Large Web Host Urges Customers to Use Gmail

1sockchuck writes "LA hosting company DreamHost, which hosts more than 700,000 web sites, is encouraging its customers to use Google's Gmail for their e-mail, rather than the DreamHost mail servers. DreamHost is continuing to support all its existing e-mail offerings, but said in a blog post that email is "just not something people are looking for from us, and it's something the big free email providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google can do better." DreamHost addresses a question about Google that has vexed many web hosting companies: is Google a useful partner, or a competitor that intends to make "traditional" web hosting companies obsolete? In this case, partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?"

Comments

Webmail

[Lord Lode]

For me non-webmail is a thing of the past, I love being able to easily access my mail from any computer anywhere (and I'm on quite a lot of different ones on different places). And GMail is the best of all webmails, so they sure made a good choice!

Re:Webmail

[ShieldW0lf]

For me, GMail equals unprofessional. It equals Mom and Pop.

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.

It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question.

It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly.

It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business.

Re:Webmail

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

gmail doesn't reveal that it is being used - you still manage myemail@mydomain.com; it's not forwarded. I suppose if you inspect full email headers you'll find a google mail server handling the message, but the vast majority of people don't bother.

Still, it's a valid point that people should be considering - when you start using gmail for your business, you're giving them permission to mine your business data.

Re:Webmail

[elventear]

My concern is that email would, for some reason or another take all my information hostage. What kind of accountability would Google offer for a free service, in contrast to the one offered by Dreamhost?

Re:Webmail

[dk.r*nger]

It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you.

Yeah, or that I know that my business is not running emailservers, and my time is better spend doing other stuff...

This might matter in the "we run Exchange-server because we're ENTERPRISE and important"-segment, but in the "getting shit done" segment, GMail is very very very good value for money ($0 or $50/user/year for the ENTERPRISE-woo-we're-important-plan).

Oh, and you do know that you can use your own domain on GMail, completely transparently, right?

Re:Webmail

[peragrin]

Not to be mean but the Post Office loses and routes mail wrong on a regular basis. My Grandmother once sent me a birthday card. It arrived 3 weeks after my birthday. I figured she had forgotten since it only normally takes 2-3 days to send a regular card.

Then i looked at the date the post office stamps the envelope with when it goes out to cross off the stamp. It was dated 3 days before my birthday.

so had the card with decent handwriting and the correct address(yes I double checked) on it been sent regularly it would have arrived on my birthday. instead it took three weeks to arrive. While I highly doubt anyone opened it up to read it, the PO does misplace things on a regular basis. Enough for a paranoid person to worry about it at least. As for me it was just a card.

Re:Webmail

[Anonymous Coward]

My company has 3 domains that are set up with google apps. Obviously, all of our mail goes directly to user@mycompany.com. Google provides the mail servers and a web based interface, as well as calendar, chat and a couple other collaboration tools that all stay neatly contained in our domain. We also moved our customer management system off site to a server running SugarCRM, for those of you who know what that is.

Now, this is where things start to get interesting. Our ISP, E-LEVEN, got into a spat with its backbone provider, Belgacom. Belgacom cut them off, and we were left without internet in the office for over a week. May is a very bad time for this to happen: we sell summer travel and May is the month where we make most of our sales. Thanks to Google Apps, we didn't miss a beat. We just forwarded the phone lines to employees' home phones and sent everybody home to work. Employees communicated with google chat, customers experienced no lag in their response times and we were literally saved. Since our customer DB was off-site and web-based as well, it was a completely transparent transition.

We got our lines back in the office and went back to work in the office for obvious managerial/supervision reasons, but that week was the most the productive we have had in years.

Anybody who doesn't think google apps is an excellent solution for small business either doesn't have any idea how small business work or doesn't know how google apps works.

Re:Webmail

[statemachine]

I work for Google, so I'm not entirely impartial, but we use Gmail here with well over 10k employees, and it is by far the best corporate email experience I've had.

The problem with your argument is that Gmail is internal to and controlled by Google. Many other businesses may have a problem with using a third-party email service which scans the email for advertising purposes (no privacy) and permanently stores all emails (no forward liability protection). All of which is then subject to the business' ISP's data inspection as it transits the wires multiple times. And that's just internal company email. For those reasons alone, Gmail will always be viewed as a mom and pop solution. There are other solutions available to healthily-solvent companies that don't compromise privacy or at least contribute to the problem.

