Kitz Forum
Internet => Web Hosting & Web Design => Topic started by: jid on May 17, 2009, 01:52:14 PM
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Hi all,
I am thinking of registering a domain and hosting say 5 email addresses on it.
I have looked around and 1and1 have some good deals for £5.99 for a .co.uk domain for 2years and7POP3 inboxes for 15.99 p/a.
Could anyone recommend me some providers and some advice on how I do it?
Cheers
Jamie
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are you wanting any web hosting, or just mail hosting?
The 1+1 deal looks ok.
Companies I normally recommend are easily and vidahost, but both of those may offer just more than basic mail services, which could end up more expensive.
If however you are looking at hosting a site... the 1+1 basic package is very restrictive.. a trap I fell for when years ago I bought my first ever hosting package, then realised that I couldnt do a pile of stuff on it that I wanted to.
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All i want is to have my own domain for email and say 5 email addresses and POP3.
I don't plan to host a website at the moment.
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Easily mail hosting starts at about £10 pa.
Doesnt seem to say how many POP3 mailboxes they allow... i cant recall how many it was when I was with them.. used to be something like 12 or 20 including a catch all.
Could always ring them to ask - its a free phone no. Support is usually very good - or was everytime I used them
http://easily.co.uk/index.php3?exe=emailac
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So thats £10 pa for just one @mydomain.co.uk?
Seems expensive unless I am missing something?
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I use freeparking.co.uk for a few domain names and have had no major complaints.
It's a while since I registered anything new, but according to their price list .co.uk's are £4.99 and seem to (but check the small print/details for yourself) include free POP3 with unlimited mailboxes up to 10Mb storage and free of all advertising.
I've never had reason to try their POP3, though I've no reason to doubt it'll work. I normally just set up mail forwarding to my ISP's mail servers. I have tried freeparking's own webmail client which is OK but painfully slow - too slow to be any use, frankly.
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Thanks I will take a look, the Free Unlimited forwarding seems good?
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Free mail and web forwarding is pretty well standard, I would have thought. I have a couple of .co.uk domains with 123-reg (£3.28 per year) and they offer the same, easily configurable through a control panel.
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Thanks Eric, will take a look
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Thanks I will take a look, the Free Unlimited forwarding seems good?
I'm sure that if 123-reg is good enough for Roseway then it's good enough fullstop so that may be a good bet :)
Still, just to clarify a few things wrt mail-forwarding / POP3 as applied to freeparking (and maybe in general too)....
With freeparking, the basic forwarding is not totally unlimited. I think you can set up 11 explicit forwarding rules, e.g. one for Joe@...something...co.uk to joe.smith@...somethingelse...com , another for sue@....co.uk, etc. But there's also a default forwarding rule to catch anything that's not explicit, so mail to randomjunk@....co.uk still gets forwarded to a chosen address.
I find it useful to set up explicit forwarding for my own name, and for my partner's name, so that they arrive (via our ISPs) mail with the correct adressee. It is then be possible to set up the mail client so that each user login also autmotically sets up the correct details ('from', 'reply to', etc addresses) for outgoing smtp. This certainly works well with the 'turnpike' client that you get as a demon customer, but I'm failry sure it should be possible with other clients too. Similarly, with a (cheap) mobile phone I am able to access (via POP3) mail that's been forwarded to my ISP's servers, and configure the phone's email app to use appropriate addresses so it looks like it came from my domain name.
If you want to do your own POP3 download direct from freeparking, rather than forward it to your ISP, then AFAIK freeparking has no limit on the number of mailboxes, but the storage limit of 10Mb would worry me as it presumably means that a few (maybe even malicious) mail items could manifest as a denial-of-service attack if it took me too long to get around to downloading or deleting them. I assume that's a per-domain limit rather than per-mailbox. I'm not aware of any such limit on POP3 storage with my ISP's service (I use demon), though ISTR there's a limit on how long it'll stay there if I read it without deleting it from the server.
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Hi sevenlayermuddle
I took a look at free parking however 10meg on the mailboxes is not enough for me.
@ Eric
I took a look at 123 Reg and they definately have a good package there!
So its now between !and1 and 123Reg, easily was a bit out of my price range (i will be paying for this myself)
I am doing it as its generally easier than ISP email addresses which are long and annoying :D
Thanks for all your advice all
Jamie
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I am doing it as its generally easier than ISP email addresses which are long and annoying :D
Glad to hear your nearing a decision. Let us know how you get on.
BTW (I'll shut up soon), another good reason for avoiding use of an ISP's email addresses is, if your ISP mail account is tied to your DSL account, they can become a 'golden-handcuff' that stops you switching ISP. No matter how many times we've told people, for over five years, to only use our private domain email addresses, we still appear on too many mailing lists as ...@...our_demon_account_name...demon.co.uk, and a lot of these are mailshots are stuff we actually want to see.
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they can become a 'golden-handcuff' that stops you switching ISP. No matter how many times we've told people, for over five years, to only use our private domain email addresses, we still appear on too many mailing lists as ...@...our_demon_account_name...demon.co.uk, and a lot of these are mailshots are stuff we actually want to see.
Yes I am with Tiscali and well if they go all to hell then my Dad is going to Talk Talk so will be helpful not to have ISP addresses.
Thanks for all your advice
Appreciated :)
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I have used a mixture of several companies and can strongly recommend UK Servers (website http://virtualnames.co.uk ) for domain name registration + hosting, as an email service provider and decent web hosting provider (*nix+Apache). Their email service is very flexible. They provide outgoing mail SMTP service (with SMTP-AUTH) and they offer POP and SMTP over encrypted channels too, both features important for laptop users on the move. They have the usual anti-spam and email scanning features and plenty of mailboxes. I use UK Servers myself and recommend them to my own customers. Their support is intelligent, quick and human.
