Leaving G Suite (Premium)

When I moved my custom domain to Google years ago, I never imagined it would limit my access to the Internet. But it has. And I've finally had it: I'm reverting to a normal Gmail account.

This problem is pernicious, and it's a bit hard to explain. But here goes.

Google, as you know, offers services like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and others to consumers for free: All you need to do is sign up for a Google account---with a gmail.com address---and you're good to go. In fact, that gmail.com requirement is, in some ways, the primary difference between this offering and what Microsoft offers with its Microsoft account: Microsoft has offered multiple domains---hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, and outlook.com---over the years for whatever reason.

Google used to offer a way to open an account with a custom domain too. It was called Google Apps For Your Domain back in the day---it launched in 2006---and for a low fee of $50 per year, you basically had access to all of the same Google services, but via a custom domain like thurrott.com.

Technically, Google Apps was always about businesses, and in the beginning, it effectively targeted the smallest businesses only. You can see how a small local business might want to get online with their own brand and identity. This was a real problem a decade ago, and Google offered a simple and inexpensive way to make it happen.

Microsoft also used to offer a custom domain feature for its Hotmail and related services called Windows Live Custom Domains. For a time, my thurrott.com domain was tied to that service, but at some point, I switched it over to Google Apps for testing purposes. That was bad timing, as Microsoft shut down the ability to sign-up for new Windows Live Custom Domain accounts while I was doing so, stranding thurrott.com with Google.

(The rise---and subsequent fall---of Outlook Premium, which offered a consumer-focused way to use your custom domain with a public email service, was obviously of interest to me. But that is no longer an option. On a side note, I also use another custom domain with my Office 365 Business Premium account.)

Even before I moved to BWW Media and started thurrott.com as my primary website, I had transitioned to using [email protected] as my primary email. This makes sense: If you know my name, you know how to contact me. But Google Apps, like the commercial versions of Office 365, has evolved a lot over the past decade. And in 2016, it was rebranded to G Suite. Today's G Suite bears little relation to the cute service that had debuted years earlier. G Suite is now as big, complex, and hard to use as Office 365 or any other enterprise-focused system. And it has been a constant frustration, on a number of levels.

Here, however, I will focus on just one of those problems. Because it has always been a problem. And the severity of this problem has become more and more acute over time. Just last night I finally realized what was really happening. And I must ...