which will never come). I feel like it's almost a right of passage these days to rely heavily on a Google service, only to have something go wrong and be left out in the cold.
- mikro2nd 13y ago> right of passage rite of passage
- GuiA 13y agoI've been backing up my Gmail with getmail [0], as I'm afraid that a day will come when I'll be locked out of my gmail account and will have no way to restore it. My long term solution is to migrate completely off of gmail, but for now this does the trick pretty nicely. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getmail https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Backup_Gmail_with_getma...
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAs a long time Gmail user heavily invested in it (with over 60GB of email), I'm waiting patiently for mailpile.is to get rolled out.
- mikro2nd 13y agoTake my advice - throw away every email older than 2 years. Not only will you never need them, but they're what the black hats will hang you by should they get the urge. You will feel a huge sense of relief - a weight lifted from your soul as you relinquish the crushing burden of carting about all those dead emails. (Unless, of course, you work in an industry where longer retention times are mandated.)
- raverbashing 13y agoAnother example of how Google does not do customer support. I would get the domain and move it somewhere else.
- chris_mahan 13y agoGoogle _does_ do customer support. You are not their customers. Advertisers are.
- RexRollman 13y agoIf you are directly giving Google money for a service or good, you are their customer.
- grecy 13y agoFair enough. You are not their priority customer.
- alextingle 13y agoOnly the NSA fits that category.
- 0x0 13y agoSo what you're saying is he should contact the ad team to request a price quote for running an ad for "how do i avoid having google shut down my blog?" :)
- yackob03 13y agoThis will get a response, not because you are trying to pay Google money, but because you are trying to use the word "google" in an ad. Had an ad for an App Engine related service blocked for a few days until a human could verify that the message containing the word "google" was appropriate.
- raverbashing 13y ago
- Gaurav322 13y agoTransfer your domain to another domain hosting service. You can use godaddy and bigrock to transfer your domain.
- alex_young 13y agoApparently the answer was no: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/12/monday-ism-manufacturing-construction.html http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/12/monday-ism-manufac...
- Hates_ 13y agoI don't think it's the 6th of December yet.
- kevinrpope 13y agoThe post said the deadline was December 6th - so he won't know until this Friday.
- kreeben 13y agoFrom my friend at Google: "It looks like he used the wrong account to update his credit card. He has a Google Apps account connected to his Blogger/url purchase, this is the account he needs to update in Google Wallet."
- nl 13y agoA perfect example of what a complete screw up the whole multiple Google Account thing is. I can't suggest a better solution, but wow - it sucks at the moment. Edit: Would it be possible to find out from the friend at Google if they are doing anything to report this anomaly to users? The author can't be the only person this happened to, and given that Google knows this, perhaps it would be useful if the error message reflected what was going on? Perhaps fixing that error message would be a better use of resources than trying to improve support?
- masterleep 13y agoIt's a bag of hurt.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoThat's an excellent tag line to describe Google Support.
- xixixao 13y agoI honestly thought this was going be an article on probability: Given the frequency of Google shutting down its services, what is the likelihood of my blog service being terminated on December 6th?
- bukster 13y agoSame thing happened to me. It ended up being my bank denying the charge rather than Google. Check with your bank.
- cabbeer 13y agoJust curious, how is Microsoft's support in this department? Has anyone dealt with customer support for hotmail/outlook, skydrive, etc ?
- dredmorbius 13y agoSome years back I determined that Microsoft had a massive problem with spam transiting their network. I found a Sr. VP's name associated with the service, phoned the main switchboard, and asked for him. He picked up his phone on the first ring. I briefly described the issue (and how I'd determined it was a problem), he told me he'd have the appropriate manager get in touch with me later that day. I received that call 15 minutes later, and worked with the manager (submitting specific emails and identifying where on their network the problems were manifesting) for a couple of months during which time the spam volumes fell well over 90%. Part of the trick is knowing how to navigate / manipulate the system, and finding a problem they acknowledge as theirs. But in that particular case (and a small handful of others) I found the company highly responsive. Now, several years later when I'd bought both a shrinkwrap product and support contract to specifically resolve a data issue with a product of theirs, I got sandbagged. Demanded my money back for the contract. And no, I'm not a fan of Microsoft. But they do (at times at least) know how to run a business.
- teh_klev 13y agoI've emailed Scott Guthrie a couple of times with regard to a couple of ASP.NET issues I felt warranted his team's attention rather than use that "Connect" bug reporting crap. After three or four hours he forwarded my emails to "the right people" and cc'd me and I got to work with these folks resolving the issues at hand via email. Was a pretty good experience and Scott is a top bloke.
