About a week ago, Google unceremoniosly suspended my gmail account, which I only use for extremely important emails (like for domain registration). The FAQs indicate that it might be a temporary 24-hour lockout, or a permanent shutdown, but no way to determine which is true in my case. Filling out web forms to the support team and waiting multiple 24-hour periods hasn’t worked (yet). I’m going to work on the assumption that Google isn’t going to help me out. Apparently, this is happening to lots of other folks and they’re not getting anywhere either.
Here is why I care: I have about a dozen domain names, all registered with directnic.com. Many years ago, I started purchasing unmanaged VPS space from one VPS provider. Things went well, until one day, they didn’t. I was naïve enough to host my own DNS servers on the same servers where I was providing web space. Although I had backups, and little delay provisioning another VPS from another provider (making sure it ran a different virtual management product), and uploading my backups to the new VPS, I still had to wait between 1 and 3 days for DNS changes to my domain registrations to propagate through the DNS system before all my webhost customers were completely back up. Because of this lesson, I changed all my domain registrations to point to EditDNS’s DNS servers, so that if this happened again, I could make the change immediately to another provider by editing my zone records at EditDNS.net.
I also gave a lot of thought to my email setup, selecting “GMail for Domains” to host my person accounts at timjones.com, linuxtampa.com, sunshinebrass.com, etc. This means having my MX records at editdns.net point to servers within Google. This also got me out of the arms race of defending my SMTP server at my VPS provider from SPAM and hack attack, and having to update SpamAssassin all the time. At a moment’s notice I could repoint my MX records to any other SMTP provider (even my own VPS servers) and recover from that. All was well, except for one major flaw: that all my domain registrations point to my gmail (NON-domain) account (____@Gmail.com).
I never though the big G would let me down on a such a simple low-volume, non-spammed account. So much for the backup plan.
Directnic.com has always served me well: based in New Orleans, LA they even had no apparent downtime even during Hurricane Katrina, which impressed me greatly. I have no reason to abandon them, but this episode made my realize that my decision to use ONLY directnic.com for my domain registrations is really another single point of failure.
So, to improve my redundancy further, I’m doing two more things:
- I’m moving a couple of my domains to another provider, and making sure that my domain registrations contain email addresses that span across the two registrars.
- I’m going to not rely on FREE email any longer, not even from Google. You must remember this: to the companies who give away resources, we are NOT the customer. We are the PRODUCT. The customer is the ADVERTISER.
