GoogleApps
From 3DN
| This site is part of the 3DN Network. Every content on the 3DN Network is subject to the [3DN Terms of Service]. Other sites in the 3DN Network include: 3DN Politics 3DN Technology 3DN Voetbal 3DN Politicap and Dutchie |
Contents |
Intro
I'm a one-man company, or 'eenmanszaak' as we call it in the Netherlands. It's kind of ridiculous what kind of hoops one has to jump through to get:
- sufficient bandwidth to run a webserver at home
- make it not change IP addresses on unexpected times
Bandwidth plenty but only one direction
Come on ISP's of the Netherlands, not every single customer wants just huge download speeds and cruddy upload speeds! I know that it's A DSL but why not also give the opportunity to make it asynchronous in the other direction? Most providers one can find out here give a maximum upload speed of 1024kbps. Fortunately I managed to find UPC Fiberpower which offers 6Mbps upload speed, which is somewhat acceptable. But ofcourse I must get 60Mbps download speed along with it which I really do not need unless I would be downloading tons of torrents. Here's an advice to the MPAA and Buma fascists of the world: Go talk to ISP's and make them offer 60Mbps/6Mbps instead of 6Mbps/60Mbps so they won't practically force people to 'use the download speed since you have it'. Anyway... soapbox rant done.
DHCP only
However, now having decent upload speeds as well, I still had another problem which surfaced over time; My home IP address is a dynamic one. It changes. Come on ISP's, what gives?? What's so friggen difficult about giving out a static IP address or even a semi static DHCP address (with a very long leasetime). I tried talking UPC into this but they wouldn't budge. They 'understand it', 'would like to help' but... 'can't'. Oh wait, I was done with my soapbox rant...
Either way, I had my own MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) running on my box at home for my mail sending/receiving. I had set it up reliably enough but enter the spammers and, by proxy, the spamfighters. Slowly they started coming up with more and more 'innovative' ways to block spam, including what our friendly Dutch KPN did which was silently removing emails to dynamic IP addresses. So more and more often I started noticing that friends all of the sudden no longer answered my emails until I realized what was going on and realized how many emails I might have lost already :/
Google Apps
Fortunately, Google came to the rescue. I already had a gmail.com account but I feel that looks a bit unprofessional to use. It seems more and more businesses are doing it but I did not want to be one of them. After all I'm an IT professional specialising in the server market so it would look rather silly if I couldn't set up a reliable MTA.
Google offers [Google Apps], a service which lets domain owners redirect their email to a gmail service. So instead of having people sending you email @gmail.com, they can simply use your own domain and any email sent from the Google Apps gmail interface appears to be coming from your own domain as well.
Signing up
It's easy to sign up for Google Apps, although Google for some reason seems to have decided that the free service should be somewhat harder to find than the paid service. Here's a [direct link] to sign up for the free service however.
After clicking on the big 'Get Started' button you will be asked to specify whether you're a domain owner or a user and you will be asked to specify the domain name.
