Brown Cow...
Ahem, so apparently Google isn't a (free) option anymore. Glad I never bothered to really dig into it. Now I've got to sell Cloud AND paid email? Really not sure how this is going to go over.
I'd like to hear ideas and solutions. Since email has always been part of any standard hosting plan everywhere else, I haven't the first clue what to do.
What's the plan Stan?
(I'm not even drunk... yet)
SkyToaster has an email service, and they provide two email accounts when registering a domain with them. I'm in the process of moving a dev Cloud to a production Cloud for a client whose domain is registered through SkyToaster, and will document how everything is set up.
That'd be great Susan, thank you.
Course domains are already registered for some clients who might switch to Cloud. And very few only use two email accounts. Personally I keep email busted up into a few individual boxes for different purposes, and I'm just one frog. The clients I'm thinking of right now would need something like ten boxes or more depending on things like # of employees, newsletter bounces/send from, or blog comments, etc. Nearly every client will have at minimum one info@ box plus various employee/division@ boxes, and who knows what else.
Email should be proprietary in most cases, so telling a client to use gmail or some other free email service will never happen under my watch. If I had employees, under no circumstances would I allow employees to use external/personal email accounts for business purposes. Having the ability to cut off ex-employee access to an email account that customers use for ANY contact is essential IMO.
A cost breakdown would be helpful. Selling Cloud isn't going to be easy when servers can be had for 3-10 bux/mo with unlimited email. Sigh...
Yes, Cloud is a relatively expensive hosting solution, and won't be for everybody. It's definitely not your average cheap hosting; it was never intended to be competition for Bluehost or GoDaddy.
I intend to suggest Cloud as the preferred solution, with SkyToaster as my secondary suggestion.
Please! I haven't had my breakfast yet!
That certainly does look like a solution, though.
I never did take the opportunity to look at SlyToaster's hosting more than looking at the website. I kinda like a "reseller" type of account, where I've got separate control panels for any account, yet can mastermind them from above, and it ends up being a small, yet guaranteed income/mo. Cloud would also offer such an environment. There doesn't seem to be such an option at SkyToaster.
Lammikko - Thanks for that link. Sounds promising.
Quote from: frogabog at Jan 02, 2013, 08:15 AMThere doesn't seem to be such an option at SkyToaster.
Send them an email, they're super flexible and I bet they could set you up a mail-reseller type-of-box which you could reuse for your clients' email and domains, while keeping the sites in Cloud.
I have to say I'm impressed by outlook.com, but am mostly glad I still have my free google apps account.
I'm setting up a beta email account with SkyToaster right now; it's normally $2 a month for 5 email addresses. That's certainly not bad. With me to poke and pry at it and harass them about the glitches I find, I'm sure they'll get it working smoothly right quickly
For Mac users, iCloud has a free email service, but there's no provision for using your own domain. It can be tweaked and tricked into using your own domain for incoming mail, but not outgoing mail.
Thanks for the infos. I will look into it all. If SkyToaster can do reseller for comparable cost, I'm in. I like their logo :~}
Gotta get my clouds working first though.