Domains and email

You are going to get more opinions than you bargained for

I run about 20 websites (not all mine; I do it for some friends). I buy the domain names from Virtualnames. They give you a control panel on which the domain settings can be set up. Crucially, they also reply to emails, because I often screw up, and also I want all the domains to end up under the same login for the control panel.

Where the actual website is hosted, doesn't matter, because one simply points the DNS IP (configured in the control panel) to the IP of the server carrying the website. I have some websites in 2 places so if one server is down I just login into the control panel and change over the IP.

Virtualnames also offer email, and email redirection so you can collect your email via your normal ISP.

In this way, YOU own the domain name and YOU totally control it. Who hosts your website, and who you retrieve the email from, doesn't matter.

I have met loads of "small businessmen" (of which I am one too) who bought a domain via some web hosting company, thinking they would get an all inclusive package with no hassle, and later got shafted over because the service level of the company went down the pan, but they controlled the domain... A really nice local cafe, in the "deep" countryside so they are relying on some internet presence to get business, is currently getting screwed by some web developer who did a "package" for them and then vanished, and now even their email has died...

So, if you think long-term, buy the domain yourself and control the DNS (the IP pointing to the www and email servers) yourself.

For ISPs, the best UK ISP is probably ZEN. Absolutely avoid the cowboys like Talktalk. I've been with ZEN at home for 10+ years. Virtually zero downtime and everything works. At work we can't use ZEN (because our backup www+email is via ZEN) and every other ISP we have used has caused far more trouble.

Email itself is a little more involved these days, because of the massive amounts of spam. At work we get say 50 real emails and about 10000 spams, per day. However any decent ISP will filter out most spam. They didn't use to... There is only one antispam method that works nowadays, which is to look at all the emails incoming across the ISP client base (say 100k-1M customers) and then spammer activity is obvious, and then pattern matching is used to identify similar ones and dump the whole damned lot.

Here's another opinion, and, of course, it depends on which country you're based in, which countries your potential customers are in and whether domains are UK-type, co.uk etc., or 'international' i.e. .com, .info etc. or, of course, European.

If you're registering international domains then look at GoDaddy - their prices are a fraction of Virtualnames for .info etc. and you get full control of your DNS. However, it's a pain avoiding their add-ons when purchasing or renewing anything.

Where your website is hosted does matter - speed of access for your customers is important and when flogging a European enterprise it's not recommended to have your hosting in California.

Keep in mind there are 'small businesswomen' as well - they do exist, and in my experience they're very often quite sharp in finding the best deals available - worth making contact if you know any.

For hosting in the UK, try one of the smaller outfits to get personal service - try TsoHost, for instance, and they're competitive for UK domains.

For .com etc. try Bluewho - they're excellent for hosting, with a wide variety of options.

For email use Gmail - unmatched, but upgrade to a paid service so you get 24/7 support. It can be tied to your domain and the additional services are excellent.

And if you get hundreds of emails/day, use Sanebox to filter and sort your incoming traffic - it can save hours.....

Whichever outift you use, check their tech support systems for response speed, and whether they have a customer forum - the latter can give you an idea of genuine day-to-day operations and whether their customers are, in general, satisfied with the service they receive.

Another consideration, with email, is whether you need to send out emails with a user-specified From: header.

For example if your business name is gadgets.com then you want an email like [email protected], obviously.

If a customer writes to you, there is no problem redirecting that email to a Gmail account called [email protected], but when you reply to such an email, you want the reply to come From [email protected], not [email protected] which would look unprofessional at best. Many small businesses have this problem and it just looks silly.

I don't know if Gmail allows you to do that. The other free services like Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, do not, though maybe some do if you pay them.

One thing which would concern me with Gmail is that I have noticed that a lot of emails from me (peter2000.co.uk) and from euroga.com end up classified as spam by them. Yet these domains have never AFAIK been blacklisted. AOL was notorious for going over the top on antispam...

For this reason, and other reasons to do with logging in from anywhere and sending emails while travelling, a lot of people transmit email via a separate SMTP account, completely separate from the account on which they receive emails.

Gmail does allow you to send from a different account. I use gmail almost exclusively and it looks like my emails come from my hang-out.co.uk domain.

I think gmail's spam filters are also pretty good. On my mac I also run SpamSieve which catches the rest.

Google GoDaddy to see why you should avoid them...

Basically you have 2 choices.

Microsoft Exchange online or office365

Or

The professional version of Googles Gmail.

Both are inexpensive and both should be fine. Big advantage is that you can also send emails from your cell .. A feature many smaller hosters block .. and you can acces your mail with whatever device and allways see the same mailbox. .. Rather then a pop3 solution where if you download your mail on device a .. Device b will not see it anymore or it will see but you will get all your as unread again.

If you have a few collegues in your business .. Go for the microsoft offering .. It is very solid and has a few very compelling features.

Websites are a separate issue and you can host them wherever.

Big advantage is that you can also send emails from your cell .. A feature many smaller hosters block

It's certainly true that no ISP allows you to send emails when you are connected via an IP which is not one of theirs (i.e. you are travelling / away from your home ADSL connection) - allowing that would be a spammer's dream.

That, however, is resolved completely by having a separate SMTP AUTH account for sending email. I pay about £10 a year for that.

Some ADSL / cellular networks (esp. in hotels) block SMTP sending which is, ahem, yet another issue Often using port 225 instead of 25 solves this and my SMTP account supports that. The only comprehensive solution to that is a SSL VPN (port 443 i.e. HTTPS which no network is going to be blocking) but that is another pretty significant IT step.

Re POP3, yes most corporates have gone away from it and for good reasons, but it remains the method of choice for small users, and you get a decent repository of all emails on the one PC which you run as your main PC, which is configured to delete the retrieved emails from the server.

The value of that (over storing emails on some server which might be tied to an ISP account, etc) depends on what you need and what you value. A lot of people nowadays live in a totally transient world where yesterday's emails are history (they might as well use instant messaging). Let's face it, loads of people live totally on their Iphone, which is hardly ideal for accessing and searching etc thousands of past emails. Personally I hugely value having all my emails, all the way back to c. 1995, in the one place.

With POP3, any other device on which you might download your emails has to be configured "leave emails on the server" and indeed some mobile email clients cannot be configured differently.

The biggest problem with POP3 in a corporate environment is the difficulty of having multiple people reading emails from the same mailbox at the same time.

My comments on Gmail were that they falsely identify good emails as spam.

At work we use Messagelabs to filter out email. It costs £400+ per year but is very close to perfect. It was recommended to me by an old-timer in corporate IT and while I don't like paying for it, it has totally solved the spam problem, and we don't seem to lose any real emails whatsoever - even ones from S. America, China, etc which normally get ritually dumped by spam filters. The problem with Messagelabs is that they feed the filtered emails to an SMTP server only; they don't provide anything where you could access them, so for a non-expert this is another big IT step.

If a customer writes to you, there is no problem redirecting that email to a Gmail account called [email protected], but when you reply to such an email, you want the reply to come From [email protected], not [email protected] which would look unprofessional at best. Many small businesses have this problem and it just looks silly.

I don't know if Gmail allows you to do that. The other free services like Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, do not, though maybe some do if you pay them.

Yahoo allows you to do this free of charge.

I have domains registered with easily.co.uk and I redirect mail to a workaday btinternet.com address. I can send from the web client using a FROM address of my choice, from my computer, iphone, nexus 7, whether I am in the office, at home in England, or at home in Portugal