A few weeks ago I talked about “Shifting responsibility in web hosting“. The story back than has been about some kind of “outsourcing” very important and hard to configure server services to a third party with more knowledge. I gave you a some examples back than too to make your shift both cheap and painless.
Today I will take this category one step further and provide you with a nice guide about how to move to Google Apps and get rid off less stable, not very spam protected default hosting solutions you get every time you sign up for a hosting package.Web hosting companies try their best, but they are in no way email companies and thus Spam is still a problem…
What is Google Apps?
I think everyone know who or what is Google. It’s the giant web search engine, but searching the web is not all they can do. they are also selling advertisements, offering you analytics tools to analyze your web site traffic and they even offer you a great solution to host your emails with the by using your own domain name.
This solution is called Google Apps and it is not only about emails. It is a full sweet of product aimed at providing you the best possible experience. One thing to note here is Google size and their expertise. It might seem a little bit scary to move your emails or files to Google’s product, but you are doing the same when you are using a web hosting company, but Google is a huge brand thus you can rest assured your data is very safe.
Google Apps consists of many features, but the basic ones you will see for sure after you sign up and configure everything up in the correct way are:
- Google Mail
- Google Docs
- Google Sites
- Google Calendar
- Google Groups
- Google Video
As you can see Google offers you lots of features and at the same time you do not have to pay anything in return! There are basically two different program levels. The free level is called Google Apps Standard Edition and you do not have to pay a single $$$ for using it. At the same time it lacks only Google Groups and Google Video, but these are not a problem as you might have not used them if you only want to use the Apps instead of your Email server 
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There are two more limitations in the standard Edition. The first one is about a maximum of 50 users per domain and the second one is about the maximum size of your inbox which is set to 7GB – much more than any web hosting company could or would ever offer to you!
The second level is called Premier Edition and it basically terrs down all the limitations and gives you 25GB of Email storage per account plus Business support and Google Groups/Video on top of it. This edition is more suitable for businesses than for normal ordinary people who just want to make their life easier by not using a default mail solution provided by their web hosting company.
Why to use Google Apps instead of your web hosts email solution?
First of all your web hosting company sells hosting packages and while they really try to do their best they are not about email hosting. They give you a configured server and an account on it. They configure it as good as they only can. Protect it from spy-ware, viruses and spam, but do you really think they can cope with a company which is X times bigger and absolutely about Email, search, advertisement, collaboration and protection? I do not think so.
With Google’s acquisitions of best software companies on the market Gmail has already proved to be the most secure and spam free service on the market! And you really get the same level of experience with your web site using the Google Apps, because you will be using Gmail
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It is easy to configure after you read a few tutorials and some domain register companies even offer you the ability to automatically configure your domain with Google Apps
You are in full control of your Email and data as it is always owned by you and this is guaranteed by Google! I do not know if this can be said about some small 1 or 2 people hosting company.
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