SASS SUCKS

I am not against SASS provided the company is not a monopoly that takes the customer for granted. Unfortunately they all do. Name one that does not?

10 years ago I had a NAS server, a linux server, and a dev machine. I enjoyed having them but I was fed up with the admin overhead. Then SASS became a thing, and I embraced it with open arms, I get everything for a small fee and I did not need to worry about admin anymore.

10 years later I have no SASS subscriptions, I have a linux server, an AI server, and a dev machine. Electric consumption has gone up, but headaches have majorly gone down. Heres why I moved back.

My email provider messed me about!

I had my email with a big cloud provider, I also had contacts, documents, security management with them too. My whole life was on there and I was really happy with the service and their smart devices (!🍏). Then an update happened on my digital TV box, which triggered my cloud service into thinking I was a bot, they immediately suspended my account.

I lost access to emails, documents and AUTHENTICATION (access to all my sites). They then sent me a notification to my backup email account which I never think to open. The only thing I noticed was my streaming service had stopped working, I thought it was a bug. So I attempted to log in from all of my other devices, slowly realizing I was cut off. I then checked my backup account and in the SPAM bin was a message labeled "your account has been suspended"!

I hit the recovery link only to be told I ran out of SMS codes. I had every security mechanism setup, backup codes, passkeys, authenticator, why are you relying on an SMS code?!?!?

It took 5 WEEKS before I was issued with more SMS slots. I was subscribed to 3 different cloud services with that provider, I paid for 5 weeks, for services I could not access! Turn off my payments you thieving sods!!

So during those 5 weeks I switched to a paid email service, I moved as many accounts over as I could to the new email address. I could not move most of my subscriptions, as I could not access them. Then when I finally recovered my account and got access, I deleted all the subscriptions and moved everything off, and finally deleted that cloud account. I refuse to use that service, and I am proud to say I have convinced others not too also.

TREAT YOUR CUSTOMERS BETTER!!

My new solution

I use separate services for everything, I don't use one provider anymore. All my eggs are in different baskets. I use a dedicated authentication service, but I backup all of my access codes onto a local separate encrypted hard drive. I only use open source software on my devices, and use a shared encrypted NAS drive to back everything up. Im as bullet proof as I can be, no one cloud provider can cut me off.

One last thing to think about

Why do we use online office products, think about it! Libre office is free and AWS storage buckets are very cheap. You can make your own makeshift cloud service that you control entirely.

Lets be free of this garbage already, they failed us!