My site was down - Google Account Disabled

Post date: Aug 14, 2018 7:01:14 AM

2018-08-01 Google Account Disabled

My site was down, because Google suddenly without any prior warning closed my Google Account. Just by sending email that "Google Account disabled".

After I got the Google Account re-enabled, the Blog site on sites.google.com still remained closed stating: "Site Disabled - The Google Account of a site owner has been disabled because of a perceived violation of the Terms of Service. The site owner needs to restore their Google Account before this site can be viewed. Learn more".

This is a good reminder why you shouldn't trust cloud services. And if you do, at least have several backups, using different technologies, in alternate clouds & physical locations, without single administration. That's one of the reasons why I laugh, when some provider says they provide backups. I guess Google provides backups too, but it's utterly meaningless if you can't access the backups. So please, never use providers own backup service. It's silly and pointless.

2018-08-02 Google Account Re-enabled

My account is finally accessible again. But Google sites still says, that the account is suspended, and I can't access the site, nor it's publicly visible. As usual, they didn't give any information why they took the site down, nor they did provide any information after the incident. Just as usual. Kind of BOFHish. If I did something wrong, wouldn't it be right, to tell me what it was? Nor they asked to change anything. Strange.

2018-08-03 Google Sites working again

Finally the website is also accessible for public.

Conclusions

Do not trust the cloud! I do have backups of everything. I could have relocated the site using just a few hours of work. But I'm pretty sure there are many people out there, whom don't have proper backups. Which you actually in control of. What if the cloud provider just throws you out, without giving any reason? As stated, one provider already gave two weeks notice of system shutdown. But that's plenty of time, compared to sudden loss of all access. I've been also worried, that people buy services from provider X and then they use the same providers backup and all other "availability" services. Seriously? Never trust only one provider, keep at least two totally independent providers if possible. Which allows automatic fallback or quick switch from provider to another if there are serious issues. Also from disaster recovery point, it's important to remember that provider can go totally missing over night.

Keep multiple backups and control your systems! Don't trust the cloud.

I do have multiple backups, on multiple locations, using multiple technologies.

It's kind of scary to think, how many people might have basically all of their data in the cloud. Which will be lost based on my experience, sooner or later. (Geocities, MySpace, etc... It might just takes some time, or you're having issues with your credit card or whatever.)

KW: cloud, fail, risk, data loss, loss of control, IT, security, risks, backups, disaster recovery.