Why we hate Google--they lost our website

[balzaccom]

When we first set up our website on Google sites, we chose that option because it allowed us to easily transfer photos from our Picasa photo pages to our website.

Then Google discontinued Picasa, and moved everything over to Google photos, which meant that all of our photo links were dead.  It took us months to  move them all over....grrrrr. 

And then late last year Google announced that their Google Sites software was changing, and the platform we used for our website would no longer be supported.  Now that's what I call customer service--what a ridiculous policy.

So we moved our entire site over to the new Google Sites platform.  It's not as good for our purposed, doesn't all text wrapping for example, and it took hours and hours of time for us to move every page over.

And now Google itself can't find the new version of the site.  We've talked to our domain host provider, Go-Daddy, who says that we've done everything right.

We've searched the Google help boards, which have a lot of other people with the same issue---search for us at backpackthissierra.com and you get the dreaded 404 message. 

We hate Google with a passion.

So just in case you were looking for our site, you CAN still find it here, I think, if Google hasn't screwed this up too:

https://sites.google.com/site/backpackthesierra/home?authuser=0

And we'll keep working on a solution.  thanks to everyone who has contacted us about the problem.  Maybe send a hate mail letter to Google...

[Keystone]

I moved this thread from the Hiking and Backpacking forum.

[+on4bam]

Do I understand this correctly? You were given something for free and you now complain it's gone?

If you think your site is important enough you better pay for hosting and a domainname and take regular backups of you site in case the hosting company goes belly up and you need to move your site.

There are plenty of cheap hosters around where you are in control. Free stuff can and will go away (just look at the many missing images on cachepages that were hosted of free sites).

 

Sending hatemail to Google won't work , they will just collect as much data as possible from it to sell to "3rd party" co's.

 

[balzaccom]

I did pay for a domain name.  And yes, I set things up on Google for free.  And yes, I would love to put my site somewhere else now,  Suggestions?

 

[+on4bam]

7 hours ago, balzaccom said:

I did pay for a domain name.  And yes, I set things up on Google for free.  And yes, I would love to put my site somewhere else now,  Suggestions?

 

Does the company where you registered your domainname offer hosting? You can just search for hosting companies, look at their offers and make a choice. I'm now in the process of moving 2 sites from servers in the US (but UK hoster) to Europe (Germany). Depending on your computer skills chose a hosting co that offers "one click site creation" (that may make it difficult to move the site if you no longer are happy with them), "plain" hosting where you can install a CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, ...... or hosting with total freedom. I'm now on the latter, cloudhosting that offers an "empty " vitual computer. That means, installing an OS, webserver software, a control panel, mailserver.... before even starting on the website.

 

For maximum flexibility I would suggest not to have your domainname registered at the same place as your hosting but make sure you can manage the nameservers yourself, that makes changing hosting later easier.

 

 

[balzaccom]

Thanks On4Bam.  I am currently checking out other hosting sites.  My domain name Is with Go-Daddy,  I think I will pick someone else to host the site.

 

[balzaccom]

After a week of messing about with both Google and Go-Daddy, I made a start yesterday.  Transferred my website over to Wix, which was surprisingly painless.  I still have to edit and adapt every single page, and there are something like 800 pages on my website.  But the big move is done, and Wix could not have been easier to work with.  So far, so good.  I'll let you know in a couple of days when it goes live...

 

I have now moved most of my content over to a site on WIX.  Let me know if this link doesn't work; https://www.backpackthesierra.com/home