Just as a FYI, all google products, including gmail are currently down as of December 14, 2020.
Which is annoying since I have Google Drive on my Mac and it keeps popping up with a sign-in box.
Try ownCloud @scott
We migrated everything away from Google and our entire team (and many of our associates) now use it (ownCloud) as a replacement. Superb support, plugins, and multi-platform. Works the same as DropBox, Google Drive etc. Simple tray application, seamless syncing. FREE!
I’m not sure how ownCloud works @Dave.
I currently have about 40 GB in email with gmail and over 2 TB in google drive.
I’m grandfathered in with G Suite services and have unlimited space that I currently pay $10 a month for and in the over a decade I have been using it, this is the first time I can remember it going down.
If you have hosting set-up takes a few minutes via a very simple script. Storage limits set by you based on server storage limits of course. Assign users, groups, etc. All straight forward. We did the painful migration over from Google not only due to mounting costs but just the risk of losing access to vital data. Can’t remember what triggered this event but we have not looked back.
$10.00 a month is great if you can access your data!
…sorry not a big fan of Google.
Ah I see, it uses the web hosting that you have. My current web host provider, NameCheap, offers unlimited storage with their shared server package, but caps the number of files at 300,000, so I do not think ownCloud would work for me.
When it comes to web hosting, I have stuck with NameCheap because we have specific things that we need and we get all of it with them for about $180 US a year.
The 300,000 limit is annoying, but as far as web hosting goes, we currently have about 160,000 files on our WordPress site. This will change once we get our Wappler site up and running and the file count will go down significantly.
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Limits imposed by hosts can be painful indeed. Especially with growth. Another reason we selected to deploy our own servers. Easy to throw in another SSD and costs about €30.00. Savings are significant but there are other costs to consider. Thankfully the decision paid off for us in that regard. Wappler is another addition that saves us an absolute fortune, not only monetarily, but all the time saved too!
Best of luck with your project @scott
+1 for self hosting and moving away from google.
I am more a https://nextcloud.com/ fan though which is a fork of owncloud btw.
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@JonL, NextCloud looks very interesting. Is the email part as good as Gmail? The biggest feature of Gmail I need is the labels so multiple labels can be assigned to email threads instead of the limitation of folders where an email can only be located in one folder.
Also, is there a migration option for existing emails from Google Workspace?
No, it doesn’t. It has been requested though.
Additionally it is just a mail client. You would still need to host a mail server and next cloud will connect to it.
I think people should be aware that Google Workspace (ex. G Suite and Enterprise) customers do not fall under the same Privacy and tracking methods as their Free users. I must admit it’s hard for some to trust what they say but:
The customer – not Google – owns their data. Google does not sell your data to third parties, there is no advertising in Google Workspace and we never collect or use data from Google Workspace services for any advertising purposes.
I looked at moving our organisations data over to OwnCloud but by the time I’d designed, bought or rented a decent box to install it on, factored in the time to setup and check the underlying hardware is operating ok and up-to-date, and to keep on top of any additional firewall or security add-ons, $6/month per user for Email, 30GB per user cloud storage, Video conferencing, Calendar, Microsoft office alternative, chat and form builder is extremely good value for money.
Let’s be honest, can you remember the last time Google went down for 45 minutes? Our Digital Ocean VPS had a network outage last month in the London datacenter (plus others I believe too) which went on for nearly three hours 
Each product has its place and if it were me alone, I’d use OwnCloud but the price and convenience outweighs the time spent on implementing our own team cloud solution and mail server
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The company I work for was a google apps client but there were too many issues regarding privacy matters for a privacy-first business as we are. Even as a paid customer.
Eventually we moved to O365 and happy since.
But for my own small needs I always go self-hosted were possible.
I do get your point about cost though.
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My gripe with Google is the switch from G-Suite to Workplace where the business package has gone from unlimited storage to 2TB per user. Yes, 2TB is a lot but it’s still a limit. Unlimited meant I could literally put everything in there and never worry about space.
I think this is one of the reasons the pricing changed, as people were taking advantage of the unlimited storage for other purposes
Yeah, but frustrating for those of us who weren’t. 
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It wasn’t just Google that went down, YouTube and all of its services went down, too. I would imagine, this must have been a problem for people who sign into non-Google services using Google as their sign in id.
I think it was strange that Google went down not long after the U.S. government said they had been hacked. My guess is that Google didn’t go down but rather Google took their services down as soon as they knew there had been a U.S. government breach. It would make sense for them to shut down before any major virus/hack got into their system via government network.
Just a guess of course but I never found out why all their services went down at the same time. Surely Google has multiple separate platforms and back up strategies that run independently of each other which is why I think Google purposely closed down all their networks all the same time.
