Technology, Theology, and Anything In Between

I’ve found that Google is going to be a great tool for my business to use concerning email.  For the last 5 years, I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange server, hosted on a server at my house.  Because of this, I had to do all kinds of tricks to get email to arrive at the server, either by hoping my ISP kept port 25 open, or using some combination of POP3 or forwarding service.

This year, I realized that I needed to down-scale my systems.  For a one-person company, it just isn’t worth the time needed to administrate a server.  Plus, by shutting down the server, I save about $10-$20/month (yes, power is that expensive where I live).

If you were unaware of this, Google now allows you to use their email and services for domains.  As of the writing of this article, the price was $50 per year per user.  So a cost of $6/month seems reasonable to me, especially since Google mail is probably one of the best email systems that filters spam.  Over the last few years, I tried Exchange’s Intelligent Message Filtering, and using SpamAssassin on Linux servers, but I could never catch all the spam that Google’s filters catch, no matter how much I tuned the filters.  This was another reason for switching to Google — I simply didn’t want to spend hours training spam filters to get rid of the hundreds of spam messages I was receiving on a daily basis.

Some other things that are notable about Google for Domains — they give you a Contacts and Calendar application that will synchronize with devices that can communicate with Microsoft Exchange server.  Now, I can sync my PDA and other devices again!

Also, they give 3 GB of space for videos to be posted.   Since many companies are getting into web-based video, this should be plenty of space to serve video content to your customers as marketing material.  I’ve also been given 25 GB of email disk space, which should be plenty.  I’ve been using Gmail for personal use now for about 4 years, and I’ve yet to get over 1% used.

So for a small business person, I would suggest that if you are tired of administrating your own email servers, and you are looking for a robust and proven solution, Google for Domains might be the application that will keep you from going insane.  At $6 per month per user, payable annually (at least in my case), the cost is low enough that it washes.  I just think about what I charge for working on projects, and how the $6 per month saves me time that I otherwise would have used deleting spam.

Last, there is a sites feature, that will allow you to create several websites that you can use internally for your employees, or you can make public as a sort of extranet.  I’m not sure I’m going to use this, but for a company that also doesn’t want to get involved in web design or hosting, this could be a simply way to get a website up and running quickly.