Tonight I took the final step in making the move away from Google. After much deliberation I made the move to migrate my Google Apps email account to FastMail. It was certainly less painful than I thought it would be and took the best part of an hour to get all three email accounts over to FastMail.

As for the other services from Google, I've found suitable replacements for many of their services over the last few weeks.

• Switched to Pages and Numbers from Google Docs - I don't have that many documents to manage and I don't need them when I am on the move, so setup will be sufficient.
• Switched to Feedbin from Google Reader - Feedbin is still young but it's growing and it's supported by the Reeder app for the iPhone. A no-brainer decision there.
• Switched to Gauges from Google Analytics - Github's analytics service is ideal for my needs at the moment. It's dashboard provides all the information that I need at a glance and of course it has a greap API that's easy to use.

There are of course other Google services that I never really took too like Google+, Chat, Picasa, and their Drive service. I already use alternatives for these that I find to be much better so I never really got round to using these.

So why move from Google?

It was the all your eggs in basket argument. Google aren't going to go away anytime soon, but simply having all my information in one place was nerving. I wanted more control over my data, so I elected to find alternatives that would do just that.

I'm happy with the choice that I made in Google free. It's not for everyone, but having more control and investing more into products and apps that provide a better service certainly does give a better feeling than handing all my information over to one provider.