Gmail has many legitimate uses. But it shouldn't be used carte blanche for many legitimate reasons, too.

STREWTH

[Kamineko]

Strewth! I use Dreamhost for my hosting, and their uptime is a bit pants. (There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

This announcement just makes them seem wonderfully credible, don't you think?

Are there any good, big hosts located in the UK?

Re:STREWTH

[WK2]

I'm really happy with nearlyfreespeech.net. It's not in the UK, though.

Re:STREWTH

[telbij]

(There's many websites dedicated to how terrible DH is. Many, many websites.)

The vast majority of which are written by ignorant script kiddies who think that for $10/month they should be allowed to utilize unlimited resources and slow down the server for everyone else on it. So they make a big stink about it publicly then go to some other shared host where they inevitably make life miserable for 50 other customers on whatever server they get assigned to (I've been on the receiving end of this and it's not cool).

I've had an account with Dreamhost for 8 years, and during that time I've also had accounts or worked with companies hosted on dozens of other hosts. My anecdotal evidence is strong. As far as cheaped shared web hosts go, Dreamhost is one of the best. Certainly many people get lucky with other hosts, but most hosting companies have not had to deal with the technical issues that Dreamhost has overcome over the years.

That said, I never recommend shared hosting anyway. VPS technology (especially Xen) is the only way to guarantee good QoS as websites become increasingly dynamic.

We switched to gmail.

[jellomizer]

My company switched to useing gmail. Primarly because it is too expensive to keep our mail server running smoothly. The mail server is one of the most volnerable parts on your network, Linux/Unix or not it is a huge security risk. And it needs to be kept up todate constently, Reconfigured spam filters... For a company mail server is very expensive. And if gmail is willing to do this for Free even though we get adds, we end up with a better email service for less costs. We switched and we are getting less Spam, out internet connection speed is better (slightly). And we are getting mail more relabably.
The employees can check their mail remotly. Management is happy they are not getting killed with Spam, and the office can be left uninteded and locked up for Weeks.

I'm a Dreamhost customer

[jalefkowit]

... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.

First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[NetSettler]

partnering with Google offers DreamHost a way to offload many of its trouble tickets, reducing the support overhead. Is Google starting to make web hosts less necessary?

One of the things I don't like about free software is that it basically pays for itself off the profits of an unrelated industry, eliminating competition in an otherwise viable industry because someone can afford to offer the service for free as a loss leader to other business.

A thing that is especially troublesome is that not only does it basically make it so that no one can afford to be in the business area (software development for money) competing with the free thing (software given away for nothing), but also no one can afford not to use the free thing because the cost of the luxury of buying an alternative brand will be exposed by the market as superfluous if passed along to end users.

It seems to me that if this becomes a trend, it will be the effective continuation of that paradigm shift by Google into another area, and that the logical continuation of this, by analogy, would be that not only can no one afford to compete with Google and other agencies giving away free mail but no one will be able to afford not to use Google's mail.

That would be sad if it turns out that there are reasons why using Google's mail is not a good idea... such as, for example, concerns about privacy.

If Google becomes the standard of mail, the problem is that it can afford to add incidental services in parity with any nuisance it causes, making it impossible for would-be competitors to match on a value-point by value-point basis even if they find a way that should theoretically be able to compete.

Re:First, do no harm (to another's marketplace)

[homer_s]

You cite two faults of the free market system and I'll try to answer each one.

It is possible to badly assign dollar values to things and in so doing to create situations in which competition will kill things of value as, for example, it might be argued is occurring with things like global warming, where a competitive market is seeking various earth-unfriendly situations because the dollar value of having a world that continues to function correctly has not been appropriately assigned.

The term is 'negative externality'. This is not a new concept that you have stumbled upon. And at its core, this is a property rights issue. Except that instead of an individual owning the property, a group of people collectively own it.
And just like you would object to your neighbour dumping garbage into your backyard, the people collectively object to someone dumping chemicals into the river. A free market is dependent on ownership of property and the scenario you describe, far from discrediting market based economies, only strengthens it.

And so if I own a company where I would like to offer better health care to my employees, I may not be able to afford to because my competition does not and I cannot compete without offering the lowest of what anyone else does or that cost of my "indulging" my employees with good health care will show through to my product.

