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Friday, October 06, 2006

$10 for the website

I am not sure if someone else has discussed something like this before. We have a website (www.gfour.net) hosted for an amount of something little less than $10. What else do we have apart from some HTML pages being hosted? Well we have access to 25 distinct (2 GB each) POP account, a calendar which can be shared online, a messenger service @ourdomain.com/.net/etc. To add to it, you can always have many other sub domains to point to individual member as you would like it.
Now the question is, how? We always wanted to have a website(ad free if we would like it to be). We also wanted some freedom to explore our creativity. This desire could have been fulfilled if we just registered on free space provider (with little advertisement slapped).Rather we chose to pay $9.24 to godaddy.com and get a name registered. The domain name www.gfour.net was not our preference but we did not get our priority. Hence it was gfour.net.
We chose godaddy.com because it gives us the freedom to configure our DNS. We can change MX records within no time, add alias, have url forwarding done and lot of more features. Getting webpages hosted was second concern. Google Apps For Your Domain (https://www.google.com/a/) was at rescue. All I needed was a google account! I could configure DNS to point to googlepages within no time. Email comes free with GAfYD. We got back to godaddy.com to configure our MX records to point to Google mail server. Once all these verification was done we had our email server up and running. With power of GMAIL (Spam filter, Contacts, Address book, google mail search etc to mention some of the advantage) we can check our email. If we would like we can always get the mails on Thunderbird, outlook express etc all we need to do is configure it for pop3 account.
To get the webpages online we hosted it through GAfYD to get the advantage of google pages. There are some good templates and the page creator is quite easy to use so, even if a person does not know much about HTML, he/she should be able to setup a bunch of pages without much effort. I do accept that Google Pages has stigma attached to it(No folder option). Yet it is a good starting place for a beginner.
Whats even the more exciting is that we have a messenger service too available. All you do is login to google talk with your account ([email protected], I would login with my account [email protected]). Once you are online Google Talk you can chat/speak with
anyone using GoogleTalk. Yes by anyone I mean anyone online on google talk. So if I am logged in with id [email protected] I can chat with [email protected] I can even chat with [email protected] if the xyz-company.com is registered for GAfYD!
There are few other services which can be plugged in to get more out of your site. If have Google Analytics account, place the javascript in the right place to watch out the statistics of your site. With AdSense account you can place advertisement on your website and make some money.
This is just the part of what I have realized about GAfYD and how to work out a site for cheap. If you have any suggestions please post your comments.

1 comment:

  1. Maybe you can help me out... I just did the same proccess to host my website from godaddy with google but I can't receive e-mails from anyone. Do you know what can it be? I am able just to send e-mails. Thanks for your attention.

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