Yeah, that’s right, all you HostRockets, HostMonsters, HostGators, MonsterHosts, and the whole lot of you, listen up! Google Apps for your Domain is here! You may now commence ceasing operations, because, well, your market has been saturated for a long time now, and we’re Google - providing this service for free (UPDATE: Looks like Google Apps is going Paid). And honestly, you guys make GoDaddy look like an easy-to-use respectable operation with your numerous hosting plans, upsells, addons, additional features, and such!

Introducing Google Apps for your Domain
Google Apps for your Domain is a free (at least at the time of this writing) service from Google that lets you “brand” Google’s applications under your own domain name. Google Apps features include:

• Google Mail for your domain
• Google Calendar for your domain
• Google Talk for your domain
• Google Page Creator to host web pages for your domain
• A customizable start page to preview your email, calendar, news, and other domain content.
• A nifty customizable control panel to manage domain accounts and users.

So What’s the Big Deal?
Well, if it isn’t obvious, this is an amazing service for a number of reasons. First, it eliminates any excuse for a business to operate without a legitimate business domain and the web and email hosting to support it (See my prior article on this problem). Second, it’s Google Mail (GMail) for your domain! GMail is by far the best web-based email client I’ve ever used. That, and there are no annoying ads inserted at the bottom of your emails (at least for now). GMail is very easy to use in a web browser, and Google Desktop makes it easy to stay informed of new messages arriving in your inbox.

Third, it’s Google Calendar (GCal) for your domain! Once again GCal is by far the best calendaring solution I’ve see in ages. I’ve been using GCal for maybe a year now and rely on it heavily. In fact, it has recently become my browser homepage. GCal has great support for multiple calendars, sharing calendars, setting up meetings, and sending meeting notices. It has a very clean presentation, is very easy to use, and is accessible from iCal, phones, Google Desktop, and pretty much anywhere else thanks to the API. Packaged with Google Apps for Your Domain, it can be used for office scheduling and has hooks into Gmail for creating meetings and such. GMail and GCal are eating Microsoft Office’s lunch, too.

Google Talk and the other applications are just icing on the cake. With Google Talk, your business can finally embrace instant messaging within your company. The page creator while a little weak, does provide a decent solution for publishing static web pages. The start page is what you’re used to if you’ve ever personalized your Google search experience. The control panel is a well thought out, easy to use user management console. It provides a dashboard to get an overview of your domain and the capability to create email lists and mail aliases. It also offers an number of customizable features for your domain including your own logo, domain aliases, time zones, and other similar settings.

Drawbacks
For most businesses or individuals, the drawbacks are minor. GMail for your domain offers 2GB of email storage per user. I imagine you are still subject to giving up a little mail privacy as Google is known to index all their GMail content. Google Page Creator is somewhat limited and dynamic content or scripting does not seem possible at this time. Web content is limited to 100MB at the time of this writing. Finally, you’re on your own when it comes to setup and configuration, however there are some good forums that can help you out along the way.

Regardless of the (minor) drawbacks, Google Apps for Your Domain is perfect for most small businesses looking for Internet hosting. I host a handful of sites through my Obility, LLC company and have even been recommending it to some of these companies as a possible better, cheaper alternative.

If your business is considering options for Internet services hosting, have hosting in-place already, or you’re one of those businesses that have incomplete hosting, you’d be doing yourself a favor to take a look at the Google Apps for your Domain.

I don’t want to see another business using a third-party domain for their web or email (i.e. joeswidgets@comcast.net) ever again!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 7:03 am and is filed under Best of Tech, Discussion, Disruptive Tech, Use and Recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.