Saturday 8 October 2011

Zero to Hosted in a cup of coffee...

...and the cost of 2

So on a whim I decided my small but thriving organisation needed to be consolidated under a single online brand. We needed an internet presence with business grade communications tools at our finger tips including hosted mail, calendaring and an assortment of collaboration and productivity tools available in the office and on the road to keep us one step ahead of the competition.

Let's call this organisation my, errmm, family..  Of course we didn't need this stuff. More accurately we didn't need another version of this stuff. We've been getting along just fine with our individual mailboxes, IM, blogs, photo hosting, social networking accounts etc etc. Mostly free, mostly easy to collaborate with each other e.g. the odd shared spreadsheet document here or private photo album there.

It was more an exercise in how stupidly quick, easy and cheap organisational hosting can be.

There are of course virtually limitless variations of resources you could use to achieve the same, but my recipe ended up being:

Crazy Domains to register my domain name. I ended up with a name under the .org TLD at a cost of $18 for 2 years. I probably paid too much, but seeing as this was the only step with a $ cost I wasn't too fussed.

FreeDNS for umm free DNS! I chose FreeDNS because it googled well and I wanted free domain name hosting, that's it.  I needed to be able to manage my own DNS records and it offers open slather management of your domain.

Google Apps "for free" this part was probably fairly obvious. The features available for free (for up to 10 users within your organisation) would be cheap at twice the price..


It probably doesn't warrant a step by step how to other that the above being the crucial steps, I did them in that order but I guess you don't really have to. The only minor issues I had were Crazy Domains trying valiantly to up-sell me from just a domain registration during the sign up process and the TXT DNS record required by Google Apps to verify your ownership of the domain, I needed to surround the destination value in double quotes. A summary of what my zone looks like is:

IN NS ns1.afraid.org.
IN NS ns2.afraid.org.
IN NS ns3.afraid.org.
IN NS ns4.afraid.org.
IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.com.
IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
IN MX 10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
IN MX 10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
IN TXT "google-site-verification=blahblah"
IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
IN CNAME ghs.google.com.
IN CNAME ghs.google.com.

So for $9 a year every member of our "organisation" has a mailbox (an email address they can keep forever and whatever aliases he/she likes) @ourdomain.org (7GB at moment gmail? for free? pfff, match that commercial hosting service), shared calendaring (all happy to be added to your favourite smart phone as an Exchange account), sites with a pretty decent site builder to have the ever important website version of kids birthday party invitations, docs and all the other google features. We also have the ability to point some host names around to existing stuff e.g. an app engine application, or maybe a blog!

hmmm, airconhum.ourdomain.org..