Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!
That way, I can handle spam they way I want, set up accounts for friends if need be (or businesses)
At the very least..."I" know who is storing and reading my mail. Me, not some corporation that holds it, reads it to display ads....and turns it over to the govt. at the govt's whim.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Using google apps for your domain enables you to use your headhoncho@acme.com... they just take your mx record and handle your mail.
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
... and if they require me to pipe my mail through Google, I'll take my business somewhere that doesn't.
Read my blog.
The idea that I'm going to be content putting "headhoncho_acme6@gmail.com" on my business card instead is laughable.
Who said anything about gmail.com? Google also provides DOMAIN based hosting of your email. i.e. headhoncho@acme.com can go to Google's servers.
If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business
I very much disagree. Web hosting and email hosting have very little to do with each other. They both involve the internet, but beyond that, there's little crossover. Why not let each provider provide what they can do best? I don't eat at gas stations, even though driving across country often involves feeding myself as well as my car. Why should my website host try to also provide poor email?
AccountKiller
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!
For those who want a bit more than simply webmail, there is also the SMTP and IMAP interfaces offered by GMail.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Well you can simply configure your host to forward your "me@acme.com" mails to "me@gmail.com" automatically. It is then trivial to set Gmail up so that incoming mails sent to "me@acme.com" are replied with "me@acme.com" as a reply-to address.
I use this for several of my domains. The clear advantage for me is that I can use the Gmail interface which I've known and used for years now. Every hosting provider has their own brew of online mail and I've yet to find one that can compete with Gmail.
This is starting to sound like a fan boy post, but another sizable advantage of using Gmail (or hotmail or yahoo-mail etc.) is that your current ISP probably does not have global coverage. So when you move to France next year and have to use neuf.fr as your provider your old e-mail address and messages will not follow you. However you can check your hotmail / Gmail / yahoo for free, no matter where you live and no matter who your ISP is.
However, on a professional front, I personally don't think it is a good move for the simple reason that people hang on to ISPs despite better competition only because they've been "using the same [IS provided]e-mail for years now".
Just my 2 cents
I'm a very small webhost provider (< 20 domains), and for me, it was a no brainer to get all my customers to get GMail for Domains, point all their MX records to Google, and wash my hands of the SPAM. I use it for all my personal domains as well. Google does a far better job of SPAM filtering than I ever could with SpamAssassin and the blacklists thing... and for this small set of users (< 50 people total), it just wasn't worth it. My tech life got a lot easier when I decided I wasn't going to mess with email anymore, just like the day I decided I was going to ignore Microsoft's APIs. Both are losing propositions in the extreme. So, for me, Google is a VERY useful partner. And I like their web/chat interface too, both the browser version and the mobile edition, which I access from my Treo 650.
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.
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.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
A few comments seem to suggest that using gmail for your business is "unprofessional".
Gmail can host email for your domain. You manage your domain, Gmail hosts your mail - most people will not realize that your email is kept at Gmail's servers.
This product grew out of the Postini merger. Many, many companies use Postini for "front-end" email security and filtering. Your domain's MX records point to Postini's mail servers. Postini receives your mail, scans it, filters it, and then delivers it to your mail servers. I've used Postini's service in the past, and it is an awesome service.
The only difference with Gmail is that the mail now is not forwarded to your mail server, it is kept at Gmail.
Unprofessional? Hardly.
-ted