Use Gmail for your own domain

Why would you be interested in Google Apps, or for that matter what is Google Apps? Google has lumped it's online applications together in a service called Google Apps. Here is a link which lays out exactly what Google Apps includes...click here.

Some of you are already familiar with Gmail, but what most of you probably do not realize is that you can now use Gmail with your own domain email. So if you have firstname@yourname.com for an email address you can now have Google host your email instead of your current website hosting company. Note: You still keep your current website hosting company, you will just be using Gmail for email instead of your web hosting company's webmail. For instance I use 1and1.com to host my personal domain website, but I use Gmail to host my email for my personal domain name. So I still pay 1and1 monthly to host may website, but I do not use their email services. Why would you want to do that? Mainly because of the limitations of most web hosting web mail functionality...

• The biggest reason I can see is the size of the mailbox. With Gmail you get 2Gb of space...that's a lot bigger than you will find at most web hosting companies.
• Gmail is extremely fast unlike some other web mail I have seen and used.
• Gmail has integrated chat with other Gmail users, including other users of your domain, comes in handy in a team environment.
• With Gmail you can create up to 100 users, all for free.
• Going back to the team environment again...with Google Calendar you can share calendars online which is great for teams.

So if you want to use Google Apps to host your email...you can click here to signup. You do have to have a regular Gmail account or Google Services account in order to get your domain's email hosted by Google. There is a link on the sign up page to do so. You can sign up for Google Apps and use your existing domain name or you can register a new domain name using Google for $10. The $10 domain registration fee is the only cost to use Google Apps, but if you already have a domain then there isn't any out of pocket costs. I should mention there is a Premier version of Google Apps which costs $50/per user/per year.