Lesson learnt moving from Google

Background

In the past I've has the experience of searching for information on the web and finding it in this blog. Of late I've not put a lot on this blog but I'm going start doing more as this blog is less empheral than Twitter and more public and searchable than Facebook. This has been prompted by moving my chipless.eu domain from Google where I have has to address some issues that others (or future me) might also encounter.

I've been using what was "Google apps for your domain" to host, for free, e-mail, calendars, and websites for my family and my business. Google decided that as from the middle of this year they would start charging for this hosting service and I decided I'd check what other options I had. I decided that I would use zoho.com as my new e-mail and calendar host. They seemed to be low-cost and, even so, offered more than I needed. I signed up a couple of weeks ago and I've started down the migration path. In the meantime, Google have decided not to charge for non-commercial use of their service, and so I'll be keeping my family stuff on Google. However, I'm still migrating chipless.eu

Cloud Service disabled by admin

I had to migrate chipless.eu e-mails from Google to Zoho. There's not a huge amount of historical e-mail and I could have done this "by hand" but I chose to follow Zoho's instructions. This involves using Google Cloud Services which I've never knowingly touched before. In the course of this I ran into a problem that took me a lot of time to over come. I could not create a "project". I enabled everything I could find that might be blocking it, I made sure that Google could charge me if I went over the hundreds of dollars of free service that was available, and still it seemed impossible to get my e-mail migration project set up. After many false paths, Google search led me to a StackOverflow article which asked for a solution to the same problem (unable-to-create-project-in-google-cloud-cloud-service-disabled-by-admin-plea). Google's error message was misleading, the problem was actually that there is an option ("Allow users to create projects") buried away in the Google Cloud Console which was unchecked. Once checked problem solved.