Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in the first place.

If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?

Several times, several different accounts.

Fortunately Google is (or more accurately, was) simply a convenience for me.

I have not yet fully deactivated the several Gmail accounts I have still standing, though those are largely inactive, and most are strictly associated with specific nyms I'd created (one notably after a primary nym account was suspended).

The best way to avoid having your Google account be suspended is to not have one.

But moving to self-hosting, or increasingly, entirely offline, has been a goal and project of the past few years.

I touch a few Google services directly:

- Google Scholar: still amongst the best academic search engines I'm aware of.

- Google Ngram Viewer and Google Trends: quite useful for tracking concepts over time.

- Google Maps: There are times OpenStreetMap's search simply falls down even when specifying lat/lon coordinates directly, Because Reasons. Google Maps is my fallback, but I still rely on it far more than I'd care to.

- Gmail: Secondary for several accounts.

- YouTube: still the largest online video hosting service, though alternative interfaces (https://invidio.us/) and alternate hosts (both centralised and federated or self-hosted) are increasingly viable. YouTube's UI tweaks and aggressive pre-roll ads over the past several months have been aggressively user-unfriendly.

- Google Web Search. A very distant second to DuckDuckGo, but still necessary for 1) date-bounded search, 2) getting overall counts of results (occasionally useful), and 3) rare edge-cases where DDG doesn't turn up expected/desired results (GWS is ~50% successful here).

I don't know if it's because I rely so heavily on DDG that I'm influencing its results, but I find that both searches and content that I've posted tends to turn up high-ranked on it. I'm not as aware of this with Google.

Only problem is, you have to be willing to become a moderately good sysadmin and spend your time doing the chores to keep your systems up-to-date. This takes considerable amount of time. Dropping the ball once, and you may find yourself hacked (I had this recently when being slow in updating a nginx reverse proxy).

[0] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted