On 03/02/2011 the experiment with Google Sites finally ended. I had moved my email hosting to a combination of regular POP mailbox accounts and Exchange Mail hosted by GoDaddy.com on 11/29/2010. The email situation, for me, was unacceptable. I got the feeling that Google didn’t employ any Spam filtering at all. I would have to clean up 50 to 100 spam messages per day and emptying the spam folder was not an option because buried in the long, long list of emails in the junk folder (not a folder at all, just a tag actually) may be one legitimate email. I can’t tell you how many times I must have deleted a legitimate mail because at 5:30 AM I just didn’t see it… It’s funny that once I moved my email address to my POP mailbox, I’ve gotten no junk mail in my online webmail junk folder even though I have junk mail filtering turned off at the account level (I let Outlook decide what’s spam). It’s suspicious to me how all those sex related junk emails seem to come in only on Google’s mail servers.
My web site is fairly simple (no reflection on my abilities but a maid’s bed is never made as the saying goes) and so I was OK with leaving the www.appdataworks.com hosting on the Google Sites part of my Google Apps account. Until I discovered WordPress. I had done another site around the new WordPress 3.1 architecture and I’ve got to say that except for the primitive WYSIWYG editor in WordPress (what’s up with that?) the CMS features and open architecture are pretty excellent for most sites. I’m actually excited about something Web related again, but mainly from the customization and PHP language standpoint.
So the final straw happened on 01-Mar-2011 when suddenly, without warning, the main administrator account for my Google Apps account was disabled due to “suspicious activity”. No warning. No email notification. No idea it was happening until I couldn’t log on to my home page (I use a special home.appdataworks.com iGoogle page and it was inaccessible) then spent hours trying to figure out how to contact Google which is nearly impossible if you don’t have a paid account. I ended up on forums and self-help documentation trying to find one way, any way possible to contact Google and say “What’s Up with my ADMIN account?”. Finally, a link posted on a message board seemed to work, but I submitted it twice in a four hour period (HELP my ADMIN account is disabled) and got no response.
But what suspicious activity? The login is used only for Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and Apps administration. Email has been turned off for all accounts. Since I received no notification or explanation, I have no idea what this violation or suspicious activity was.
OK, so yes it’s in their terms of service that they can disable an account without warning or cause, but in all my years of experience I’ve never seen it actually happen. Usually you get a call, or an email letting you know that suspicious activity caused your account to be locked out and here’s how you resolve this. Luckily for me, I was able to use another Admin login I had set up for another user. Once in my Account settings, I could not enable the main admin account. It appeared to be permanently locked out.
So, that was the end for me. Between the Spam and the even remote possibility that a master account owner’s account can become disabled without warning or notice with no clear path to resolution, I decided to move the site to WordPress hosted on my GoDaddy account. And I’m not sorry I did it. I love the WordPress architecture and I think in time I should be doing some pretty cool stuff with it for Clients (even if I use other peoples code in the form of plugins and complex templates– that’s win-win!).
I’ll still continue to use Google Sites for sub-domain type stuff if needed, like calendar, docs, etc., but I’m looking seriously at totally switching everything to my own SharePoint site that I have control over. At least with GoDaddy, there is 24/7 access to support personnel and they’re located right here in the USA – a major tech employer in fact, and I’m a big fan of supporting jobs here in the US.
Jerry Boutot, MCAD, MCP
Owner / Developer / Consultant
AppDataWorks, LLC