- tempestn 13y agoI briefly used Microsoft's Azure Bing custom search engine, or whatever they call it. I found the support to be extremely responsive and reasonably knowledgeable, even though I was only spending a few hundred a month. That said, the actual product features and terms of use were both significantly behind both Yahoo BOSS (which uses the same Bing index) and Google's search API. (One particularly terrible term was that you can't use it on pages with any advertising besides Yahoo/Bing ads.)
- smoyer 13y agoWas there a post somewhere in the midst of all the ads? On my first generation iPad it's a tiny fraction of the screen.
- Osiris 13y agoI work at GoDaddy and recently our CEO read an email from a customer who had been encouraged by a son to use Google services for his small business, but when he couldn't figure out some issue with support ("they talked way over my head"), he called GoDaddy and found someone that worked to get his account setup. Google probably, appropriately, calculates the cost of providing good customer support to hundreds of millions of people as way too high. But by doing so, they do leave open the door to smaller companies to compete, not on the product, but on the service and support. Google could, at the very least, make sure that it provides sufficient support for all billing related issues. If a customer is paying for a product and there's a problem with their billing, they should be able to get a person on the phone or web chat to resolve it if the online tools are insufficient.
- jonny_eh 13y agoYou know you're support is awful when GoDaddy makes you look bad.
- thaumaturgy 13y agoI've had some good experiences with GoDaddy support recently, including one case where a client's site had a custom php-mailer whose messages seemed to be disappearing into a black hole somewhere, and the front line support tech (not even tier 2) read the PHP code in question, determined it was fine, checked the mail queue, and verified there was a problem on their end. "Surprised" doesn't quite capture my response to that. I'm still not a fan of GoDaddy the company, GoDaddy the infrastructure, or GoDaddy the horrifyingly bad control panel "interface", but GoDaddy support could teach Google a lot.
- nivla 13y agoKeeping aside Godaddy's ethical issues, their support is actually pretty good, definitely above industry average. The times I had to contact them in the past, they did go the extra mile to resolve the issue and even waived any invloved fees. Don't know why I feel this way but now a days getting phone support (especially 24/7) seems like a miracle. So apart from my moral compass going wonky, I have no real complaints about them. Other services I tried: Namecheap: Decent prices, great support, beware of domains with certain keywords (would require approval). Gandi: Decent prices (Free Whois guard), poor support, beware of moral clause in TOS.
- mwnz 13y agoWhy on earth does this have 144 points? I want my 20 seconds back :)
- babuskov 13y agoFWIW, if they do shut it down, at least you can say it went off with a bang (I mean, traffic from HN) ;)
- cabbeer 13y agoIf Microsoft was smart this is where they would attack google, instead we have the "Scroogled" campaign. I think they're in the same position (in this department) as apple was when they made this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UZV7PDt8Lw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UZV7PDt8Lw
- Niv_Atias 13y agoIf your site contains valueable information, so why would Google will delete your site?
- ChuckMcM 13y agoGiven that I haven't been pummelled with email about how Blogger is going to become "Google + compliant" I'm guessing that the answer is "No, they won't kill your blog." And they won't charge your credit card. And next spring they will announce that Blogger is being shut down and you can move your Blog over to your own Google+ page! And then you will get to decide what you want to do next. But that is just a theory, my experience of late is that when Google stops talking about a service, and responses stop coming back, the reason is that the service is on the list to be killed off and anyone inside Google that was working on it, already knows that, and have already transferred to some other project.
- Of_Prometheus 13y agoI'd love to know just how much of a possibility there is of this happening. I've spent a lot of time customising and tine-tuning my own blog, so I've no interest in seeing it turn into one of millions of generic Google+ "blogs".
- tlogan 13y agoI had the same problem with Google Cloud account (for API and App engine). The problem is that changing CC number by following link in the email will not update your CC. You need to go to https://wallet.google.com https://wallet.google.com and update your CC.
- alextingle 13y agoThe big brains at Google can't design a workflow to allow you to continue paying them? Was it even tested?? Words fail me.
- donniezazen 13y agoOne of the worst things, universally known, about Google is virtually no customer service even for paid users.
- ChrisArchitect 13y agowhy not contact the admin email on the whois information for the domain, or go through ENOM which is who google seems to have run this operation through....they can probably help renew or get payment information updated......
- mark_l_watson 13y agoA few weeks ago I transferred a domain I bought from Google for AppEngine to my 'usual' domain registration service. Very easy to do, but it took 5 days for the transfer to kick in. I wish you had posted this earlier because this could have been a solution for you. That said, try it right now, and maybe it will work OK when Google/GoDaddy drop your domain.
- chrisBob 13y agoFirst: Try repeating everything with a different browser. I couldn't update my adwords payment information recently in Safari, but I had no trouble doing it with Firefox. It sounds like you have a different issue, but that could do it. Google sites are all a little funny with anything other than Chrome.