You are correct. The consumer/market does not care if you pay your employees well, "take care" of them, etc. It completely ignores that aspect and does not place any value on it.
But this seems a problem to you only because you consider only what you can see - like the cat in the proverb, you think that just because you cannot see something it does not exist.
What you do not see and hence do not consider, is another market which does value things like health care, fair treatment, workplace amenities, etc. This of course, is the labour market. And just like the market for the product of a business, this too is a market where people have to compete for scarce resources.
So, while I as a consumer, may greedily want goods for the lowest cost and would not care about things like slave labour, health care, etc, the other market for labour counters my greed with its own.

You seem to view the employer-employee relationship as a paternalistic one where employers have to "take care" of the employees.
I'm only 29 and I've seen this worldview destroyed in my hometown in India. In the 1980s, I've seen mill owners fight with labour unions about worker pay and benefits. I've seen disputes get ugly and end in violence.
Since the economic liberalization in 1992, I've seen labour become scarcer and scarcer to the point where known "union busters" are offering perks upon perks - free housing, on-site healthcare & free transportation - to lure workers.
Workers who had to slave for hours and hours to afford basic goods now command salaries that were unthinkable 15 years ago. And the same marketplace that "exploits workers" has no choice but to pay them what they want.
All of this happenned not because some bureaucrat suddenly came upon "social systems and economic paradigms and value systems that lead to outcomes like happiness and fun", but because people were given the freedom to run their businesses as they please and produce what they want.

So, "social systems and economic paradigms and value systems that lead to outcomes like happiness and fun" does exist and has brought immense wealth to the world in the past 300 years. The only problem now is the people who seem hell-bent on reversing this period of unprecendent prosperity based on their unbelievable vanity and smugness.

Re:I just prefer...

[mortonda]

Transiting ISPS would have to snif traffic to catch my email, which is doable but a large task. My email server also has TLS available, and a lot of sites actually do use it... which makes it unsniffable.

Re:Very unprofessional move

[mrboyd]

No one is asking you to use the gmail.com domain for your professional emails.

Google App is a free mail hosting for companies domain (up to 100 email) using their gmail technology. And yes you can replace the gmail logo with your company logo and choose your favorite colors.

I recently decided to get rid of our internally hosted and managed email server to use google free services and as a part time sysadmin I am delighted. It hassle free. Took all of five minutes to set-up including sending an email to my ISP asking them to redirect our MX server.

It gives our employees POP, IMAP and a state of the art Web access and it runs on a distributed server farm with 99.99999% reliability. My boss is paying $0 for it and is very happy about that.

I didn't even bother looking into the other features but apparently we also have our own company branded google calendar, google chat, google docs and google sites.

There currently isn't any interesting "Google App Engine" based application but from the look of the admin dashboard it seems that I will be able to add the one I like to my domain. If the Google App Engine picks up that will mean free company branded - server farm hosted - applications like forum, image gallery and even maybe CRM application...

An small to medium sized company would be really stupid not to take advantage of that kind of offer and dreamhost advice is actually making sense. Want to host your own PHP pages? use DreamHost. Want a professionally run email server? Go see google/hotmail/yahoo.

From a business standpoint it makes a lot of sense. Running an email server is a much more complicated matter than stacking a few servers together and providing AC, UPS, fire extinguisher and fat pipes. I am pretty sure it provides them and their customers with little added value for the cost of running it. Especially with the current barely manageable spam levels.

Could this have anything to do with....

[Anonymous Coward]

About two months ago, one of their email servers (Blingy) started having problems. Email (at least imap) was completely down, and they sid they would have it back up within a day or so.

That day lasted two weeks. Technically the email was back up before that but barely accessible during working hours for the whole time.

See...

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2008/03/27/filer-problems-with-blingy-cluster/

Playing with fire

[AppyPappy]

I set up my wife with a free email account which she used for sending emails to Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts, etc. After a few years, they canceled her account for spamming. I thought I would never hear the end of that. She still brings it up.

If you have a free account, don't expect a whole pile of customer support. If they decide to cancel some VP's account, it just sucks to be you.

Said it before

[Colin Smith]

Google is the start of the factrification of the IT sector, they are the new Arkwrights.

It's basically an IT factory, providing the same service to hundreds of millions. Where smaller scale and family businesses might have performed those particular services before. Have a look at what happened during the Industrial Revolution for an example of what's coming. I'm sure there will even be some new age Luddites protesting against the changes.

It's simply the economics of increasing availabilty of bandwidth.