I also use 123-reg as well (as Roseway recommended). For domain registration and DNS hosting only.
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I'm sure that if 123-reg is good enough for Roseway then it's good enough fullstop so that may be a good bet :)
I used to use 123reg for some years, until they bought/sold out by/to a company that moved the help centre to India ... After a couple of calls it was clear that they couldn't understand the meaning of a domain name, let alone serve it.
1and1 are alright if you want basic vanilla solutions (no mysql databases, etc.) or otherwise you start paying big bucks (i.e. there's more economical offerings out there). By the way, they also have moved their help centre to Asia ...
I assume that the OP is looking for a cheap but reliable mail hoster and you can't get any cheaper than free! :) Since no one has spoken of Google Apps (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en-GB/group/index.html) I thought of mentioning them here. They offer the largest mail storage space that I know of and their mail spam filters are quite effective too. Of course you still have to pay for your domain registration (via 123reg, or anyone else who offer domain registration services), but mail hosting (plus some other useful applications like calendar) come for free.
HTH.
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Hi Mick,
That apps thing is interesting :D
I have been still looking around and as I am in the middle of GCSEs haven't really had time to look into it.
I have seen a good offer from Fasthosts which has free unlimited Email Forwarding - which I guess is what happens with Google Apps?
Fasthosts £5.90 + VAT for reg for two years
Thanks for all help, will be looking into it shortly, but that Google thing is great and free idea, email hosting is expensive :(
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I have seen a good offer from Fasthosts which has free unlimited Email Forwarding - which I guess is what happens with Google Apps?
No, email forwarding and email hosting are (strictly speaking) two different things.
Once you buy a domain name you will invariably be given access to a control panel to manage your domain records. One of these is the MX record where you define what the mail domain name will be for your domain; e.g. <mydomain.co.uk MX mail.mydomain.co.uk>. In the control panel you then map your MX record to any mail server you wish - the mail server where your email messages will be received and stored. If you use gmail as your mail hoster then you will point your myemail@mydomain.co.uk -> mail.google.com (or whatever it's IP address is). If you use fasthosts then you will point your MX record in your domain control panel to e.g. mail.fasthosts.co.uk. Of course, before you do that you will need to subscribe with the hosting company that owns the particular mail server.
After you start receiving messages on the said mail server you can set up mail server side options. One of the options is to forward emails to another email address. So, you could set up mail forwarding in your google account to forward any email messages sent to myemail@mydomain.co.uk to myotheremail@hotmail.com.
(I have simplified the above and hope I have explained it correctly - others will put me right here if need be I'm sure.)
Thanks for all help, will be looking into it shortly, but that Google thing is great and free idea, email hosting is expensive :(
Well, do a simple calculation:
Get the rating of the PSU of your computer. Then multiply its kwh rating x 365 days x 24 hours x cost of electricity for each kwh. If you have a large desktop you will see that it is probably more expensive than buying the hosting service from a data centre for a year. If you also include the cost of buying a PC and a UPS then it will soon become apparent that the only way you could make this pay is if you hosted the email accounts and websites of all your friends, neighbours and passers by! Hold on, did you add the cost of maintaining the server, updating its software, running regular backups with a separate physical storage, etc.? ;) It all soon adds up. If you are prepared to take risks then you could use your old laptop I guess and employ some solar panel solution to pay less for electricity, but you get my point.
There is no free lunch. Google offer their standard webapps for free because they make money out of advertising (when you use their webmail interface). Fasthosts et al. have to charge what it costs them (plus a small profit) to earn a living.
Back to your hosting question: the first step is to buy your own domain name. Then you can point your mail record wherever you like and change it to another server address when you want to. So, start with gmail (if only because it is free) and if you don't like it you can try another email hoster.
HTH.
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>>> I have seen a good offer from Fasthosts
You may want to be aware of this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/fasthosts_email_down/
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Interesting but I meant for Domain hosting only as their Email hosting is very expensive compared to others I've seen.
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Sorry, I thought you were wanting email addresses from the domain too?.. which is what has also been affected.
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Just an update.
I signed up with Vidahost today a domain name and have set up the Email forwarding.
I may consider doing a hosting package with them as for £20 a year its great.
Their support is excellent too and I am happy I choose them. All credit to Kitz for recommending them, excellent company.
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:)
Wish I'd heard of them sooner... but then again, when I first went with them they didnt do the smaller packages, and mostly concentrated on the larger type accounts anyhow.
Its good that they now also do starter and cheaper packages more targeted towards home-user/small business. The offer they have on atm is a damn good deal.
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Hi
quote : Then multiply its kwh rating x 365 days x 24 hours x cost of electricity for each kwh.
That equates to about £1/year /KW for 24 hrs a day .(at present rates )
Regards Jeff
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Also got to consider bandwidth. If your upstream is 448kbps, then to the outside world your site may appear to be running pretty slow... especially if theres more than one user viewing it at a time.
Thats totally discounting how many ISPs have CAPS and FUPS so its possible that you could soon eat into any allowances.
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I am thinking of registering a domain and hosting say 5 email addresses on it.
I have looked around and 1and1 have some good deals for £5.99 for a .co.uk domain for 2years and7POP3 inboxes for 15.99 p/a.
Could anyone recommend me some providers and some advice on how I do it?
If you need less than 50 email addresses on your domain, then the best free deal is Google Apps Standard, which is the same Gmail service but with your domain name (and POP3 support).
Danny.
[link removed by admin]
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Sorry.. but your link with a fee of $50 for doing this seems a tad expensive and when coming from a first time poster looks like spam. :/
Link removed.