I have a few domains for my personal and professional use. When I first started my personal website/domain I took what ever came from the hosting company. In my case, www.powweb.com is the provider in question. I've been generally happy with Powweb, but I also have straight forward run-of-the-mill needs too. The only thing that was a problem for me was email. I needed to be able to read my mail from multiple machines. Your typical provider only offers POP3 access and webmail. Webmail just doesn't work for me and multiple mail clients with POP3 is problematic. My initial solution was to use gmail to retrieve the mail via POP3. Then via GMAIL I can use their advanced webmail client and desktop clients via IMAP. I probably would have gone with Yahoo Mail had they offered IMAP for free. Don't know why, but I like Yahoo's webmail better for some reason.
Gmail isn't with out it's problems though. When you send email via Gmail from your @gmail.com account it has a funny header that some MTA's don't like to honor. So you'll email will have a header lines:
Sender: user@gmail.com
Return-Path: <user@gmail.com>
but a from line of:
From: Richard Whiffen <me@whiffen.org>
In the past it used to say
From: user@gmail.com on behalf of user@whiffen.org
which was even worse. Anyway, some older mail apps reply to the @gmail.com. This becomes a problem when the reply is to a large group of people. The threads get fragmented because some people are mailing to @gmail.com some are @whiffen.org. Doesn't happen often, but enough to be a bother.
The fix is to sign up for google apps. If you have less than 50 mail boxes (not aliases, actual email boxes) the free edition is quite powerful. When you sign up you can either buy a domain via Google, or you can use a domain you already own. I think it'd likely be cheaper via someone other than google but your milage may vary. I already had my domain so I signed up and via some fairly simple steps was able to point my MX records from powweb.com to google.com. So now I can log and get a gmail interface to my @whiffen.org. Google's mail infrastructure and spam filtering is far more robust than my hosting provider so I have had a noticiable drop in spam since moving over. I also have an online calendar and google docs @whiffen.org as well. So now when I send email from @whiffen.org there's no funky headers or other issues like that. It does mean however now I have two mail boxes @gmail.com (which I only use to subscribe to listservs) and @whiffen.org (and @rwhiffen.com but that gets no traffic at all). In Mail.app and Outlook it's trivial to manage. It is a bit trickier from the web interface. I basically have to log in more than once.
Where it gets fun is my G1. I have a T-Mobile G1 the "google phone" if you will. When I bought it I signed in with my @gmail.com account and when I'd click the nice red gmail envelope I'd get my @gmail.com mail and my @whiffen.org mail. But sending mail as @whiffen.org wasn't possible on the phone with out extra work. The simplest path is to set up the Mail app within the phone (it's separate from the gmail app). It will allow you to connect to a pop3 or IMAP host. But with the google apps setup, I was able to factory reset my phone and instead of using @gmail.com I used @whiffen.org and it worked like a charm. Now I have a single interface to my @whiffen.org email via the phone, via the web and via my Macs. What's more, my calendar and calendar invites are now @whiffen.org.
The Google apps setup also comes with Google docs, which I'm using to co-write some documentation currently, very hand tool. It has fairly flexible version control and permissions structure. It can do fairly robust word processing and spreadsheets. I find the spreadsheet navigation a bit clumsy at times do the the web based nature of it. Data entry isn't as smooth as it is with a local application. I haven't tried the google gears feature for offline editing yet. But for the basics it's pretty good. I essentially use it to rough in the documents and the finish them up in NeoOffice or in MS office via parallels.
A hidden gem, I feel, is google sites. Google Sites is very similar to Microsoft's SharePoint. You have less widgets and flexibility perhaps but you do have a lot of base features. You can make a file cabinet page for simple file storage, retrieval and versioning. There's a dashboard template that lets you add google gadgets to the page, like weather, docs, excel sheets, movies, but is generally intended to give you a portal-like view into your other site pages. There's also a announcement template and list template. All together it's easy to see turning Google Sites into a small company portal for sharing information, which is what I believe it's intended use is. Although I do find it ironic that it's not tied into google docs. When you add things to your 'file cabinet' page, you have to find the URL's to your Google docs via the Google docs page and paste them in as a web link. You can't select them from a list. I suspect this will be improved over time, but I was a bit surprised by that lack of integration.
What will really make Google Apps interesting is when they get integrated into Android. Then your phone will be tied into this nexus as well giving you a lot of power from a phone. I'd love to be able to at least read my docs on my G1. That's one area that is sorely lacking in the current G1 and the forthcoming 1.5 version coming 'any day now'. It'll come some day, but probably not for a while. I think they want to get things like Adobe Flash working first.
If I ever decided to start a small business I'm definitely going to use Google Apps instead of running an email server and share point server. Especially when the first 50 email users are free. I do find it a bit odd that the 'premier' edition is $50/user/year, which for what you get, isn't too steep. That $50 gets you 25Gb of mail, a host of extra security options, a 99.9% uptime SLA, and more support. For a lot of small companies, especially the 10 or less people kind, it would be tough to justify the $50 vs free. The security options might make it work while, but other than that, why would you do it? I'd be curious to know how many freeloaders like myself are out there vs the less that 50 user paying customers there are.
I've looked at the 'live.com' offerings from Microsoft, and I was very disappointed. It's far to confusing initially. They're also trying to be everything web 2.0 all rolled into one. While the idea is reasonable, as with a lot of things Microsoft, the execution is poor. Once I figured out what they were trying to do it made a twisted kind of sense to me but it was still cluttered and confusing. They forgot one of simple things about the web 2.0 experience. Most things are separate by default and you have to choose to join them. Not with windows live, they linked and cross linked everything. I looked at it, acknowledged, and moved on.
Anyway, if you have your own domain I'd strongly suggest you give google Apps a try. It's great email hosting if nothing else. It's fast and free. It has extras that appeal to small businesses or groups. If you're one of the lucky ones who has a grand central account (now called google voice, apparently), you also have a central phone number for your business, again for free.
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