I have been paying for web hosting for over 3 years and as of this post I will be paying for hosting no more.
It occured to me a little while ago that the only thing I am really using my paid hosting for is my blog and email. While there are plenty of good blog hosting solutions (blogger.com, wordpress.com), I hadn't however found anyway to manage my email with the same control as paid hosting, that was until I found Google Apps.
What is Google Apps you may ask, well Apps is basically a way to assign google services to your domain name. The services that Apps currently supports are:
- Start Page - Google Start Page(ig)
- Email - gmail.com
- Calendar - Google Calendar
- Docs and Spreadsheets - Google Docs
- Chat - Google Talk
- Web Pages - Google Page Creator
The answer is pretty simple- all these services are run under your domain name. This means that you can set up users and they will have an email address at your domain (ie pete@yourdomain.com) and a document store at your domain as well.
You can even host your own webpage with Google Pages.
